Late last night, I was sitting in my library, enjoying a nice cup of earl grey tea, a pipe, and the day's copy of The Times. It was the first night of autumn cool enough for a fire and I’d brought one to a crackling burn in my home’s blackened hearth. The evening was a picture of utter tranquility, the sort of convalescence one scoffs at in youth and longs for later in life when a day’s labors start to take their toll. But it was around 10pm when this harmony was shattered! My lover, Bionic Commando, burst into the room wailing, tears streaming from its eyes, its heavenly façade twisted and mangled by anguish!
“My love, what ever is the matter?” I asked, alarmed.
“It’s that awful man from the Sunburnt Country! He called me such terrible things!”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand, dearest. Who is this rogue who dared question your honor?”
“You know. Benjamin Croshaw. Yahtzee. The videogame critic from the island of convicts who walks about in a Justin Timberlake hat. He makes his trade nattering on about obese fellows being silly for liking terrible entertainments. Like me! Oh!” Bionic Commando swooned, its clawed hand against its forehead.
“And what did the uncouth bastard say about you?” I asked. I could feel a heat prickling about my neck and cheeks that did not come from the fire.
“He said I’m console-stompingly frustrating! An archaic nothing made only for nostalgia’s sake who arbitrarily extends play through broken platforming mechanics. He said my controls were installed by someone reading the instructions upside down. Darling, he said I was old, fat, and wrinkly!”
Bionic Commando ran from the room, sobbing. My tea had grown cold. How dare he. Bionic Commando is a vision, a treasured paragon of tight rules and lusciously precise gameplay that has endured for two decades. Nostalgia may reign for trollops like Battletoads, but my Bionic Commando is as pure a game as Pac-man, an ageless bit of programming as entertaining today as it was in years passed thanks to fundamental quality, not its association with some fool’s salad days.
I write this from aboard a sturdy ship, The Radd Spenceria, sailing west across the pacific. I carry only this journal, a pistol, and my love on this journey. I do not know what I will do when I encounter this Croshaw, but I fear that I will no longer be able to be called a gentleman in polite society.
…
Yeah. Right. Anyway, my personal life aside, Zero Punctuation is particularly amusing this week. I’d never actually try to pick apart Yahtzee’s criticisms of a given game. The man’s a humorist first and a critic second, and he’s damn good at his job. You don’t tell the clown he looks stupid and expect him to take you seriously. But I will say that this is the second recent episode of Zero Punctuation (the other being his Soul Calibur IV video) that makes peculiar claims as to what does and does not make a game good. Just because something is old, this doesn’t mean it’s broken. Saying Bionic Command is inferior to modern games because its controls work differently than the Mario- platforming-standard is like saying chess is worse than checkers because it’s older and the pieces have more complicated moves. Bionic Commando, as a set of rules you must follow by performing actions to achieve a goal, works. It’s a stark contrast compared to other beloved old games like, say, Star Tropics, a game whose controls occasionally just don’t respond to your actions. But I digress. Check out the episode below and head over to The Escapist for more.