Today marks the 25th birthday of Bio Menace

[[McD] James]

 

 

Happy birthday to the seminal PC classic!

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

One of my favorites. *salutes*

[elend]

Oh yeah, love that game as well. It may have its issues, but I remember it fondly and even had a great time playing it again last year.

[Mr. Freeze]

Before the game was released, when it was in development we referred to it as "Bio Hazard". Given the nature of the plot line and the things you ran into, that fit the theme well. However, before the game came out, we changed it to "Bio Menace". When we asked Jim Norwood about that, he had this to say..

 

"That happened because it turned out that there was some rock band named BioHazard who already held the copyright to that name. I'm not sure why we couldn't still use the name anyway since my use was for a video game versus a music brand. You'd have to ask Scott and George about the why's on that one."

 

Fun Fact: This is also the reason why Resident Evil is known as Biohazard in Japan. 

[DynamiteKaitorn]

Never played it.

[[McD] James]

7 minutes ago, DynamiteKaitorn said:

Never played it.

 

https://www.gog.com/game/bio_menace

[The_MártonJános]

I remember giving the first instalment a go as a kid, though with the skills I possessed back then, didn't make it too far. Then time passed, things changed, system got completely replaced, never had the chance to play it again before it sinking into oblivion for me. Despite the fact how much I sucked at side-scroller platformers, I thought the game was hella fun with its vast majority behind the point I could progress to remaining a complete, chilling mystery.

I had the chance in 2010 to be re-introduced to the game, now having it completely shown to me - via another player who was basically making a game introduction video series, duh. I remember heavily regretting not even trying to acquire its two sequels by the slightest, but then, getting to know them all around... oh well. I learnt I didn't even miss out on anything that much. The first Bio Menace was indeed awesome, but the next two games suffered from gradually increasing symptoms of sequelitis to put it mildly.

So yeah, my overall experience towards the franchise is really a mixed bag, but the retrospective vibe still tilts it to the positive direction 'spose.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

 

On 8/6/2018 at 4:21 PM, Cell said:

The first Bio Menace was indeed awesome, but the next two games suffered from gradually increasing symptoms of sequelitis to put it mildly.

 

I feel like this was an issue with a lot of episodic (and in some cases other) shareware.  Front-load all the best stuff to make it appealing to the people giving it a try, and then dump all the filler stuff into the registered episodes, with some highlights you can screenshot for promotional material, because by the time people see the actual stuff, you've already got their money.  I'm sure some people will say even Doom was like that (although to me, the weird hell-corrupted stuff is Doom at its Doomiest).

 

Probably the most notable example in Bio Menace is that one ant town level in E2 where if you knock out the falling platform and then don't make it to the checkpoint, you render the game unwinnable since the platform doesn't respawn when you die.  Fun times.  There's also the secret level early in E2 that's basically "Congratulations, you found the bonus level!  Have fun burning all your lives on this incredibly precise platforming gauntlet to try to get to the bonuses at the end! Oh yes, and you can't cancel trying to beat the secret level and just go ahead with the game, either!"  I think they knew how evil that was and that's probably why they put it so early in the episode (so that you'd lose less progress) but still.  Some levels seem like they were pretty much designed around heavy use of the invincibility/fire spread special moves, too, which I guess you might or might not find dumb.  (I also always wondered why the "shoot a giant laser" move cost health but the "explode yourself revealing your exposed skeleton in the process" one didn't, especially since the explosion move was WAY more useful and I'm pretty sure could be executed quicker to boot.)

 

The whole "make sure to find and place the nuke" thing might be considered questionable too, I suppose, but as I recall you pretty much had to be a complete moron to miss it.  The only time I got the bad ending there was because I avoided getting the nuke on purpose to see what would happen.

 

Still, I would say overall Bio Menace E2 and E3 were a bit "expert player" oriented but mostly not that bad aside from the above mentioned things.  I can think of far worse offenders in the "registered levels suck" category.

 

[Arno]

To celebrate the 25th anniversary, an early beta of Bio Menace was made available. Apparently it took quite some effort to get it in shape for a public release, as the file that contains the compressed EGA graphics turned out to be corrupted. For anyone with an interest in hardcore reverse engineering, there is a thread on duke4.net where @NY00123 explains in detail how he managed to restore the EGA graphics with some homemade tooling: https://forums.duke4.net/topic/10127-bio-menace-beta-released/