Bionic Commando

You grab onto vines, ropes, and enemies with your grappling hook. On MS-DOS back in 1988, that was something else — the biomehanical arm of an agent in a green jumpsuit does what no ordinary hero can. It's not a platformer, it's not a shooter, it's a peculiar, clumsy yet captivating blend of both.

Bionic Commando sends you into a military base controlled by lawful enemies and you must methodically clear each level, which means killing as many enemies as possible and then finding the exit. Basic survival — you've got a weapon, you've got grenades, and then there's that famous bionic arm. Without it you move like anyone else, with it you hang from objects and overcome chasms. That arm isn't decoration, it's your only way forward.

It plays cumbersome, but that's precisely the point. Maneuvering your agent means thinking about where you can grapple, how to time it so a falling enemy doesn't smack you with their weapon. The graphics are blocky, the sound from the speaker whines like an old tractor, animations are stark, but the game has precision and logic. You're not invincible in it — one collision with a grunt and you fall. You fall constantly.

In the eighties, Bionic Commando was such a curious gem that rubbed shoulders with other oddities — it was simply different. It couldn't go soft, couldn't shower you with lives in a row, had no time for sentimentality. Today it looks like an excavated artifact, but the moment you realize how that arm works, how you navigate space through it, it stops being strange and becomes clever.

It's a game for those who want to experience how things played before jumping and running became standard. Here you grapple and think, which are completely different skills. Today you can access it in your browser without an emulator — give it a shot, wrestle with that little green hero, and understand why people knew about it.