Bionic Commando stories tie together

Bionic Commando producer Ben Judd has told Eurogamer to expect elements of the re-imagined XBLA, PSN and PC game, Bionic Commando Rearmed, to fill out the back-story of next year's 3D game.

"We intentionally put in some nuggets in the story that later tie into the 3D version," Judd told Eurogamer.

"You'll talk to some characters that will ask Spencer about his wife and he'll say, 'my wife left me, I don't why she left me - maybe she just couldn't handle a military man and that lifestyle'.

"So the user is going to play that game, and certainly a fan of the original is going to play that game and go, 'Wait a second, that wasn't in the original game,' so they'll be curious and wonder what that's about. And later you find out more about it in the 3D version."

Judd said that the team behind the 3D version had to work hard to produce a story that would satisfy fans.

"When you think about the original game, it was NES, very limited words and dialogue, so it really is a very thin story, so there wasn't a lot to go off of, so trying to find enough to build out into a real-world serious story that was on multiple levels, versus the original game but yet still have enough dialogue in there that fans would appreciate," he said.

"Trying to find that perfect blend was not easy."

In the end the team went for a shades-of-grey story of a bionically enhanced super-soldier who has to hunt down terrorists driven to act against society by their government's decision to try and strip them of their life-giving bionic enhancements.

"We wanted to drill it down to technology. For us, there's a lot of technology that's good, but it carries a heavy price," Judd explained.

"We wanted to blur the ethical line for the government, because they blur the ethical line a lot [in the real world] when it comes to weapons technology."

Bionic Commando looks great in both iterations, and you can read out hands-on report from the 3D game to see how that one's shaping up.