Why The Bionic Commando Remake Is Clueless?

It's most likely a concession to necessity. I can only assume that to get a project like this greenlighted by a publisher like Capcom you have to compromise your sense of taste and pander to the LCD by piling on the idiotic cliches. I'll be willing to forgive the OMG SO DARK facelift if the gameplay is awesome.

parish | October 24, 2007 4:54 PM

Wow! The word OVER-PRODUCED leaps to mind. I guess they don't think it will make money unless they spin their wheels on countless rehashing cycles of concept art and 3D graphic development. If they wanted to do that, why not come up with something original, instead of the misty-eyed sentimental daydreaming inspired by an old game?

I'm sorry, but making a graphically-intense nextgen version of a fun old little 8-bitter is not going to bring your youth back.

Grassroots Gamemaster | October 24, 2007 5:56 PM

I see his point, but on a superficial level it seemed hypocritical to criticize the change from Radd to Nathan (Rad? As in radical? For the protagonist? Nice), but then take the opposite stand on Ascension City.

Jaunty | October 24, 2007 6:41 PM

I don't know what hallucinogenics they are on, but the "this is the most epic, cinematic story EVER WRITTEN" days have advanced the medium and our industry exponentially more than the "we’re making a video game, why not make it fun to play and then worry about writing a plot that fits in with the game?" days. Any serious gamer should know not to expect plotting devoid of clichés from a Capcom IP and N+'s "plot" is no less uninspired than that of the Bionic Commando remake. For a two-person developer with mediocre-at-best output (there are teams of the same size doing some amazing stuff), they are awfully arrogant.

surfer girl | October 24, 2007 9:11 PM

I don't see how stories in games are advancing the medium at all, stories are just a wrapper for the crappy game that's inside. As for advancing the industry, most of the industry growth was started by Doom and Quake, two of the worst stories ever written.

Alex Austin | October 24, 2007 10:16 PM

im gettin a lil tired of the " anti hero/badass main characters", but none the less we will all see if the proof is in the pudding..

sketchzombie | October 24, 2007 10:19 PM

..really? Really?! A story in which "freeing a convicted-for-crimes-he-didn't-commit-tough-guy from jail so that he can save the world from an evil tarrorist organization" is considered advancing the medium?! If i were british I'd accuse you of taking the piss.

Advancing the medium of video games will require developers to see how stifling and boring the crutch of narrative is.

Look at what happened to film, a medium which could have been so much more but is now just a vehicle for story-telling -- and usually telling one of the same three or four stories again and again! That doesn't sound familiar at all, does is? How about: FPS, RTS, RPG, sports.

Writing, and even "content" IN GENERAL in games is just a crutch -- the code doesn't comprehend the meaning of the dialog text any more than it does the meaning of the hyper-photorealistic brick texture. This means that the game code can't properly interact with or manipulate these elements -- they're static, baked in. The opposite of interactive! There is a minimum level of audiovisual representation that has to go on for a game to convey the simulation, and beyond that content is nothing more than a cheap, pragmatic short-cut kludge that allows people to laboriously create the appearance of complexity where there is only static data in reality. I'll save the verbose version of this argument for a blog post.

This is why games like Facade, Gish and Everyday Shooter are the ones which are advancing the medium -- they're exploring new technologies and ways of approaching games, rather than just changing the window-dressing on an existing game.

I think that abstract, minimal-narrative games such as Ms. Pac-Man, Tetris and Super Mario Bros have done more to develop video games as a medium than all of the FPSs combined, no matter how epic their cherished plots. (Doom is an exception)

The trend of totally vapid narrative has DEFINITELY "advanced the industry" in that it's broadened the appeal of games to the point where they're a nice big lucrative commercially viable product which anyone can "enjoy". Narrative is definitely appealing to consumers. I'll buy that -- but that has nothing whatsoever to do with advancing the medium, any more than McDonalds' 2trillionth customer served is advancing all things culinary, or boy bands are advancing music as a medium.

There is a big difference between judicious, self-aware, and ironic use of cliches/tropes/idioms/archetypes, and embarrassingly lowest-common-denominator, design-by-committee focus group cliches. This is the difference between Dead Rising and the new Bionic Commando; they're both full of terrible cliches but only one of them knows it.

I'm sorry for being arrogant, but frankly anyone with an iota of common sense, aesthetic, or a brain will appear arrogant when compared to the totally bizzare, alien, isolated corporate-culture PR-driven groupthink world of mainstream game development. The same could be said for mainstream media of any type probably.

There are definitely a ton of 2-person teams that are doing great things; we know a lot of them, and they're all inspiring and great people. And NONE of them is wasting 3 months designing the look of a bionic arm ffs.

raigan | October 24, 2007 10:29 PM

To answer your question, we are on the best damn hallucinogens money can buy.

ps. N's plot alone advanced the medium by 17 years. The numbers aren't in on N+ yet, but we're crossing our fingers it's exponentially more than that.

Mare | October 24, 2007 11:23 PM

Raigan, I don't like over-produced stuff, but on the other hand, your perspective is so typical of programmers - that story is superfluous because "the code can't comprehend it". Talk about arrogant. Maybe the idea that something as "static" as a story can make something come alive without one little bit of machine logic to grok it first could help sway your feelings. (The great stories are also "static", if you think about it, yet you can see so much in them each time you encounter them [which makes them... dynamic!].)

My suggestion for your soul-of-a-machine train-of-thought is why not develop the ultimate game: one that plays itself.

Grassroots Gamemaster | October 24, 2007 11:38 PM

However, you are absolutely right that mainstream game development is a totally bizarre, alien, isolated corporate-culture PR-driven groupthink world.

Grassroots Gamemaster | October 24, 2007 11:42 PM

I recall one of the first findings from the Experimental Gameplay Project: graphics make a game more fun.

This seems to go against the meme, but let me explain what I think's going on here: graphics mean context. It's more 'fun' to save the last human family from a neverending alien menace than it is to save green dots from red dots. It speaks more clearly to the human tendency to frame everything as stories.

Let's take a generic FPS, and look at its weapons. Shotgun, machine gun, pistol, rocket launcher, sniper rifle, maybe a revolver. Now, we take those same gameplay concepts and map them onto 'alien' weapons, and suddenly thy're less intuitive. Players will need to fire the weapons at least once, or you'll need to give them a practice area, because they need to learn what the weapons are. If you go with the familiar, players old and new can infer what they do from their knowledge outside the game.

Certainly, in relatively simple games you can get away with having incongruent settings like ninjas trying to collect gold that earn them time, but in a larger, more complex game you can't do that with everything.

Anyway, I suspect that single-player non-narrative games are a developmental dead end - multiplayer non-narrative games, or at least Fox-and-Geese style games where one player sets the challenge and others solve it are more appealing to players thanks to that human element; on the other hand, single-player narrative games have a lot of promise, though how much of that promise they'll be able to fulfil, I'm not sure. I think a lot of players don't really expect games to try for a meaningful narrative, although they like the context that a motivation provides, and become upset when a game trades 'fun' for an attempt at using the unique tools provided by interactivity to make a point. I don't think this will change until there's a few games that show that games can evoke a reaction other than 'fun'. (There's been some interesting studies into these, I'd like to play around with some of them myself.)

While I think that maybe they didn't need to spend 3 months modelling a bionic arm, we don't know the specifics. Perhaps this was done between other art projects; perhaps the source is wrong, and they changed it after three months of being upset with it. Perhaps the development team kept tweaking it, making lots of little changes, for the entire three months.

Frankly, the whole thing smacks of the same sort of anti-mainstream rant you see all the time from indies. (Groupthink indeed.) It would be nice if they would stop - negative campaigning does no-one good.

Merus | October 25, 2007 12:59 AM

if fumito ueda directed the new bionic commando, the hero would be nameless, the city would be nameless and the story would be "you're a guy with a robot arm/grappling hook. have fun".

and it would be a better game for it.

fish | October 25, 2007 6:22 AM

Merus, you are wrong that negative campaigning by indies is bad. History shows that reinvention and revolution cannot occur unless proceeded by a phase where the status quo is ridiculed. This "negative campaigning" is necessary and, ultimately, productive.

Grassroots Gamemaster | October 25, 2007 9:56 AM

Fish, you just made me depressed that Ueda's not doing this game.

JP | October 25, 2007 11:00 AM

Merus, I don't think anyone is writing off the concept of story entirely. They're just blasting away at the fish-in-barrel of how the mainstream industry typically approaches story: an embarassingly self-serious, cliche-riddled exercise in clueless forced edginess. It's difficult to overestimate the degree of cynicism and creative impoverishment in the mainstream industry. Chances are, a story like this wasn't conceived because it better explicated game concepts, provided an interesting context, or advanced any grand themes. Stories get added to new mainstream games because existing mainstream games have them, pure and simple. All the N+ guy did was point out what a colossal waste of effort that can be.

And I agree with Mr. Grassroots that the status quo does need to be mocked, so long as it continues to believe that the way to profitability is to insult the intelligence of their audience. On the other hand, indie developers have an obligation to follow that up with creativity and meaningful work so we don't all become a bunch of bitter, jaded malcontents.

JP | October 25, 2007 11:11 AM

I think you misread me -- if you take "programming is king" to the extreme you get games with differently coloured rectangles rather than goombas, which obvisouly isn't as fun. But the content should support the simulation, not the other way around.

We're big fans of graphic design, definitely there is a lot of room for style in games. Rez, Wipeout, Loco Roco are good examples of having style without resorting to narrative-heavy crap, and they're not "tiny" games.

The sorts of things you can do with shader3.0 hardware is totally amazing; sadly rather than look at interesting visual media for inspiration (such as the motion graphics industry.. just look at some autechre videos!!) everyone just sticks with hollywood and the result is that the things we represent in 3D are usually things which you could capture with a camera and some good set/costume design.

I really think there is a representational sweet spot where the content conveys the state of the world without becoming a gigantic cancerous growth impedes the game itself -- and most AAA games are light years too far in the wrong direction.

Your example is framed in such a way that there's no good solution: when you start with an FPS with guns, you've already chosen your metaphors. The fact that "what sort of guns?" is a hot topic in game reviews is either really sad or hilarious.. if you're stuck with the choice between human guns or alien guns, the solution is to burn down the studio overnight and start working on a GOOD game the next day. You can even use the same technology that crap games use, all it takes is a little imagination and creativity: http://ludocraft.oulu.fi/deflebub/

The thing about the story in Super Mario Bros, or N for that matter, is that it doesn't try to be anything more than it needs to be -- a flimsy pretense which establishes the most basic metaphors necessary for players to understand the simulated game world via some simple shared intuitions. The fact that such stories are transparent allows players to quickly forget them and get on with actually playing the game.

As for dead-ends, i think that's a tragically narrow-minded view. Just look at Braid! Look at how many different sorts of music have been made and are being made with just a drumset and a guitar!

Certainly it's a more limited setup, but sometimes you can be a lot more creative with a pencil and a pad than an entire studio full of materials, because lots of decisions evaporate and you're left with only the important ones. A guitar and drumset might not be able to do some of the things a full orchestra can do, but you also don't need to spend weeks transcribing oboe parts.

In terms of writing in games, the Simpsons and Portal are two examples of big-budget games that actually get it right.

Finally, with regards to invoking the great stories in order to discredit a "ludology over narrative" approach to games: this is why choose-your-own-adventures are terrible books, and narrative-heavy games are terrible games. Taking existing media and grafting them into games is not the way to progress games, this is exactly the same tragic thing that happened to film. At least they chose theater to bastardize film with -- imagine if they had chosen literature! They would have filmed someone turning the pages on a book so that the audience could all read along together!!

This is more or less exactly what is being done to games. Pressing A to read the next bit of dialog is just "next-gen" interactive page-turning.. which is light years away from what makes my favorite games so magical.

raigan | October 25, 2007 11:33 AM

i question whether pretending to be a movie has done much to advance the videogame as its own medium.

dessgeega | October 25, 2007 12:15 PM

i love you raigan.
i trully do.

fish | October 25, 2007 12:22 PM

and dess too.

fish | October 25, 2007 12:24 PM

All videogames don't have to be 2d flash-based games played in a browser , some people actually enjoy games with high production values. But who am I to criticize?
By that logic, I suppose that even the original bionic commando game was also a "bad" game because it involved more than two colours and it was actually fun to play?

radikalRebelTeenIndieHero | October 25, 2007 12:40 PM

You'll have to try harder than that -- it's not about high production values == bad. I mentioned lots of terrific high-budget games! Although there really does seem to be a correlation between budget and "inertia": the more money required for a project, the harder it's going to be to convince those who control the money to blindly follow a certain weird or new idea. It's not a conspiracy or weird at all, it's just natiral -- look at how quickly small, simple organisms (like the flu) adapt and exploit novel niches in their environment compared to large complex organisms.

About "games that play themselves", since they're not really interactive at that point, the whole ludology-first/content-subservient -ness has been lost. What about games that generate their own graphics or levels? That way things can change at run-time rather than being the same every time.

Here's a great example: Everyday Shooter. Rather than describing the graphics explicitly, and then at run-time simply display pre-made animations, Jon described procedures to be followed in order to generate the graphics. Since each procedure is governed by a set of parameters that the code "knows" about, the game can adjust these parameters dynamically based on other parameters in the game world (velocity, direction, distance, etc). This is TONS more interesting than the standard maya->3Dengine pipeline for producing graphics because it allows for actual coupling between the simulation and the graphics.

It's not programming-centric, it's processing-centric -- if there was a great easy-to-use visual tool for creating interactive, dynamic game graphics, we'd be all over it. There are lots of terrific modular software sound synthesizers which I love using, I'd never dream of soldering up a bunch of circuits when I could just use these great tools.

Sadly, for whatever reasons the corresponding graphics technology isn't there, so often the only way to accomplish these things is to roll up your sleeves and program a bit. But it has nothing to do with programming per se. I would be happy to never have to program since frankly we're not very good at it and it's often tedious, frustrating work. But, it's sadly often the only pragmatic way to realize the specific thing you want to create.

There was an amazing graphic design tool called n_gen which could algorithmically emulate many different graphic design styles. It was like magic -- you provided the text, hit "generate" and it would come up with a layout (complete with graphics, fonts, etc) which was different every time but always totally indicative of that specific style.

THAT is the sort of thing that belongs in games, not ham-fisted hollywood hackery.

raigan | October 25, 2007 1:22 PM

I've got to defend Hollywood for a second here. Ham-fisted Hollywood hackery is still head and shoulders above most game writing. The "stories" of most games, including (especially?) AAA titles, entails the kind of contrived cornball writing that as a film wouldn't get a 1am Sunday slot on the Sci-Fi channel. This rehash of Bionic Commando is just another example of an "ultimate badass" story, the kind that HBO used to show on Thursday Night Prime.

It's unbelievably lazy, yes, but the entire approach to this is idiotic. In movies you start out with script. Even if the idea was some think tank turd, you still start out the production with a script. If decides to shape a multi-million dollar game around a linear story and setting, why the hell don't they start with a script at least. You can at least pass it around for a while until someone points out the obvious fact that this story is crap, these characters suck, the whole twist at the end is cliched and predictable, and the script as it stands will only serve to detract from whatever action it is meant to house.

Anyway, my vote is for creative bankruptcy, as I'm a big fan of ridiculous extremes.

pnutz | October 25, 2007 2:36 PM

The plot of this game sounds like a total rip-off of Escape from New York, so I think it could be fun.

Swinging mechanic looks like it could be fun too. Hope it doesn't end up sucking.

Also, whatever, the game probably just uses cutscenes that you can freely skip so I really don't think it's that much of a big deal.

CycleCycle | October 25, 2007 5:21 PM