Bionic Fall
This article is actually a follow-up to a previous one, and I recommend reading it for context. Here is a link.Bionic Commando was released in 2009 for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC and is often said to be one of the worst games ever. While that is a very strong title, it most certainly is bad and is a representation of everything wrong with CAPCOM and its problems during the 2000s. In a way, it's also everything wrong with video games in general during this era. But it didn’t start off as a harbinger of doom. No, the game started from a place of love.
Bionic Commando was dead for about eight years. Sometimes, it’s fine to let the dead rest. But not according to Ben Judd. Judd was the first producer to work at CAPCOM in Japan who wasn’t Japanese. He got his start in the localization department on games like Viewtiful Joe and Ace Attorney. He actually is the person shouting “Objection!” in the early Ace Attorney games.
While he worked on several CAPCOM properties, there was one series he yearned to work on the most: Bionic Commando. In 2004, he developed a pitch for a new game that ended up getting shot down. But Judd’s dreams were not down and out. Not long after, he began working on the game Dead Rising with another producer at CAPCOM, Keiji Inafune. Inafune saw the young producer’s passion. After Dead Rising was released in 2006, he began working with him on a new Bionic Commando.
The concept was for a simple remake of the first game to be released on the PlayStation Portable. CAPCOM actually had a series of minor remakes for their games on the PSP, including Mega Man, Monster Hunter, and Ghosts’ n Goblins. Fun fact: Tokuro Fujiwara returned to CAPCOM temporarily to work as an executive producer on Ultimate Ghosts’ n Goblins for the PSP. Inafune also worked on the Mega Man and Mega Man X remakes for the system titled Mega Man Powered Up and Mega Man X Maverick Hunter. Both games were simple remakes of their respective titles that helped reinvigorate both series, which led to the release of Mega Man 9. The Bionic Commando game was being worked on in CAPCOM itself like the previous games, but Inafune realized something. If the Mega Man remake helped pump blood into its series, making the fans excited for new games, what if they did the same with Bionic Commando?
From Val Kilmer to a guy who only listens to Nu Metal.
Grin AB was contacted in Sweden to continue development on the PSP title and begin development of a brand new remake/reboot of Bionic Commando for modern consoles. The game was revealed alongside Bionic Commando Rearmed at E3 2008, where it was announced that Rearmed was moved from the PSP to a digital release on Xbox 360 and PS3. But when the game was released, it saw critical reviews below expectations and sales even lower.
Escape From Ascension City
The story takes place ten years after the first Bionic Commando. Radd was seen as a hero by the Federal States of America’s citizens. Joseph “Super Joe” Gibson gets promoted to the head of the Tactical Arms and Security Committee or TASC. However, over time, the zeitgeist around bionic soldiers shifts towards them being seen as a threat. So, five years after the war with Badds, bionics are outlawed, and the Great Bionic Purge begins. Despite his hero status, Joseph arrests Nathan and puts him on trial. He is ordered to be executed. Now, Radd is left in solitary confinement, waiting for death for five years.Today, a terrorist attack on Ascension City, the largest population center in the FSA, has resulted in millions of deaths and was orchestrated by Bioreign, a terrorist cell composed of soldiers from both the Badds Empire and FSA. The terrorists launched a nuclear bomb and began using large mechanical beasts to terraform the city. The FSA is under threat, and the only team that can stop Bioreign is TASC. Gibson takes his old partner out of storage and tells him that he needs to enter the city and take out the leader of Bioreign. If he does, then his crimes will be erased. Nathan doesn’t want to follow orders from the guy who betrayed him. But Gibson promises him that he has a lead on the disappearance of his wife Emily Spencer, so Radd decides to follow along, for now.
Radd is launched into the city on a missile and soon after finds the pod with his bionic arm. It is painful, but he is able to reconnect it to his body. After five years, he has no memory of how to use the arm but will slowly regain his abilities over the course of the game.
Spying on the masked leader of the terrorists, Nathan spots Gottfried Groeder still alive. His espionage is halted by Jayne “Mag” Magdalene, a former comrade and fellow bionic. They get into a tussle but are interrupted by a mysterious sniper. The gunman fires at them but doesn’t hit either one. Mag runs away, leaving Nathan alone. Realizing that his past is beginning to chase after him, Nathan points his head down and decides to just follow orders and see where they lead him.
Swingin’ Through The City
Before starting the game, it must start. Sure, that’s a given, but not for Bionic Commando, which hasn’t seen an update on PC since 2009. So some drivers needed to be fuddled with, and there are no options to separate the frame rate from the screen resolution, vsync, controller configuration, HUD placement, subtitle size, or to change the game from always being fullscreen. No, editing the config file did not change anything either. The game feels like it’s in a desperate fight for its life every time it starts like an old car on the verge of death. It’s also so old that it assumes that if you’re running the game with a screen resolution larger than 720p, you must have the game projected on a movie screen because the HUD and subtitles shrink down with no way to adjust them. Also, whenever you start the game, a splash screen says it runs best on Alienware computers. Great stuff.Anyway, the game begins with Nathan alone and armless. He must fight off enemies with a Tungsten pistol until he finds his arm. The game plays from a third-person perspective, and by clicking the right stick, Nathan will aim down the sights of a gun. This is because the left trigger is used for the bionic arm.
The Bioreign grunts can be a little stupid.
Finding it unlocks a tutorial that teaches you all about tethering to grabbable objects and swinging. It also unlocks tutorials on all of Nathan’s abilities that he will learn over time as he regains his memories with the arm. This is kind of pointless as whenever Nathan remembers these skills, there is a short tutorial for each making the full tutorial at the beginning pointless. Anyway, Swinging is simple: hold the trigger to hold on to the object. Jumping in the air will cause Nathan to be suspended and he can begin swinging. The swinging is what you would expect for a 3D game, but the game adds a helpful indicator over the reticle whenever Nathan is at the peak arch of the swing.
Anything that can be grabbed is highlighted in blue on the reticle. This includes cars that Spencer can throw at enemies or lampposts from which to swing. Throwing things at enemies is a great way to take out big mechs that your guns can’t hurt or to save ammo.
Nathan has two weapon slots, like Call of Duty. One is always reserved for the Tungsten, but the other weapon is retrieved from the drop pods that Super Joe sends you throughout the mission. These include grenade launchers, machine guns, and even the odd bazooka. Oftentimes, the drop pods are situational, like you’ll receive the sniper rifle before entering a snipers’ nest. There is also the grenades which act like grenades in any 7th gen shooter. Speaking of Call of Duty, there is no health bar. Instead, the screen turns red as Radd takes damage and must heal by avoiding being hit.
There are weapon challenges. Whenever Nathan first picks up a gun, it will unlock a basic challenge with the weapon, like ‘kill 3 grunts,’ and completing it will unlock a second, more complex challenge and a gun upgrade. Plus, you see the upgrades to the weapons as tangible changes in the firearm’s design, such as how an ammunition buff to the Tungsten results in an extended mag or how getting hollow points gives the gun a barrel extension because that’s how hollow point bullets work.
The Bioreign grunts can be very stupid. Like this one time I beat a Polycraft with a pistol and without it fighting back.
Explosive Finale
Nathan learns that Bioreign is interested in the Vulture System. It is a weapon made by the FSA as a countermeasure against bionics. As it’s an FSA property they’re after, Nathan is tasked with ensuring they can’t use the weapon. He visits the FSA’s archives to retrieve the Carrion Device, the device that powers the Vulture System. Meeting up with Gibson again, he tosses the device to him. In exchange, Joe tosses him the mask of the Bioreign leader, revealing his true identity. Mag gets kidnapped by the rest of Bioreign, and they begin to fly away, but not before Nathan latches on to their convoy of helicopters and blows them up.Radd and Mag make it to the FSA Vault, where Joe goes to retrieve the Vulture System. This vault also holds the secrets of bionics, where Nathan reads off a report on his arm that reveals that his wife Emily was used in the development of the arm. Bionic limbs need to connect and sync with their hosts, or they will develop mental problems. Joe explains that making a robot act like a human arm was next to impossible. So, they decided to make a human act like a robot arm. The closer the host was to the catalyst used for the limb, the better the sync. In other words, they turned Emily into a robot arm.
Joe kills Mag and activates the Vulture System with the Carrion Device, which is revealed to be a large army of angelic androids with a central unit being piloted by Gibson. Nathan chases after them and manages to catch up to Joe in the sky. As he is knocked unconscious, he sees Emily one last time, who tells him that she was always there with him. This motivates him to wake up and rip the Carrion Device right out of the central unit, causing the vultures, Joe, and Nathan to fall back into the vault. The screen goes black as Nathan loses consciousness again.
The game ends with an after-credits scene of the sniper reading off a screen with Morse code on it that reads:
-... . ... - .- . - .. --. . .-.-.-/ .- ..- ... ..-. ..- . .... .-. ..- -. --./ ...- --- -./ .--. .... .- ... ./ --.. .-- . ../ ...- --- .-. -... . .-. . .. - . - .-.-.-/ .- -.- - .. ...- .. . .-. ./ .--. .-. --- .--- . -.- -/ .- .-.. -... .- - .-. --- ... ... .-.-.-
Which translates to “BESTAETIGE. AUSFUEHRUNG VON PHASE ZWEI VORBEREITET. AKTIVIERE PROJEKT ALBATROSS.”
2 COOL 4 SKOOL
One of the first things that many notice about this game and the first one that discomforts them is Radd’s design. Initially, he was inspired by the likes of Schwarzenegger, Kilmer, Stallone, and Michael J. Fox. This new design looks like it was inspired by the action stars of the era it was developed in. I can’t help but look at the design and see Gerard Butler in 300 or Vin Diesel in the Riddick series. Someone at Grin decided they should go from a ginger to something far worse, a white guy with dreadlocks. He is disheveled with a stained and ripped undershirt, a 5 o’clock shadow, and a bandaged hand.Bomberman: Act Zero and DMC: Devil May Cry articles might happen later down the line.
There was a trend in the mid-2000s to the early 2010s where everything seemingly had a little more edge. Colors got muted and darkened, there was a layer of grime, anything considered too cartoonish was rejected, no smiling allowed, and if they could make it edgy, they would make it edgy. Like every design trend, you can’t help but look back at how stupid it was. Even Devil May Cry, a series that took inspiration from Punk and Goth aesthetics, wasn’t cool enough for CAPCOM, so they rebooted the series to be more hardcore. I suppose this design trend was because these franchises wanted to be seen as serious and mature. However, if anything, it makes me and plenty of other people take these characters less seriously. But Bionic Commando isn’t satisfied with having the edgy character. This grit infects the story as well.
Soldiers of Sorrow: The Game
All this pathos only comes off as bathos, an attempt at a serious story becoming unintentionally comical. There is a scene that many laugh at when Nathan first meets Mag. They get into an argument over Mag’s desertion and joining Bioreign. She says that she wanted to avoid the Bionic Purge because she couldn’t handle living without her bionic legs. She doesn’t want to live in a wheelchair. To which Nathan shouts, “You deserve a chair, Mag! But the one I’m thinking of doesn’t have wheels!” This is the type of line you would expect to be an action one-liner, but it’s meant to be a threat.
The game is trying to reject its silly origin but comes off as an edgelord who is only doing this to get some girl’s attention. The game thinks it’s an adult when it is really a teenager: obsessed with its image, trying to act like it’s mature, and failing at all of it.
Wife-Arm: The Game
Emily is a completely stupid addition to the story. She’s one of those characters whose only purpose is to be dead. The possibility of her existence motivates Nathan, but she has no real character or development. Existing as a damsel-in-distress that wasn’t in distress to begin with.How do you even turn a human into a robot arm? Wouldn’t it make more sense to try and make the robot arm more compatible with the user than to turn people into robots? They say that if the limb doesn’t sync right with the wearer, then they will enter a psychosis. However, plenty of people in the real world have robotic prosthetics, and they don’t lose their minds, so why does an arm with a grappling hook mix up people’s brains in Bionic Commando? Also, Groeder had a ton of bionics on him, does that mean that the Nazi had a ton of friends? Or is it supposed that he has gone crazy due to the bionics not being in sync? Of course, that makes no sense since Bionic Commando Rearmed established that he was already insane before he got the arm, let alone the entire body. The entire idea behind bionics is stupid now due to this one change.
Development Hell
A comic book was written for the game titled “Chain of Command.” It followed Radd as he set off on a mission to kill two rogue bionics. However, he hesitated to kill them because he saw himself in them. This is treated as treachery and is what got him arrested. The comic was released on the Bionic Commando website with one page a week being released up to the game’s release.
Constant arguments broke out about the direction the game should take and how the story was handled. Staff often argued in public on the forums.
Most of these problems are due to Ben Judd’s mishandling. But if the game suffered because of anyone, it was Keiji Inafune.
Father of Mega Man
Keiji Inafune was a bit of a weird guy at CAPCOM. The fans call him both the father of Mega Man and the killer of Mega Man. He started working at CAPCOM in the 80s as an artist. He cut his teeth on Street Fighter and the first Mega Man game. Akira Kitamura began the Mega Man project himself and did the first designs of the character in sprite art. Inafune joined later and did the painted concept art of the character. So it is sort of a Bob Kane-Bill Finger situation. Inafune would later become the producer of the series after Kitamura retired in 1994.Inafune had this weird perspective of Japanese developers. He saw the growing number of developers and fans of video games in Western countries not as a new audience but as a threat to Japan. However, he didn’t rise to the challenge so much as say, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them.’ The early 2000s saw him produce games like Lost Planet and Dead Rising, two games that were developed with Western audiences in mind, and when an American with plans to revitalize an old franchise came up to him, he couldn’t say no. But Inafune didn't let his pessimism go unnoticed. During the Tokyo Game Show 2009, Inafune let his grievances air with Judd acting as his interpreter. “Man, Japan is over. We’re done. Our game industry is finished.”
Killer of Mega Man
Of course, Inafune wasn’t just working on Bionic Commando. As Mega Man’s father, he ensured that many Mega Man projects were in development. All of them were either canceled or announced and then canceled. Rockman Online was an MMORPG that was announced and then canceled. Mega Man Universe was a game where players could create their own levels that was announced and then canceled. Mega Man Star Force 4 was a sequel in the Star Force subseries that was canceled before it was even announced.The most notable of these cancellations would have to go to either Mega Man Legends 3 or the project titled Maverick Hunter. Mega Man Legends 3 was not only going to be a sequel to a long-dormant subseries, but it also had a marketing campaign slightly inspired by Bionic Commando’s. Its website allowed fans to participate in polls, forums, and more. The concept was greatly expanded upon for Legends 3. Fans could vote on design concepts, discuss the game’s development in forums, and receive regular updates from the staff. All of this was on the Devroom website, and fans contributing to the game were considered extra developers. However, the project was canceled in July 2011 after CAPCOM didn’t see the activity they wanted in the Devroom.
They wanted you to take this seriously.
Maverick Hunter took a page from Bionic Commando, which was a gritty remake of Mega Man X. It was developed by Armature Studios with some oversight by Inafune. Also, this game would have involved X becoming evil over the course of the game and Zero having to stop him. So even some of BC’s story managed to bleed into this game. It was canceled sometime in 2010. Dozens of Mega Man games were killed off between 2009 and 2011 and were all tied to Inafune.
It may seem weird to go on a side tangent about Inafune and Mega Man, but it’s essential to get into his head space to understand why this game was made. All of this gritty stuff that doesn’t fit the series is just stuff he copied from other Western trends and games. It may have been Judd’s idea. But it was Inafune who drove the game into the ground in an attempt to be ‘more Western.’
But despite all the problems, despite being a vain attempt at Western appeal, is the game bad?
It’s Not THAT Bad!
I like it, and most people seem to, too. The worst critical reviews I found still rated it five out of ten at worst. The story is dumb, yes. But the gameplay is phenomenal. Swinging on the bionic arm is hard to pick up but easy to master, making it a thrill to swing throughout the destroyed city.The challenges are rather fun to do. Sure, the majority of them are simple and will naturally be done over the course of the game, but I love how rewarding the system is. It took about eight hours to beat, which is a reasonable time for a game like this, and the action was more fun than one would expect.
In 2012, a sequel to Bionic Commando Rearmed came in the form of Rearmed 2. The game followed the same formula and tried to take itself less seriously. It told the story of Radd and Mag on a mission against a Caribbean dictator. It mostly added more backstory to the characters and sold poorly. There isn’t even a PC port. I bring it up because it would feel incomplete to talk about Bionic Commando and not mention it. Plus, Nathan got a 'stache.
From a guy that only listens to Nu Metal to "Are yah winnin', son?"
So Long, Bionic
There hasn’t been another Bionic Commando game since Rearmed 2, and there probably will never be another since both games have done terribly commercially. That means that we most likely will never know what happened to Nathan Spencer, Super Joe, or that mysterious sniper. It doesn’t help that Keiji Inafune and Ben Judd no longer work at CAPCOM.They both left in October of 2010. Inafune’s departure is also part of why so many Mega Man games got canceled. So what would he do if he wasn’t going to stay at CAPCOM to work on Mega Man games? Well, he would create his own development studio, Comcept, Inc., where he would… work on a Mega Man game: Mighty No. 9. The game is its own can of worms, but basically, on Kickstarter.com, Inafune pitched a game that, on a good day, was a ‘spiritual tribute’ to the super fighting robot and was on the verge of being copyright infringement on a bad one. Judd actually joined Inafune as the Kickstarter manager. Yes, that was him that stated it was ‘better than nothing.’ The game struggled to stay on budget, keep its promises, and was delayed several times. When it was eventually released, the game was lampooned from every angle for being buggy, poorly designed, and not even meeting a lot of the promises made during the Kickstarter campaign.
Keiji Inafune, Ben Judd, and some random developer doing their best in a bad situation.
Inafune worked with Armature Studios again for Re:Core in 2016 but didn’t work on much else afterward. He quit in 2024 and joined a Vietnamese studio called Rocket Studio that primarily develops mobile games. In a way, Keiji Inafune’s career parallels Tokuro Fujiwara’s. They both worked from the ground up in CAPCOM in the 1980s, made their names on some of its most famous franchises, and left after decades to make their own games despite their almost immediate failures doing so. But the two men can not be any more different. Fujiwara was known for supporting young developers at CAPCOM like Shinji Mikami, whose hit series Resident Evil was based on Fujiwara’s work with Sweet Home. While he wasn’t a perfect developer, he always had a passion for the art. But everything I’ve heard about Inafune was that he was a jerk who downplayed other developers, and when the US market began to match the strength of Japan’s, he shouted, “Japan has fallen!” and jumped ship.
Ben Judd worked for Digital Development Management, the firm that handled the Kickstarter campaign of Mighty No. 9. He ended up also doing the campaign for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which is to Castlevania as Mighty No. 9 is to Mega Man. The only other difference is that the game is good. He founded Dangen, a Japanese company focused on publishing Western indie games in Japan, but quickly lost the job due to claims of mismanagement and sexual harassment. He is currently being sued by developers whose Kickstarter campaigns he managed for embezzling the funds.
Grin didn’t last long after the release of Bionic Commando, which was released in May-April 2009. The studio filed for bankruptcy in August of 2009. Part of the problem was the financial strain of Bionic Commando’s poor sales. But another problem was the development of Project Fortress, a side game in the Final Fantasy franchise funded by Square Enix. Grin went through 6 months of development before SQEX pulled the plug. Due to their contract, SQEX didn’t pay Grin anything.
CAPCOM is still alive, but the period from around 2008 to 2017 is often called the CAPCOM Dark Age. Sure, they had some successes in this period. However, Resident Evil went through a slump with Resident Evil 5 and 6 as the series tried to become more action-oriented and took notes from Hollywood flicks. Devil May Cry got a notorious remake that followed Inafune’s philosophy. Street Fighter came back to life with Street Fighter IV and died again with Street Fighter V. Dead Rising was handed over to a Western developer, CAPCOM Vancouver, and the series almost died with Dead Rising 4. But of course, none of these suffered more than Mega Man, who saw a grand total of 2 games released during the Dark Age. Two sequels to the original series were made for the Wii Virtual Console that released at the beginning of the period. Yeah, that poor little robot was dead in the trash can the entire time.
Playing Rearmed unlocks a costume of Nathan's old design. He won't stop asking me to sign his petition.
So everyone and everything’s lives were made notably worse after this game. Are there any positives that can be gleaned from this? Well, maybe there is a lesson in all of this. Don’t try to change yourself to impress others. Whether you’re Dante from the Devil May Cry Series, a 40 ft transforming alien robot, or even a bionic commando. It doesn’t matter. I suppose this advice also works if you’re a regular human too.
