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Bionic Commando, Gyromite, and More! | Ranking the NES, Episode 23
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ส.ค. 2024
- Don't tell my Robot Operating Buddy that I'm doing this without him, OK? Let's check out one of the launch games for the platform, some big names, as well as a late-era game that I'd never even heard of. Peaks and valleys, baby. Peaks and valleys.
00:00:00 - Intro
00:05:40 - Gyromite
00:47:14 - Bionic Commando
01:52:47 - Taboo: The Sixth Sense
02:07:10 - Cowboy Kid
02:42:38 - Wizards & Warriors
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![Bionic Commando NES [Longplay]](/img/n.gif)
"Is Gyromite better than Dynowarz: Destruction of Spondylous?". God I love this series.
I look forward to these videos now every week, and they are definitely some of my favorite videos. It's a great way to kick back and start the weekend too.
This and basement brothers are my favorite weekend shows
Yeah, between this feature Gamesack and Techmoan Saturday night videos it gets me through 3 night 12hour shifts on the weekend.
Agreed- plus I’m looking forward to the next console series. It would be insane if he managed to get through every console in the 16-bit era too.
I don't expect him to ever have the time but with all Jeff knows about video games he could write one hell of a book on video game history. This video series and many other random moments show his incredible breath and depth of knowledge about video games and it is very entertaining.
When you love something as much as Jeff loves gaming holla at me.
Really cool to hear Jeff speak so passionately about Bionic Commando. That game rules
I replayed that part a few times.
Was quite fun watching Peanut Butter the Dog play in Rob's role for Gyromite at GDQ this week.
The world shook when he rated Bionic Commando! I felt it here! About a 6.7 on the Richter Scale!
that wiretapping thing in level 4 is you listening in as your allies lose a battle against the boss.
He did the thing! Spondylous!
This has become a series where I hit the “Like” button immediately before watching! Its been really interesting and fun so far, and as of late for me, even kinda relaxing…I’ve been dealing with a lot of stress and negative life stuff, so its helpful!
Oh boy…Taboo is on this week’s list…my friend had that game during his brief stint of collecting retro games a handful of years ago and we played it. It’s eerie accuracy with our results kinda freaked us out 😂
I agree. Even though we don’t often agree on the actual rankings on a lot of the games listening to Jeff talk about NES games is like ASMR to me. It’s relaxing
@@mr.serious2618 I think anyone talking about something you already enjoy/love will always put you at ease quicker than other subjects. 🙂
The moment Jeff said it was a masterpiece, it was the clear #1 for him. Every other game has its drawbacks when he is talking, but Bionic Commando gives Jeff a lot of joy it seems.
Jeff's constant disdain for any game that feels 'British' is always facinating in this series.
I don't think it's disdain? It's just that it's distinctive
Wizards and Warriors felt impenetrable the first time I rented it, but I eventually beat it on a second rental. I actually really like it despite it being really frustrating at the outset
"I actually really like it despite it being really frustrating at the outset" pretty much describes my relation with most of my favorite NES games.
Made me think of Nightshade for some reason
Happy to see that the immortal science of Jeff Gerstmann has placed Bionic Commando in its rightful spot.
You could tell within the first 30 seconds that Bionic Commando was going to rank super high. Anyone who can use the grappling hook confidently like that is going to love this game. It's an acquired taste but once you get it, you're good.
Wizards and Warriors has kind of a legendary status at my house. I was maybe 4 when I played it and my brother was 6 and stayed home sick from school when we rented it. I remember that game so insanely vividly its kind of comical. We still talk about how it took us 8 hours to beat. We remember it taking forever because it was the first time we ever left the house and our mom let us leave the game running so we could come back to it when we got back. The game isnt great but it remains one of my favorite gaming experiences with my brother. We kept trading turns when we died going back and forth until we beat it. The skeleton that starts a couple pixels tall and gets bigger each time you kill him in particular took us the longest to beat. I still love the game.
I've never been happier to hear Jeff praise a game. Bionic Commando is one of my all-time favorites.
Every time I replayed Bionic Commando it would take me a while to get used to not being able to jump in a platformer.
The use of black in the background and the sprite design definitely give Wizards & Warrior the look of something that people who'd worked on Spectrum games designed.
Only a 7th of the library done!
I thought the US had well under 1000 licensed and unlicensed NES tapes. Are you referencing the Famicom total?
@@funforalgernon no i just cant do math
I definitely didn't understand Bionic Commando when I was a kid, and it bothered me because I could see there was something cool going on there beyond its seeming inscrutability. I finally gave it an honest shot several years back and wound up impressed despite not finishing it.
That first take on the sign off catchphrase was hilarious
"Bosses are not that challenging" yet in Bionic Commando I watched him defeat a boss room in about 2.5 seconds with a bazooka lol
My favorite weekly video gaming stream returns!
I could listen to the Gyromite score on loop for hours.
50:00 When he fades out and comes back in, it's when MA-1 is switched with the exact double, but that wasn't revealed until Bionic Commando Solid 5.
Would a modern day Bionic Commando Collection similar to the TMNT Cowabunga Collection be a good idea? I say yes!
Instead of remastering the remaster of The Last Of Us, they should remaster the PS3 3D Bionic Commando and the two Rearmed games
Jeff got that good smoke
i always look forward to these, but especially today i just got back from having all my wisdom teeth taken out, watching jeff science these old games while i sip soup, thanks jeff!
One of the fun parts of watching these is keeping track what game is just about to fall out of the top 100
I love this series. I hope we get to look back on it while we wait for the next episode of Ranking of Fighters 2.0 No Stems No Seeds Edition.
I played Wizards and Warriors for the first time with a friend not many months back. The first level felt rough and I wasn't so sure I was going to stick with it, but something about that old PC game mystery it's got going for it won me over and we ended up beating it in one sitting. Treating the jump as the main mode of attack did a lot for playability. There was one boss rather late in the game that split in two every time you took down its life meter, which was kind of neat conceptually and graphically but also incredibly frustrating as it was about three times as difficult as anything else in the game. Apart from that encounter and the absurdity of the game discarding old items before you know what newitem you're getting I found it unexpectedly painless.
AWWW YISS ITS THAT TIME OF THE WEEK AGAIN ❤
Weirdly I don't think you can fully understand just how good Bionic Commando is unless you play the remake, Rearmed. Rearmed is undeniably (scientifically?) brilliant. The movement feels incredible. You end up getting so comfortable with the swinging that you can pull off some crazy stunts/saves with the grapple arm. You feel like an absolute badass. Then you go back to the NES version and realize you can pull off a lot of the same moves and it blows your mind how good the original was and still is.
It took me a couple minutes to notice the graphic changing in the upper right hand corner, and for a second I thought I was losing my goddamned mind.
I remember some of Jeff's streams from when he was still at GB where something like that took up about a fourth of the screen, it was funny to see it back here in reduced form.
Just started the stream but saw Bionic Commando is on the menu for this fridays programming.
I am a little younger than Jeff per deduction of info he has given in the past.
However I am old enough to say my first console was the Atari 5200 and the Commodore 64 getting my NES in 87 or early 88 so orange action set later. today I own everythingfeom 2600 to NES to Mega SG and SNES NT to Dreamcast and Vita.
Anyway before i wander to much back to BC. I struggke whem someone asks me what my favorite game of all time is. Sometimes its Ski3s of arcadia in my gut, sometimes its FF7, or Pitfall 2, sometimes its Castlvania 3 but, mostly and since the first time I finished the game i think of my baby brain loving the stoey the world and feel of BC once you master it and i remember all this time Bionic Commando in reality and real number one on my list and heart.
Im preparring myself for Jeffs liki g of the game but in Mid enthusiasm. Jeff i cant wait to see your experiment and test to find out what the science says about Capcoms NES Bionic Commando that has treated me so fine for so long.
Oh then there was Grins remake of the OH BC so good.
The soundtrack for it. Holy sheeeet mang. Now its a banger and a spotify and YT saved nessecity when needing my ear is hungry
Hugs and high fives Mr Gerstman. Thabks for all the content ive consum3d since 2009. All the best to you the Spouse and the kids!😂
A man and his dog ran Gyromite at Games Done Quick esrlier this week! It was really cool.
I've never played Wizards and Warriors or seen it in my life but during the bat corridor I kept shouting "jump up into the bats with your sword, Jeff! Stab them from below! JUMP"
great thumbnail
Yeah Bionic commando I loved so much, but as a kid I only really played like 2 levels :P I couldn't figure out how to do anything, but the game was so interesting to me
One day when I was about 5, a neighbour kid just gave me Wizards & Warriors and Thrilla's Surfari. I remember the first three levels of each perfectly
Cowboy Kid was called Western Kid in Japan. I was totally hoping for a Kurosawa/Leonne situation where they ported a Japanese samurai property into a western.
Love that lil' intro tune to W&W, reminds me of Bach
I know it's not even in this episode, but you said Solomon's Key is awesome and you are right. It is unbelievable how hard the last few levels are tho.
At first I was mildly not impressed seeing THE NEW #1 but then I remember the ending.
Man the music in gyromite is heckin great
I feel like Bionic Commando is a perfect level of Contra-shooter and Simon's-Quest-Awkwardness that gives you a shooter that you dont beat in the first weekend you own it. I played Bionic Commando at least a half-dozen times as a 8-10 year old kid but dont think I ever once figured out how to get to and destroy even the first core. Even being that bad/dumb, I still held it as a favorite NES game cause I had so much fun swinging around, killing enemies until I got stuck at the pitch-black level.
Makes sense it goes #1.
If you like the Gyromite music, you might enjoy an Electroplankton stream.
Bionic Commando was a formative game of my youth, in that I could ALWAYS play it until I beat it, and it never got old. Plus the satisfaction of blowing up Hitlers head was like candy for my brain.
Bionic commando was amazing. I remember getting to the final boss, only to fail that final hit timing that screwed you over. Such a great game, but fuck that fire level and final helicopter shot.
For sure.. I was lucky enough to hit the shot my first time and it felt amazing, but I can't imagine how bad it would feel to mess it up
Apparently you do get a gun in the second stage of Cowboy Kid.
Gyromite might have been the first game I played on our NES. We got the ROB deluxe set when it came out so I was like 4 years old.
It's weird, but I love thinking about the 100 spot, and how every week the level of quality for what defines a Top 100 NES game changes. (Congrats to Gyromite)
wizards and warriors WAS a legendary game, and im not even sure i can articulate why. It just had a really cool sense of exploration and adventure, seemingly in spite of its very basic, janky + just plain bad controls. It was loaded with secrets, and very little is explained, you just figure stuff out by doing it, and doing it wrong. but it wasn't THAT punishing to fail, either, iirc you could infinitely continue your way through. And the magic weapons and equipment all felt really cool. The second game, Ironsword, was even cooler with all the weird elemental bosses and themed stages, plus building the titular sword as you went. The third game was truly mythical in my mind, it HAD to be AMAZING! I heard it had a class system! but I never got to play it back then, and IIRC going back to it with an emulator it was incredibly disappointing, IDK will have to see when you get there. Even now, I recognize it's not a great game, but it's still very cool to me. Old medieval fantasy stuff like this is still my favorite genre / setting.
Watching Bionic Commando just makes me want to crank up the ReArmed soundtrack until someone calls the cops!
EDIT: My Bionic Commando memories are how effectively I thought it portrayed the sense of scale and the real sense of tension in some of the swings that have to be made. Once I made it to the top of some of the levels, it actually felt like I had climbed a fifty story structure, and there are a lot of leaps of faith in this game that feel so damn good when you land them. Thanks for playing it.
Wizards and Warriors isn't a great game but it's the first game I beat in my life and I was 6 at the time, so I will always have a massive soft spot for it.
Bionic Commando is still so fantastic. BC Rearmed smooths the presentation nicely but is the same game underneath. BCR2 didn’t work as well because it didn’t have the fantastic NES OG template to work from.
The ‘09 (Arm Origin Story) game still has the best 3D grappling/web slinging ever.
BC my top pick for best NES game. Megaman wishes he was that Rad.
In short,
Bionic Commando Forever.
Shoutout to the Apple employee looking at the checkout metrics wondering who clicked off when the delivery date changed and why they needed a Vision Pro so urgently, but only in February
Get it together Gerstmann, this is no way to run a military organization!
This is currently my favorite TH-cam show, thank you for doing this. Also you are dead on about “wizards and warriors” the controls are absolute garbage but the game itself is cool.
Gyromite has great music!
52:28 He was not there, but a door was. Pretty mean design :P
I always thought it was odd that Gyromite's been sort of memory-holed. Professor Hector's shown up in a few games over the years, but I wanna play as a radish monster in Mario Kart.
This was a nice little group of games...though I would use "game" in the loosest sense of the word for Taboo. Whatever *that* is.
I also, like many others, struggled with the controls of Wizards & Warriors back in the good old days. Don't ever think I got past the point you stopped at. I also watched gameplay videos with R.O.B. being used in Gyromite and Stack-Up. Cool concept seeing it in action (I grew up with the Power Pad bundle with the triple cart so I had World Class Track Meet instead of Gyromite), but I don't think I possess the patience to ever actually use it that way. That robot is sloooooooowwwwww.
Cowboy Kid is neat. It's a reskin of a Goemon game since hardly anybody knew what that was in 1991. A cart of Cowboy Kid will set you back a cool $300 on eBay.
Bionic Commando being #1 is...debatable. Hell of a game, no doubt. One of the best NES games? Absolutely. Better than Contra? That all depends on if someone wants a straightforward action game where you just blow a bunch of shit up from point A to point B or something with more thought, depth, and complexity. Kind of an apples and oranges argument there. I would personally take River City Ransom over both, I think. BARF!!
i'll also imagine Takeshi's Challenge and Super Monkey Daikoben at the bottom along with the mahjong games
Bionick Commando at number 1 is quite bold. He must really have fond memories of it. My top 10 would pretty much go with the conventional games ( Castlevania / Megaman /Mario Bros / Punchout / Contra / Dragon warriors or Final Fantasy / Metroid etc. )
Than again i am no scientist so what do i know.
We got a later NES, it came with the triple game single cart of Mario, Duck Hunt (w/ zapper) and World Class Track Meet (w/ running pad). This is the first I’ve ever seen Gyromite actually played and I gotta say… not what I expected from a robot peripheral game. It does feel very Nintendo though.
43:09 everybody drink, he said it.
Contra is like a grilled cheese. It's simple and delicious. Bionic Commando is a fucking patty melt in a NY Diner. Possibly the greatest sandwich ever made by man.
Bionic Commando was great, but I never actually legit beat it. Always respected what it was aiming for. More than you can say for a bunch of NES hard games back in the day.
Something else I'm noticing with Gyromite that makes it easier than Lode Runner, and I think this would make it easier no matter which way you play it: the enemies don't respawn! Lode Runner barely gave you any moments of relief before the enemies came back into the game, and that was typical of so many single-screen puzzle games of the era (I'm also thinking of the absolutely horrendous enemy respawning in NES BurgerTime). With Gyromite, Nintendo clearly wanted to make something more kid-friendly and toned the difficulty down, or maybe this was also a way to account for the problems inherent in using ROB as a control method.
Never heard of Cowboy Kid. It's got a weird Goemon-esque thing going on in town but with other weird stuff going on elsewhere... It's interesting but is it good?
Good find.
Holy shit! Bionic Commando ftw.
BC was a constant rental back then, it was so intriguing and different. Taking away the jump and forcing you to figure out how to move with this new thing, kinda linear-not-linear, clue searching, upgrades etc. It's very comparable to Rygar and Metroid and moved Adventure games forward just like 'em (yeah, I expect Metroid to top this list eventually.)
Love the science, but man, you can be so precise and use the secondary weapons in Wizards way more than was showcased here. It deserved better!
Anyone interested, there is a ROM hack that removes all the censorship from the US version of Bionic Commando, and also
changes some of the dialogue
Before knowing Rare made it, I could tell by the UI that Wizards and Warriors was very British. Something about it just smacks of Amiga or Zeddex or whatever they have over there.
Audibly saying "whoa!" when Bionic Commando took #1 made me realize how much more I care about this list than any organized sport.
Cowboy Kid is like the Goemon games.
Bionic Commando in 1988 was amazing. So amazing that 'rearmed' was released 20 years later and held up well as an arcade title. So well that it inspired a rearmed sequel 3 years later, thus proving the science.
Jeff wins this one. Sorry contra fans.
There has to be a video of someone playing Gyromite with the Rob. It sounds Robdiculous
Has somebody made lyrics for the Bionic Commando theme song?
Jeff would it be possible to get the chat in futer wpisodes incuded to see. Be interesting for those whonhave to see the YT ver. At another time.
Thx
1:11:44 "Look at these fucking nazis" fucking kills me every time 🤣
Pretty sure Rock "The Dwayne" Johnson already gave us the best sign off of all time.
Bionic Commando over Super Mario 3 though, can't wait to find out, doc
SPONDEELOOS
I've never had the opportunity to play with a robotic operating buddy, but I get the impression that it would be very tedious.
Oh we did. For hours back in the day. It was soooooo sloooooooooow.
The Contra In Your Head: And Other False Gods
have ya'll heard of this nintendo entertainment system?
I trust the science but not sure on Taboo, if I were alone on a desert island with a NES and I could only play one game, Circus Caper or Taboo, I'd choose Circus Caper.
Was knockback a mistake? Are there games that it improves?
Boy, Taboo is quite the Title/start screen to actual content come down.
How many games would you trade to Klaus for Professor Hectors Radish Adventure?
If you think Cowboy Kid was some reskin of a Japanese game, then apparently the game is somehow inspired by the Ganbare Goemon series, especially first two Famicom games, although not developed by Konami.
Hi Jeff ❤️
Cannot people disagreed with the science.
Bionic Commando is the best game on the NES. I said it.
Surely not when Zelda and Super Mario Bros 3 exist
@@vizuz you make a great argument.
The Legend of Zelda is far and away the best game on the nes. It's the best game by quite a wide margin. It absolutely is on a different level than Bionic commando.
There's a certain game today whose ranking made me go "fucking what?!?" But hey, that game's quite alright.
"We made this game, called Wizards & Warriors, innit. It's shit, it's supposed to be shit, and if you don't like it, there's the door."
The bionic comando bird looks like the contra bird. Whats up with that?