Fret not! We contacted Capcom, who told us: "We're slow to update our press site. It's just the first six months of 2009 at the moment. Definitely not the latter Winter."

The game's producer, Ben Judd, also confirmed that the game will not be released Winter 2009, adding that it will be out "sooner than that." He also explained the shuffle, saying, "We wanted to spead out some of the titles and BC (which is pretty much close to an original game since it doesn't have as much name brand value as SF or RE) was too close to the heavy-hitters. It's going to hit a little later but not anything like winter."

Yeah, sure. I mean, we've already got action figures and a comic book; movies are a definite possibility. Capcom are active IP holders, they do a lot of turning stuff into movies, so...yeah.

Far from a done deal, sure, but not far enough to stop you coming up with ridiculous casting ideas.

It's a game that's been done by a Japanese publisher so even though it's doing extremely well, that information hasn't really sunk in to their side. It'll be interesting to see what happens with Mega Man 9. That right there could set our internal strategy. If the Mega Man 9 stuff is successful we might see more retro games like that. But if ultimately Rearmed is more successful, they could come back and say 'people really want these high def, high quality remixes, they don't want just the old stuff'. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Sure we can find room in our hearts - and our wallets - for both styles of re-release, Capcom.

Bionic Commando Interview [Videogamer] [Image]

I liked Metal Gear Solid 4, with the exception of the story. I like Kojima's stories, but they keep getting longer and longer. He needs to put the clamps on himself and only give himself 30 minutes. If he did that I'm sure they'd be fantastic.

So it seems Judd thinks Kojima needs either an editor or the ability to show self-restraint. Agree? Disagree? Oh! Judd also weighs in on that "easy as hell" game BioShock. That, after the jump:

BioShock was easy as Hell, I don't care what anybody says. That's what people want. They want to play through it. They want to die once or twice. It's like an interactive movie, sort of. Gamers have lost their will to continually drill down on something. It's also the fault of the developers. If you make enough restart points; if you make it so that if you die you can restart and retry without having to go back for an hour, which is not the right way to do it, I think people will keep trying something.

Bionic Commando Interview [Videogamer]

While I have to admit, throwing out a number like 100,000 seemed pretty overzealous after seeing how hard digital titles are to sell, I still hoped we could reach that lofty goal. Boy, did I miss the mark.

7 days — over 130,000 units.

Holy fiddlesticks!

That may not seem impressive compared to package titles that sell in the millions but compared to other digital titles that is a friggin JUGGERNAUT!

...Consumers voted with their dollars. They basically have sent the message loud and clear:

We are tired of meta-emulated crap.
We want the titles of yesteryear to be paid the proper respect.
We want them done right.
And if the price is right, we'll buy.

That's a nice message, you know. Hopefully other developers are, you know, listening.

BC Weekly Field Report: #12 [Bionic Commando]

We still have a fucking ace up our sleeve. It's an ace, a fucking ace... At TGS (Tokyo Game Show), the Capcom booth stage is going to make people's balls pucker up. It's going to be big.

When questioned further, Judd would not reveal what this ace was. Wonder what Capcom still has left to announce for Bionic Commando...

Thanks Jon for the iPhone pic!

I can give you a song and dance about PC digital content being more expensive as a general rule... but nobody wants to hear that crap. I can say this: for the PC version we are planning on uploading some additional PC-only challenge rooms via a free patch so you will get more bang for your buck.

There you have it. More buck, yes, but also more bang.

BC Weekly Field Report: #10 [Capcom]

We couldn't get it approved for the Virtual Console...I can't say why. I can just say that we tried to get it to work.

Is it the Nazi thing? The exploding head thing? Who knows, could have been both, could be neither!

Capcom's Ben Judd Interview [1UP]

Bionic Commando Rearmed available for download in N. America on Aug. 13/14 [Capcom] [Pic]

プレイステーション3、Xbox 360版ともに配信日は未定 [Famitsu Thanks, Josef!] [Pic]

I know that once something hits the net it can be pirated very easily but I hope you can see the amount of time and money we have put forth to make this a reality. Just so that you don't see us as the evil corporation that is rolling in money and sticking it to the end-user, let me break down some costs:

We are charging 99 cents per song of which we usually make about 60% or so. That's 60 cents. Additionally there are server management fees, the internal staff hours it took to get the contract up and running, and of course a license fee to create the initial contract. All in all, it probably costs us around 10K just to get the product up and running. We would need to sell 15,000 songs to break even and when it comes to game soundtracks that just isn't a number that you can easily hit.

Odds are we will take a loss.

But still, I believe in the music. I believe in making it available to the fans. And I believe that you can't always look at the bottom line (although my boss disagrees).

Hates the money, loves the fans. That's nice.

BCR Music [Bionic Commando Thanks, Daniel!]

The vast majority of Japanese devs have an arcade background, and if an arcade game is going to be a hit, it needs to work, it needs to be tight and snap. If you put in a coin in a buggy game that locks up or freaks out, you'll complain to the arcade manager, who will then complain to his boss, who will then complain to his boss, who will complain to that game's publisher. Shit's gotta work. While the arcade scene is very much alive in Japan, it's not in the States, and most developers are coming in with a strong PC gaming background. If shit's broken, patch, patch, patch! "Japanese games have very few collision problems — hands, arms going through walls, etc," says Capcom producer and former localization head Ben Judd. "When western gamers see in-game collision issues, they don't care as long as they're having a good time. That's just not acceptable for the Japanese." Things like A.I. and programming is where Western devs really shine, while Japan picks up the slack on things like textures.

Other things that separate Western and Japanese games, points out Judd, include such seemingly small things like "Japanese player typically don't like controlling two thumbsticks are once — they get sick" and "Japanese players like a strong tutorial." Japanese players, says Judd, prefer that characters are skewed slightly younger and have more anime-style qualities, while Western gamers favor 30 year-old bald men. "RPGs are popular," says Judd. "Players don't typically like the first person point of view and want to see their character. It makes it easier for them to support that character." No wonder Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto has found a welcome audience in Japan.

While Japanese games have been localized to varying degrees of success on a consistent basis since the early-to-mid 1980s, Western games, save for the oddity here or there, haven't. This is nothing new, and Capcom has been bringing Western games over to The Land of the Rising Sun for sometime, even working with Blizzard to localized Warcraft III. "But it wasn't until GTA III that the company really saw the potential of Western games," says Judd. Even though a heavily censored GTA III was slapped with a dreaded CERO Z rating (the equivalent of ESRB AO), the game was a hit, fueled by US hyper carry-over as well as controversy in Japan. San Andreas moved something like 500,000 copies! Just as there are Western gamers who salivate at the idea of grinding through Japan-Only RPGs, there are Japanese gamers who cannot wait to tear through BioShock or Halo 3. Thing is, there doesn't seem to be as many of these Japanese gamers...

For Judd and his team, the challenge is selling Bionic Commando, a game developed by Swedes and clearly geared for a Western audience. One reason that game is getting made is because Western journos kept harping on a new Bionic Commando during Capcom press events and interviews! The original game, Top Secret: Hilter no Fukkatsu (Top Secret: The Return of Hitler) wasn't a huge arcade or home hit in Japan, but the NES console port with its endearingly cruddy English localization became a cult hit. "For the Xbox Live Arcade and the PSN Bionic Commando, the question has been how much to push Hitler," says Judd. "People in Japan know Hitler no Fukkatsu more than Top Secret or Bionic Commando." Then again, while releasing a Hilter game for the Famicom was apparently totally fine in the 1980's, it's not in today's world. Instead of releasing a Hilter no Fukkatsu remake on the Japanese PSN and XBLA, Capcom's releasing a re-localized version of the localized Bionic Commando remake. While Judd is fairly confident that Bionic Commando: Rearmed will do will with Western gamers, he's upfront about how it'll do in The Land of the Rising Sun. "Bionic Commando: Rearmed will have a tough time in Japan," says Judd.

"We don't really have a team in place to localize English games," says Capcom's Gearoid Reidy. "We're either outsourcing games we're publishing like GTA or God of War to be localized or trying to tie-up loose ends in-house." Capcom is staffed with a team of native English speakers like Reidy and Judd who are both fluent in English and Capcom and who have extensive experience in localization. What about vice versa? Besides Japanese staffers who are proficient in English, there isn't a dedicated in-house team of Japanese native speakers acting as translators. That's not to say the outsourcing firm does shoddy work, that's not to say that at all. The outsourcing firm has handled most of Capcom's Japan English game releases. "The problem is that there's a delay," points out Reidy. "Since they are outsourced, it takes a bit longer than if we had an in-house team doing English-to-Japanese translation." Judd would like to create a team of Japanese native speakers doing translation work in-house. "It really depends whether these games are successful or not," he says. With Capcom publishing Grand Theft Auto IV in Japan later this year, there's a pretty good chance they will be.

Translating is hard. Translating English to Japanese is harder. "You can't do direct one-to-one translations," says Tokyo-based localizer Matt Alt, who has his own localization company AltJapan. "You often have to capture the spirit of the original text." Programming-wise, changing English text into Japanese text can be tricky. "I've really come to hate the Japanese language," says Judd, who's not only a Capcom producer, but a licensed Japanese language teacher. "There are no breaks between words in Japanese," he explains. All Japanese words are mashed together, making breaking up in-game Bionic Commando text tricky. In English, text can easily broken up by spaces, but Capcom has had to go back and create a special program for breaking up the Japanese in-game text. "We've spent a lot of money on coding the Japanese text alone."

Some games just should not be dubbed. Besides the difficulty of matching up the character's lips, sometimes dubbing just doesn't fit. Take SEGA's localization of Yakuza, for example. That game needed subtitles. American voice actors trying to pass off as yakuza just sounds strange! Bionic Commando will not be dubbed for Japan. "Some titles," says Judd, "the Japanese just don't want the language changed." Shit Japanese Western game dubs become the object of ridicule for the Japanese internet. Who wants to hear cutesy anime voice actors try to act like badasses? Nobody! Bionic Commando will be subtitled in English. Besides, when you're looking at selling 100,000 Bionic Commando copies in Japan (as Capcom is doing) and you're consumers are Japanese gamers with a thing for Western games, what's the point of dubbing, really?

Even if the game is localized correctly, the Japanese market is tough to crack. "Japanese companies don't even know what'll be hits here," says Reidy. "Who saw Nintendogs or Monster Hunter and thought those games would be hits?" Some publishers feel that it's a market that needs pandering to. "Consumers need to know what they're buying," says Judd. So when Crackdown is given anime-style style poster art, it's not exactly a fair description of what's in the box and reeks of 1980's style game promotion. While Western publishers take advantage of things like podcasts and blogs, those really have not caught on in Famitsu-press-release-fed Japan. Bionic Commando has a Japanese blog, but it's updated only once a week. If users have any questions, their identity is censored by Capcom for privacy concerns and only their sterile question appears before developers to answer, creating a very sterile community interaction. Judd explains: "In Japan, we can't do community. It's considered a liability here." There are too many unknowns with community sites. What if an employee says or does something stupid? The lack of direct corporate control is dangerous. "We just waiting for Capcom to drop the hammer on our podcast," says Judd. "Lucky they don't speak English." Lucky, indeed.

But where does Bionic Commando stand regarding Nintendo? There was that internet petition, but it's ground to a halt — everyone's forgotten. Here's what Capcom producer Ben Judd told Kotaku:

Of course I know Bionic Commando's history, and it's relationship to Nintendo platforms. A Wii version is something we are considering. And if we did a Wii version, it would not be a port of the next-gen games or a remake. It would be an original title, but wouldn't use the Wii-mote for one-to-one swinging. I have a pretty creative idea for how to handle the controls.

I mean, don't make any mistakes: The Japanese guys know that the west is starting to kick ass and take names, and they are studying those games. And from what I know of Japanese motivation and business practices is, if they ever feel that there is something that they're not staying on track with, or on target, then they study it, see what's great about it, then they learn how to do it better.

A lot of people talk about the Japanese industry being, you know, on the way out, in terms of design and stuff like that. I don't think that they're out yet. I think that they'll come back.

It would be nice if they would adapt a policy of determining what the size limit would be based on the concepts submissions they are getting in. With BCR it features 20 different levels, 20 enemies, multiple attacks, next-gen shadows, scripting, 50 challenge stages, lots of sound effects, hi-res art from CJ's best artist, etc, etc. If you put that much in you just need more space if you are shooting for HD quality graphics as well. On the other hand, I don't think a game like Tetris (even if it is HD) would require as must space as say an MGS game due to it's huge amount of voice.

I think standards are good for maintaining consistancy across a brand image. Sony, Nintendo, and MS all have policies concerning naming, icons, and features but still you need to be able to take a case by case approach on occasion if you see a title that you think really needs to bend the rules a bit.

I'm not kidding myself, Street Fighter is a much more endeared brand than Bionic Commando but it's still nice to see MS was willing to adapt their policy in order to support Bionic Commando Rearmed as well as Street Fighter HD Remix. I'm sure this is because they feel these games will solidify XBLA as a prime platform for digital distribution.

Size-wise Sony has the advantage for now but MS has plenty of other advantages. They both have their advantages and disadvantages but isn't that ALWAYS the way it is? Heck, that's half the fun about deciding which system to buy... you know you gain one thing but lose another.

I understand where they're coming from. If we did a Wii version it would not be with one-to-one swinging... you couldn't do [that] for more than 10 minutes.

...the team and I fell in love with the game and ended up putting a lot more time, effort, and money into the project than initially planned. Personally, since the goal is to make this game for the fans and to get the world to see what makes Bionic Commando so special, I want to sell it for about US$10.

However, some of the suits are suggesting that since the game is of such a high quality, has a ton of new modes, and has gotten a fantastic response from users, that we should go with a US$15 price point.

To be quite honest, not everyone internally is sold on the idea of doing a full-blown remake of the original. Some think that we can go the simple "meta-emulation" route, put on a fresh coat of paint, and release the game without any tweaks or new modes. After all, that is the standard right now. Most of these games sell for $10 but aren't anywhere near the quality of BCR.

There is also my biggest concern: I want 2D gaming to live on. Gaming was forged on the innovative gameplay of 2D games, and maybe I'm a bit of a fossil but I want it to continue to evolve over time. Since BCR wasn't cheap, turning a profit won't be easy but without doing so it will be hard to justify this type of a production for future games.

So the question stands:

How much would you sell BCR for? And as always, since you, "the community" is an important part of the puzzle, we want to hear from you.

I wish I could send a message out to the whole world, 'cause I hear about this all the time. It was a story from Reuters, so it was literally sent to every news source around the globe. Yeah, that's how I was quote. If you notice, in the news story, I have lots of quotes in there with quotation marks, but that part of the story isn't in quotation marks.

I gotta be honest, I took twenty different interviews that day at E For All, and I remember talking to a lot of people. I remember talking to Kemp Powers at Reuters who wrote that story. And he was very interested in hearing about the console war, about Sony versus Microsoft, and what are we doing, are we going to go over to Microsoft, how much will they pay us. You know, all this weird stuff.

Number one, that million dollar figure is incorrect. I don't even know how many figures we'd need to sell to be profitable. More importantly, that's not something you really talk about in an interview. It's nothing I'd ever say. It could've been something like, 'You guys need to sell at least a million copies to be profitable, right?' 'Well, yeah, that sounds about right.' Worldwide, obviously, right? I don't think that's too controversial, but it blew up... I've been trying to contact Kemp Powers over at Reuters to see, I don't know if he recorded it on tape, but I'd love to hear it. So we can set the record straight..

What do you think the Bionic Commando Megaton will be?

• The original Bionic Commando will be released on Virtual Console
• Nathan Spencer will appear as a playable character in Super Smash Brothers Brawl
• A Bionic Commando movie announcement
• A 2D version of the original on next-gen consoles
• A Wii version of Bionic Commando
• Multi-player for Bionic Commando
• A Bionic Commando Collection Pack will be released on handhelds

The demo was from a build that was shown earlier this year at Capcom's Gamer's Day. The problem I have with watching companies play through demos at large staff events is that I often think they are pre-recorded. Certainly, I don't think companies do this to hide problems with the games themselves, but rather, to avoid any unforeseen technological problems like a controller accidentally discounting or whatever. But, I watched a good thirty minutes of honest-to-goodness play, complete with me chiming in and asking the dudes to try this or show me that. Didn't get to play, but I'm happy to share my observations from the build I saw.

The Swing
Let's face it. If you are interested in this game, this is why. The swinging mechanic is what made the original. It *is* Bionic Commando. The arm can grab onto anything and swing — save for the red areas of radiation. The reason why physics are so important is that weight and mass come into play. Spencer's own body weight can cause certain objects to collapse. Stronger objects won't be affected. Others will be weakened the more he swings on them.

"We tried to do totally free swinging," says producer Ben Judd. "But it was way too frustrating." The team came up with an unique solution: Put auto-aim on a vertical axis which puts auto-select on that axis, but give players the freedom move and control the swing without it being insanely impossible control. Judd adds, "Giving the users just enough auto so that they feel in control but not so much that they are frustrated and unable to go where they want to is a slippery slope." It's not a rehash of Spider-Man by any stretch, but something else entirely. On paper, the controls sound logical and straightforward: The left thumbstick moves Spencer, while the right thumbstick controls the camera. The right trigger fires Spencer's gun, while the left one shoots the arm's cable.

If you pick up enough speed you can do a flip-type thingy, but it's only if you have enough speed so that it doesn't get annoying and you're flipping all over the place. The swinging does look smooth, and Capcom Japan producer Motohide Eshiro said they've been trying to keep the swinging as smooth as possible. Many Japanese gamers get motion sick from movement in first-person-shooters. That doesn't mean the swinging looked slow. It was, well, smooth.

The Stage
The demo map Capcom showed was fairly big. The game maps are not only sizable horizontally, but also vertically. Nice thing about it: There were colors other than brown. I even saw greens! Apparently, the finished game won't look like it was made in a mud pie.

Also because the maps are so huge, the speed at which Spencer runs is at a snails place compared to how he can zip around the level.

Capcom is still doing some tinkering and trying to decide whether or not touching the red glowing patches of radiation through the game will damage health. If they do, it'll probably be a misstep. Glowing red radiation probably would do things like give Spencer cancer in ten years or knock his sperm count off. Worse things than simply knocking a few digits off a health bar.

The Sausage Arm
During the demo, I don't think the dreads ever really stood out. Not even once. Maybe if I saw a cut scene, I'd notice. Didn't really notice or think ZOMG DREADS during the demo. Sure, now that I think about it, having the dreads echo the swing makes sense as far as a design choice goes. Personally, I don't care either way. Spencer wasn't a blocky Gears of War type character, either. The arm wasn't as huge as I thought it was going to be, and it glowed a nice orange red. Of course, the freakazoid orange tubing was still hot doggish.

According to Judd, the game is about half done. Things will be changed and refined, we're sure. But seeing how much importance Judd and co. and putting specifically on the swing hopefully shows that this sequel is in good hands.