No One Told Me About This

All I was trying to do was catch up on the games that got away. On deck this time, Bionic Commando. Its great, great grandson will be appearing on XBLA in a few weeks and I know that it will be the toast of the blog-land and I wanted to be sure I knew what they were all talking about. I had always heard the basics of the game: grapple hook, wink-wink they are Nazis, and a climactive fight against Hitler. What I didn't realize, though, is that that this is the first side-scroller with an overworld map.

You would think that interrupting you from a perfectly good 2D landscape and thrusting you in to an overworld map would make the game feel jarring and unfocused but it has the opposite effect. The landscape feels like a living breathing world when you can see it from two angles. It is persistent and it's alive. Vehicles travel from area to area. Furthermore, you can tell that the next two levels are going to be ice-based by the simple fact that they are located on mountain tops. It makes the world feel bigger.

All along I believed that Super Mario 3 was the game that unearthed this oh so endeering innovation. But, all wikipedia searches and game history research seems to confirm that Bionic Commando's was the originator. Later games such as Mario 3 would perfect it. Rare's Donkey Kong Country would take the world map and slather a coat of pre-rendered CGI onto it making a blurry mess of confusion. Capcom later took the shooter's free roaming enemy trucks, one-screen layout, and upgradeable weapons and repackaged it as UN Squadron.