Bionic Commando: Rearmed.

Since I'm currently suffering from a state of hopeless insomnia, I decided to download and buy the remake to the NES classic, Bionic Commando. Since I have a few minutes to kill before going to work, I might as well finally update this blog with my thoughts on the remake of one of my favorite games from theNES era.

So far -- I only had the chance to play the game for about an hour -- I'm really loving most of it. While I don't have a whole lot of time to get too detailed about the game, I will go over a couple of points.

Graphics: While I've been seeing videos of this game for awhile now, I was really surprised by how detailed the graphics were. Little things like tiny particles breaking loose from walls after shooting them and the overall animation really make this game stand-out from your typical Xbox Live Arcade fare. Though I will say that I can do without the blinding HDR that developers for some reason love to include in their games nowadays. I don't know why Grin thinks that blinding the players at the start of every-other-level will somehow impress them, but maybe that's just me.

Music: Take the NES classic and remix the tunes while keeping the odd 8-bit sound effects. Brilliant, and it's amazing that other developers of remakes haven't caught on to this idea.

Other aspects that I like are the new bosses (Only fought a couple so far) and the cool mini-challenges that I'll try out once I get home from work. On the negative side, I can't believe that they couldn't include some type of online play. Sure, there's offline play, but how many people are going to play this game offline with a bunch of friends?

Also, the rewritten dialog is too corny for my tastes; the inclusion of Haley was a mistake (Her "HEY" voice that blares every-time she appears annoys me) and the new 3D puzzles that you have to solve whenever you want to hack a communications tower are a little 'meh.'

Anyway, I'm going to try to finish my Crysis review that I've been writing off-and-on for a week now later tonight. That or some more thoughts on Bionic Commando.

Off to work!