“Both one of the greatest and worst things I’ve ever read. I feel like this was written from a checklist of action movie stuff. Crazy weaponized vehicle? Check. Gadgets that seem worthless and come in handy? Check. A character named Super Joe? Double-fuckin-check.
Let’s run through what happens.
We have Jack and Joe. Two war-scarred vets enjoying a pizza together in a hotel room after another successful mission. Are the two characters staying in the same room, possibly as lovers? I don’t know, but I assume yes because I like to think that Bionic Commando is an early gay-positive romance.
THEN!
Ninjas bust in.
Now, here’s an example of the writing problems in the book:
“Another pair of bullets blasted through the window, whistling even closer to their heads.
‘Those guys are good,’ Joe said. ‘Real good.’
Jack knew that things were getting serious. His well-trained commando instincts were going off like fire alarms.”
Ah, really? Bullets crashing through the window set off some alarm bells for you? No shit? Good thing your instincts are so well-honed. Guy like me, I’m likely to have no goddamn idea that bullets shot at me might be dangerous.
At this point, I wondered if we were going to get mature and actually shoot some bad guy ninjas. They had swords, after all.
But, thank god, a chandelier saves the day. Jack shoots a chandelier, it falls on top of some of the ninjas, and because we’ve all decided that it’s not murderous to drop a 100+ pound light fixture on someone from a height of 2 stories, everything is groovy.
Until it isn’t. Jack jumps out a window (and by the way, a ninja throws a throwing star at him as he’s falling to his imminent death), lucks out and lands in the pool, and when he wakes up, Joe has been kidnapped. Oh, and Jack now has a bionic arm.
Here’s what the arm does:
Grappling hook. As is present in the game.
Hot Finger: A thing that makes his finger super hot.
Strength: Jack can punch with the force of ten men.
Truth Ray: An electromagnetic field that compels people to tell the truth. I am not making this up. And in fact, I think they only added this feature so Jack and the boss could have this great exchange:
“He raised his finger and pointed it at the Captain.
‘Will it make you tell the truth too, Captain?’ he asked.
‘Yes, Jack,’ the Captain said grimly.
‘What are Super Joe’s chances of living?’ Jack asked.
‘Not good,’ The Captain said. ‘He will only survive if your mission to rescue him is successful.’
‘What are my chances of surviving the mission?’ Jack asked, staring straight into the Captain’s eyes.
‘Slim,’ the Captain answered. ‘It’s a suicide mission.'”
Boom.
So basically we have Jack running from place to place to collect different weapons like a helmet, bulletproof vest, a 3-way gun (which shoots in three directions, not a gun that helps convince someone to get experimental in a dull relationship) and a bunch of bullshit like that. Really, what’s going on here is we have that element of the game, the stupid element that makes no sense because WHY CAN’T YOU JUST GIVE HIM THAT SHIT?! Every goddamn game, I swear. Oh, Link can’t carry a potion because he doesn’t have a jar. I have 999 rupees, motherfucker! That’s the maximum I can carry or the maximum amount the Hyrule FDIC will insure or whatever. Surely some asshole around here has a jar for sale at that price. Or I could use one of the many constantly-regenerating pots all over the place? C’mon.
Jack wrestles with his newfound bionic power. Does he really feel like a man anymore? Does he even like his bionic arm?
YES!? It’s fucking bionic, strong as ten men, and has a truth ray for no reason. This is much better than the people kind of arm, which is a lesson Jack learns near the end of the book. He overcomes his pointless prejudice against his own awesome robotic arm and then…well, the lesson he learns at the end is the lesson we all learned from the very beginning, bionic arm is awesome.
Most of the books is about a bunch of fetching of this or that item. Some highlights:
+A chapter break where Jack is falling, and in order to ratchet up the tension, he “forgets” how to use his bionic arm. At the beginning of the next chapter, he remembers. Kinda like the time I nearly died because I forgot how to make my heart beat. And then I was saved because I remembered.
+The different areas Jack visits are called “Stage 1” or “Stage 5” or whatever, rather than having actual names. And the stages are all out of order in the story, which follows with the game. In the Bionic Commando game, you start en route to stage 1, after which you can choose to go to stages 13 or 4. Notice I didn’t say 2 was an option. Nope, 13 or 4. If you pick 4, then you can branch to either 15 or 5, and from 5 you can pick 15, 16, 2, or 6. From the beginning of the game, the stage furthest from the starting point is stage 11. Stage 11 of 17. It makes no sense. If you’re going to be so uncreative as to name your various towns by number, WHY NOT PUT THEM IN ORDER AT LEAST?
+Jack flies a helicopter by pressing buttons that say things like “SPEED LIFT.”
+At one point, a villain uses the phrase “Find him, you idiots!” He also tells his men that they should “Shoot to kill” long after they’ve been firing at Jack with what I assume are real guns.
+”Welcome to San Genaro…We are a peaceful village. And we stay that way because we have rules. If you use weapons here, you will be killed.” Uh…okay.
+Jack cleverly disguises the fact that he’s talking to an informant in a restaurant by asked for the salt shaker from her table. He then shakes salt all over his pizza. His pizza. He puts salt on a pizza.
+As Jack swings across a pit of spikes that are also covered in poison slime, he imagines himself as Tarzan crossing a river of crocodiles. I guess because swinging over a pit of slimed spikes with a bionic arm is kinda boring.
+The phrase “bionic commando” is used no less than 5 times by no less than 3 different characters.
+Another chapter ends with a cliffhanger where Jack puts a keycard into a slot and then “nothing happened.” Duhn Duhn Duhn!
We do get some other great action movie tropes as well. The Captain is more concerned with the arm than he is with Jack. Jack falls in love with a fellow spy lady who goes by the code name “Heather Willis”, which isn’t so much a codename as it is her real name. Used, I assume, to make the bad guys THINK she’s using a code name, thereby throwing them off the scent.
And of course, we have our very own Short Round. Yes, a boy named Tiger who helps Jack by drawing maps of the various BADD facilities. Did I already mention that the evil organization is known as BADD? Well, it is.
You might be asking, how does Tiger know his way around these secret facilities where the secret of ALBATROS is hidden?
Tiger, it turns out, delivers food for a Japanese restaurant, a particular favorite of Kilt, the evil bad guy. Kilt orders the food, tells Tiger to go ahead and let himself into the secret facility by twisting the ring worn on the finger of a statue outside. I am not making this up.
Guys, there’s no point to a crazy-ass way of coming in like twisting a ring on a statue if you’re just going to tell everyone how it works. Don’t be an idiot.
Of course, Tiger betrays Kilt out of his desire to move to America! America!
A.M.E.R.I.C.A.!!!
Let’s skip to the end, shall we?
Jack frees Joe, and he confronts Albatros. Which turns out to be a flying submarine covered in rocket launcher, bazookas, machine guns, and cannons. Because why the fuck not.
I think in a normal situation, if we found out that this was the plan of an evil organization, we’d be pretty relieved. Oh, it’s just a car with a bunch of guns on it? Like the WAR VAN from Tango&Cash?
Jack defeats Albatros by shooting it. Like a lot. Also, he shoots its power source, which is a flashing orange light at the top. A million people have written a million things about this sort of shoddy construction. Just Google “death star uncovered reactor stupid” and read what they have to say about it. Because I can’t even.
Jack, Joe, Tiger and Heather escape. The end.
Okay, here’s why I was so excited by the possibilities with this book.
In the game, the last boss you fight is CLEARLY Hitler.
In fact, the Japanese version featured some swastikas and neo-Nazi stuff, which was scrubbed out for the American version. Oh, and Hitler says DAMN! In a video game! This is 1988, people.
Then this happens:
And then you get the ending to Bionic Commando, which is actually pretty fascinating.
You escape the exploding facility, but you still haven’t found Super Joe. The scene cuts to your helicopter pilot, who is arguing that they need to leave before the place blows. Cut to a faraway shot of the evil lair exploding, and a helicopter makes it out just in time. And there, dangling from his bionic arm, our hero. And Super Joe. What’s implied here is that our hero went back into the exploding facility to rescue Super Joe, even though he didn’t have to.
And that implication is made even deeper by the text that follows:
04/07/1989
Battle has ended and we have a new hero now. I was feeling different as I received the blessings from comrades.
08/02/2010
Now, so much time has elapsed, and I am old now. I think it’s time for me to tell you the whole story. I hope this story will be told for a long time…
-Joe
Okay, it’s far from a sophisticated tale for the ages. And you’ll have to excuse the translation circa 1988. But it’s a video game ending that snaps us 21 years into the future, and the story is being told by the rescued party, not the rescuer. In an era where most video game ended with “Thank You” or “Congratulations” or, famously, “Conglaturation!!! You have completed a great game. And prooved the justice of our culture. Now go and rest our heroes!” this is actually a fairly complex kind of ending. The rescued character is kind of ambivalent, and the fate of our hero is unknown 21 years later. It’s definitely reading too much in, but fuck off. In this ending, a character was rescued, and that rescue was the most significant event of his life. It meant a lot to him, and he wants to tell this story so no one forgets what our hero did.
I thought this story had everything that needed to be there in a book. Sure, it had to be Nerf’ed a little. But you’ve got a bionic arm, a flying war submarine, a friendship between two buddies. The Nazis weren’t likely to stay, but damn it, it would have been awesome if they did. If you can’t explode Hitler’s head guilt-free, then whose head CAN you explode?
I was so pumped to see all this happen in the book.
And the book kind of just glosses over the entire ending.
This could have been some real Saving Private Ryan shit. But instead it was just dumb. It was LESS cool than the game’s ending, which is severely limited by the technology of the time, not to mention that few people saw videogames as a legit storytelling medium at the time.
There’s awesome, hilarious action in here. Slimed spikes, an octopus fight, and even a weird shadow evil boss guy who comes out of nowhere and recedes into nowhere. But goddamn it, I just wanted that ending so bad.
They say the book is better than the movie. This time, the game is better than the book.”