Bio Menace

Piccola nota introduttiva: più di 20 anni fa, nel pieno dell’era dei giochi dell’Apogee (che avevo tutti rigorosamente in versione shareware) questo gioco è stato uno dei pochi ai quali non sono mai riuscito a giocare, per un semplice, bastardo, subdolo motivo: nel livello del “bosco”, mi crashava al prompt e mi diceva che mancava memoria EMS disponibile. E per quanto armeggiassi al config.sys e all’autoexec.bat, non riuscivo MAI ad arrivare al valore che richiedeva (che era altissimo, praticamente voleva tutta l’EMS per sè). Adesso però, grazie alle “magie” di DosBox, posso avere tutta la memoria che voglio, e quindi ho preso l’occasione al balzo per recuperare finalmente questa perla degli anni ‘90. Questo platform è, senza ombra di dubbio, uno dei migliori del suo genere e, con grosse probabilità, uno dei migliori in assoluto dell’Apogee. Nel gioco impersonerete l’agente Snake Logan, il classico tizio cazzuto che deve, rigorosamente da solo, salvare il mondo dal classico genio del male che ha creato un’orda di mostri assassini e vuole distruggere tutto e tutti - un classico stra-abusato, non si sono certo scervellati più di tanto nel creare la trama. X-D Ciò invece in cui si sono veramente impegnati è tutto il resto: il gioco è fluido e veloce, il level design è bellissimo, la sfida è appagante (oddio, a “Hard” anche piuttosto frustrante, specie in alcuni frangenti, ma del resto questo è un aspetto comune di molti videogiochi di allora). Entrando nel dettaglio, Snake è più simile a Duke Nukem che non a Super Mario: i nemici si sconfiggono sparandogli, e non saltandogli in testa. Il nostro protagonista è dotato di base di mitra con una scarsa cadenza di fuoco ma, tramite appositi bonus, si possono ottenere munizioni al plasma, esplosive o fuoco rapido. Nei livelli si possono inoltre trovare granate esplosive, incendiarie e mine di prossimità, utilissime per superare situazioni altrimenti troppo ostiche da affrontare. È bene notare che NON è possibile cambiare tra un tipo di arma da fuoco ed un’altra, così come cambiare tipologia di bomba, cosa che rende sì il gioco più immediato, ma anche meno tattico da affrontare - in particolar modo le mine, che hanno un’utilità situazionale, vi capiterà in alcuni frangenti di “sprecarle” pur di riguadagnare l’accesso alle granate. I nemici contro cui dovrete riversare tutta questa potenza di fuoco sono uno dei punti di forza del gioco: sono variegati, cattivi e piuttosto caratteristici. Vi capiterà spesso di lanciare imprecazioni perché vi colpiranno e uccideranno perché siete stati troppo precipitosi, avete analizzato male una situazione o, più semplicemente, perché i programmatori non vi avranno garantito una vita facile, ma l’essere “sotto tensione” è una delle caratteristiche del gioco. Ogni tot di livelli dovrete affrontare una boss fight - cosa che, mi duole dirlo, sono uno dei punti deboli del gioco. I boss in sè sono anche belli, ma più che l’abilità del giocatore richiedono di trovare il punto dove i programmatori hanno posizionato power up e granate per permettervi di nuclearizzarli rapidamente, magari da un punto di vantaggio posizionato ad hoc. Per quanto riguarda il resto, il gioco presenta un level design impeccabile: i livelli si sviluppano in larghezza e altezza, e sono assolutamente pieni di posti da esplorare, situazioni variegate da affrontare, pericoli da evitare, bonus da raccogliere (la maggior parte dei quali celati dietro a porte che richiedono una chiave per essere aperte) e segreti a iosa da trovare (addirittura livelli bonus). Il vostro scopo in ogni livello è, tendenzialmente, sempre quello di trovare l’uscita e un prigioniero da salvare - per poter raggiungere questo scopo spesso dovrete trovare dei cristalli speciali che vi permetteranno di avere l’accesso a sezioni altrimenti bloccate dei livelli (trova la chiave A per aprire la porta A che vi farà trovare la chiave B ecc.. ecc.. un classico tra i classici). Concludendo… un assoluto must have, una perla del passato che, sinceramente, non sfigura neanche nel presente.

The first episode is good, but after that this simple Apogee platformer really dips in quality.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ A lot of people go shopping on Steam for new age “retro” games...Which I always thought was silly, since Steam offers many actual retro games. Growing up I had a “shareware” disc, which for any of you old enough to know...Is essentially a disc companies would release with usually the first mission, or chapter of a game for free, like a demo. Then if you wanted the rest of the game, you would call and order it...As opposed to now where most companies want you to pay $150 for a collector's edition of a game that there's a media blackout on and review embargos on...My how times have changed! In any respect, once upon a time there was a company called Apogee. Which made games that I always found extremely enjoyable. I'd always equivocated Apogee games to having their own unique charm, like Rare or Capcom, you always knew when a game was made by one of those companies. This game was one of many charming and fun games on Apogees shareware disc that I never thought I would get the chance to play the full version of. This game is fun. It's challenging. Even to this day, it's a more complete and enjoyable experience than many of the modern “retro” games offered. You can't really go wrong getting this game, especially for the price. It's a side scrolling shooter, with various weapons, power ups, sidearms, enemies and bosses. While also requiring you to find things in the levels such as keys or power cards to open certain doors and progress. It's just straight fun.

One of the greatest games from my childhood and it's still great! Back when games were not easily defeated on 1 go, but actually punished you for dying.. you'd have to start the whole level over and that was only possible if you had remembered to save the game!

Un juego super clasico, esta tal cual como lo recuerdo me encanta

Oh, hey yet another game that just isn't available on the Steam store anymore for some reason. Oh well. Anyway, I may as well leave a review... I played through the first episode of three, which took about an hour, I got the gist of it. I did enjoy what I played though. Honestly I had never really heard of Bio Menace before, but I found it in my Steam Library, so I must have bought it at some point, and it's kind of neat. It's a side-scrolling action game. I'm not really sure what to liken it to, but it feels a lot like a Duke Nukem game - except here your guy is named Snake Logan, which I guess is... a combination of Kurt Russell's character from Escape from New York, and, Wolverine? I don't know. There's no adamantium claws or melee weapons even in this game, so who knows. The controls are like really simple, intuitive, the game scrolls really nicely and plays pretty well for a game of this era, I think. You get SHOOT which is control, and then JUMP which is left alt. And then you can move with the arrow keys and throw grenades with, either shoot + up, or just the ENTER key. Sounds a little weird but it's really not that bad. I was in a somewhat cautious mood upon looking at the difficulty selection, so I opted to play on easy. I beat the episode without game overing once, but that was only because I found a secret level that gave me like 7 extra lives. One level in particular, called Elevator or Elevators, is just nothing but a series of platforms that go up and down, and if you fall you instantly die and lose a life. It's also the only level where I had trouble actually with platforms being finicky too, so I ended up losing like 3 lives in as many seconds at one point just because I'd go to hop to a ledge and then fall through it or slip off it somehow. The enemy AI can be kinda rude at times, since certain enemies will camp ladders, but I only noticed that being a problem in the first level. Other than that, they have pretty set patterns which I think is a good thing overall since it lets you come up with strategies to fight them, and since they aren't overly complex, they're not too challenging or frustrating to deal with. I am okay with this. It reminds me of Doom, and the guy who designed this game, Jim Norwood, I think he did a good job basically coming up with a few different types of enemies to throw at you in each level, so there's even some decent enemy variety. Overall though, despite all of this, the game is not too challenging - except for the fact that you do kind of have to just take hits sometimes. There are many parts of later levels where you kind of just have to take a hit, and while some sections are very generous with medkits, there are some that are pretty stingy. The door and key system is an interesting one. So basically every level has so many doors that you can walk up to and unlock with keys. Keys are just all over the place, usually just floating in the air 'around' almost strewn haphazardly. Every door pretty much has points in it, except for a couple that have items you need to progress. This probably should be something I dislike, but I had absolutely no problems because I pretty much always had enough keys to open doors. I was really happy with the level layouts in this game. I don't know if it's the best level design I've ever seen, really, it's not THAT great, but everything is very orthodox and makes sense - you go down a side route, you get rewarded. There's a long route to the end, it has a key in one of the last doors at the end so you can go back and use the key to progress or exit the level. You see the objective (rescue the hostage, one per stage) at the beginning of the level, you thus have to explore until you find the key to rescue them, and then you can leave. It's all pretty classic stuff, and I was very happy with that. I also liked to see the 'secret levels' thing. The game has absolutely no problem with just giving you access to secret levels that give you truckloads of points and tons of extra lives and stuff, they really do feel like rewards and even though you probably really don't care about points or whatever, extra lives are definitely nice to have. I like seeing developers kinda splurge on players in this way, because it's fun. Speaking of, let's talk about weapons. So you start off with what I will just call the peashooter, since it's clearly that type of starter gun where you can hammer the shoot button to shoot, it doesn't have autofire and it does paltry damage, but it has infinite ammo so you can plink away at enemies all you want. Then there's the machine gun I guess, which gives you autofire and about 100 bullets. Then there's the plasma gun, which has 20 shots and does big damage and interestingly can destroy a couple annoying enemies bullets can't. And finally, in the last couple levels you can find the 'super gun' that has like 90 bullets I think, but does apparently 5 times the normal shot damage. Then there's grenades, flame grenades(?) and then landmines which I personally don't usually like, but they turned out to be okay in this game, for the most part it seemed like they only give you the mines when you are fighting enemies you would want to kill with mines, and you get the other grenades whenever it would make sense. Not a giant plethora of weapons, but it's enough, and they are all useful whenever you find them. It really felt to me that there was a lot in common with Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem 3D in this game... your guy's plane got shot down, Snake is fighting weird alien-looking creatures, just like Duke Nukem, I don't know if they are literally aliens but they sure look like it, there's button combinations you have to press in order to open doors, usually secret doors that give you big loot, the final boss even says "it's down to you and me" which, Duke Nukem himself literally says at the conclusion of DN3D, to the Cycloid Emperor. There's also the sewers, which Duke Nukem has a glut of, and the keycards, and you're playing a kind of tough action man type of guy. Anyway, I was surprised that I quite enjoyed Bio Menace. Aside from the Elevators level, it was pretty decent. Certainly not the BEST game I've ever played, really, but it was an alright kinda game. I really liked how smooth it felt to control, shooting felt good, and all the power-ups and weapons you can find were fun to use.

Fun game with a very strong Retro-charm, although a bit hard to beat. I enjoyed it.