BIO MENACE - MASOCHISM IN BLUE

[Music] you know it's been ages since I played a DOS game and what better place to go than Apogee the height of gaming excitement and unlike a certain pinnacle of Entertainment Software Apogee could easily live up to that pedigree back in the early 90s they developed and publish the biggest PC games on the market your commander Keynes your Wolfenstein 3ds and yeah your Duke Nukem 's the Duke himself started out as part of a G's lineup a platforming shoot-'em-ups before Apogee changed the name to 3d realms and started making their own blockbuster FPS games but back in the day boy after experimental artificial intelligence gone rogue John Carmack dated so you can actually do side-scrolling games on the PC like you could on your Nintendo the hits kept coming and one of those classics was bio menace a little less well known than its cousin Duke Nukem yeah spelled with a u at the time designed by Jim Norwood with music by Bobby Prince and in 2005 as a Christmas present to a perche fans the whole game was released as freeware so that anyone could pick it up boot er up a DOSBox and have a blast you know unless you're looking for a game that didn't make you tear your hair out in frustration I've heard people say that consoles cornered the market on brutally unfair games and while biomedis isn't as hard as safe ninja gaiden it did make me almost rethink playing it around the time I got to the third episode whatever dreams died oh shut up there's like 20 other people on this floor why don't you go bother them you aren't scheduled for artificial supervision between the hours of 1:00 a.m. and 6:00 fine Jim Norwood says biomedis was the first game he ever designed and you know what good job Jim it's really solid in terms of the mechanics honestly jumping shooting the graphics aren't bad either you don't have a ton of frames to work with so the animation isn't too smooth but this was the early days kids 1993 and while doom would also come out towards the end of that year there was still a market for this kind of stuff but the absolutely unforgiving unfair and unreasonable difficulty of this game okay let me just explain the basics to you some mad scientist named dr. mangled released a bunch of mutants into Metro City and CIA agents neg Logan owner of this sweet porn stash has to deal with it your ride gets shot down in the city and from there you have to make your way to dr. mangles lab to put an end to this [ __ ] here's a fun thing you have easy medium and hard difficulty and easy you get eight hole health points take a good look cuz this is the last time you're gonna see him playing on Normal difficulty like Old City forces himself to do gives you a hole for hit points you also get four on hard luckily hidden behind your plane there's some grenades and weapons you've got the automatic weapon here 99 free full auto bullets very nice you've got a super gun which has bullets two to five times damage and you've got plasma bolts which do even more damage but aren't auto fire they're good though grenades which come in three flavors the first is your standard explosion the second is an incendiary grenade that can burn for a few seconds and clear out a small army of creatures all by itself the third is a landmine [Music] your basic gameplay goes like this you get crystal shards and key cards to turn off force fields and usually inside one of the force fields is a hostage you have to rescue gives you another key card to disable the force field that blocks the exit so what are all these other Keys about well there are doors everywhere that require keys not specific keys just one of these keys which means since any of these open these doors one should open all of them but you lose all of them when you lose but you but these doors have score items in them and also crystal shards and sometimes extra lives which otherwise you can only get by collecting 50 of these gems or by reaching a certain school so if you follow me check this [ __ ] out jibs holy crap look at all these corpses these mutants are killing everybody now you might have seen Gore before in a game like Wolfenstein and doom but in the little Apogee side scroller where all the monsters exploded to bloody pieces of beat and eyeballs and [ __ ] so remember how I said you've got four head points not five you don't get that extra one at zero like in Duke Nukem oh no and even if it were it wouldn't matter very much once you die if you have lives left you return to a checkpoint or the start of level once you're out of lives it's back to the save there's no restarting the level with three lives again [ __ ] you this doesn't become a problem for a little while depending on your skill with the game but I think most players will probably start noting the unbridled bastard Riya this game around episode 2 but the foundations of bastard rear set up from about the 2nd level this flaming devil mutant here he's a fun one unless you have plasma bolts you can only hit him when he's not on fire and he likes to jump around and screw you over whenever possible he's no fun at all and you're introduced to the most frustrating enemy in the game pretty early to the snake the snake doesn't look too intimidating he doesn't have a ton of health but he does have the worst attack he spits these little blue blobs out and you might think hey that's normal and it is but watch kids because unlike your average projectile attack from a monster this one is set up for the purpose of ruining your life normally a projectile attack would stop here but this one bounces and sticks around it travels about halfway across the screen as soon as the snake is in view and sometimes you can hit them while they're off-screen if you know they're there sometimes but as soon as you notice they're actually attacking you you have less than a second to avoid it and you better not be shooting him because this is one of those games where you can't walk and shoot at the same time [Music] but monsters have a habit of turning to face you as soon as you hit their eye line and these snakes are placed at the top of ladders so if you're trying to climb it you can only hit the stakes by crouching or tossing your grenade they are the absolute worst monster to deal with and we're on level three just to be clear the greatest threat to snake Logan is snakes there's these green things which are on the ceiling and they're not too bad unless they're on a ceiling you can't see and they drop down and kill you and there's no way for you to know that they're there [Music] then there's the slimes slimes can only be killed with explosives or plasma bolts they travel incredibly slowly and they block your normal bullets so if you're trying to hit a monster behind them you won't you'll spend probably 15 minutes of your entire playtime to this game waiting for slimes to move also and these things these robots that travel around the level in a path and soak up way too much damage but also instead of just taking one bit of health away they're instant death how about the bouncing robots or the weird dumpster robots that don't actually hurt you they just push you into spikes spikes are a pretty common element of any platformer but in bio menace they come in three varieties instant death spikes not instant death spikes and spikes that come up out of the floor and you can walk over them if they're not extended the first two were sometimes completely indistinguishable from one another so that's cool in the easy skill your basic attack is a burst of three rounds on medium and hard it's down to one but it's okay the automatic weapons are pretty common in early levels it's important to mention that the hit detection is based on the size of the sprite not the shape so snakes hit boxes like this not like this at the end of episode 1 you face dr. mangle he turns into a giant mutant frog yeah we'll go with frog as it turns out dr. mangle is just working for a more evil guy named master Cain he's got a robot face in Fabio hair but then there's episode 2 starts off innocently enough before you hit the ant caves this is the level where I place that point of no-return marker for the difficulty in this game these giant mutant ants are bad enough jumping around everywhere spearing you and you can only shoot in two directions so have fun on any of those ramps see you have these color codes right a lot of the levels have these and you have to input them in the correct order usually to get a bonus and if you [ __ ] it up you get punished well one of those is required to exit this level if you don't want to lose a life and if you [ __ ] it up and you're not pretty good at this game you won't have a life to spare and you're on a time limit oh and to get this color code you have to jump over disappearing Mega Man style platforms over an instant death pit now that's cool thanks oh and instead of showing you the color code like every other color code this game you know since you might accidentally pass over it and see it without having to do all the platforming [ __ ] it gives it to you through text this is the only time this happens in this game good job Jim Norwood for thinking of that sort of a [ __ ] but wait because the next level ant town is much worse from the very start of the level as soon as you're off the elevator get ready for some fun because you have to jump on these two falling blocks now you jump on the first one right and you notice before plummeting to your death if there's something shiny over there that's the secret level warp gem you want that then there's a cave that takes you above where you started in this plasma bolts that's awesome [Music] now you need the warp channel because it's gonna get you extra lives and you're gonna need them after this level this isn't the hardest level in the game but it's probably the hardest one before episode 3 so you have to jump and hit the second block if you want it because [ __ ] you you won't be able to land on the second block on the way back down you need to take the second block down then jump onto this tiny platform then go through cave then back onto the falling platform and these platforms disappear forever when you lose a life and go back to the start so then you really [ __ ] and there's an ant's on the platform you need to jump on and he lunges at you to his own death what does he carries part of colony you know [ __ ] it theoretically you can drop down on this little platform between the blocks but you're not gonna know what's there at first you're gonna lose a life anyway unless you can get on that ladder while you're on that falling block which I couldn't you're gonna have to take a hit from this ant here don't forget though you have a leap of faith on to this elevator platform here because you can't clear the jump onto the falling blocks for the next section and you have to know to drop onto the elevator which you would know if you use the ladders but those are a pain in the ass so oh and by the way if you die at any time before hitting a checkpoint in this level it's back to the beginning where you can't [ __ ] jump anywhere because the falling blocks leading to the rest of the stage are gone forever and about a quarter of the jumps you have to make there are spikes everywhere it's [ __ ] up this is where I think any normal person would put the game down anyway let's check out that secret level [Music] so I lose a life in the secret level I went to so I could get some goddamn lives that's before we face the queen ant who can go [ __ ] herself because she shoots bees at you okay flying ants whatever they're mutants it doesn't matter this whole level is a pain in the ass but since this is a game where you get two or three bosses per episodes it's Oh after the Queen you get to the trash dump level where I have zero lives and there's nothing I can do about that I [Music] [Music] make it through the trash dump with zero lives and get to the trash boss I mean it's only been one level since we had a boss and biomedis does this thing a couple of times that's just a dick move it starts you off right in the bosses line of fire and sometimes they can just shoot you from the start taking that precious precious health away before you can get off a shot at them since they're off-screen oh and you have to hit a switch to lower an elevator so that you can get out of his path and get some decent weapons since your guns and grenades don't carry over to the next level but thankfully your health does there's one section of this game that has a ton of health pickups where you get to turn into a mutant yourself and then turn back so my question is if it's so easy to go for mutant to non-mutant why is this whole thing such an issue the next level is a little deceptive you see it could be a straight shot through with no resistance but you need to dig a little deeper because I can't even imagine surviving the episode without it you need to go through a couple of doors to find a strange key that opens a door marked secret door which you first saw when you were killing dr. mangle inside that door is an Easter egg room full of Apogee stuff it's Jim Norwood designer and George Brassard architect of Duke Nukem Forever stone fall and Scott Miller of Scott's mystical head Fame there's a poster of OG tube nukem pre sunglasses a bunch of sprites from tooks original outing some Commander Keen references and to signs apogee and it's software upstairs you'll find three lives full health and a secret warp gem and the secret level is oh [ __ ] no no [ __ ] so I'm forced to lose a life but I get four of them in this level and if I'm willing to sacrifice a hit point on this spike here I can get full health the live smacks out at nine I think but this is the first time I've ever seen the lives that high in this game you're gonna need all those lives for the boss level the boss of the second episode might be the hardest boss in the game he's surrounded by mutants and robots until you wake him up and then he shoots lasers at you forever and you're gonna be down to your pissant one shot rifle pretty quickly because hitting the bastard is hard enough he can travel through floors and walls and such and some stuff provides the cover but whatever provides cover for you also provides cover for him and good luck hitting it with grenades I am this episode of two lives in one bar health or if I hadn't found that Easter egg [ __ ] all then we start episode 3 and episode 3 is the kind of video game cruel 2 usually reserved for arcade machines so you keep putting quarters in and I want to mention something here that y'all will have no idea about because I didn't I found this out after the fact there are special moves you can do a super plasma shot that will take away one health bar [ __ ] that and temporary invincibility do you think that would be really helpful right look up for two seconds and then look down this might confuse you because the character doesn't look up or down you need to hold the up and the down key you need to release the up key before the down key and then you're invincible for like 3 seconds it takes about as long to perform this move is to the move itself lasts and the only decent use for it I can think of is running through one of these force fields to get to the exit and yeah that's what I thought so anyone in the comments talking about how I didn't use the super secret moves that I wouldn't know about unless I looked him up because I was researching for a video you're gonna leave that comment anyway because I waited until now to mention it but Seve there's a secret invincibility move but saving Mila Kunis is actually Russian but civvy you didn't hear them saying doom eternal that you can turn that off Sonic the Hedgehog is a canonically sexual character but city how can the robots operate with a quarter of your brain that's not how biology where's Frank where are the virus tell us or it's back on the cold room TV 11 target is right doll has gone off the grid Sophia Gracie ia is concerned so episode three is just the worst this is the point where most sane people would stop playing the game look at this screenshot there's horrible things happening where you can't see them like there's one of those snakes just up ahead but also there's hidden landmines that you're only going to avoid if you memorize where they are I mean you can randomly toss grenades to see if they hit anything fun right it gets better once you get inside the building we had even more new unfair enemies mutant suicide bombers they run up to you are faster than any other monster are faster than you and they explode and you've got a ton of snakes above those ladders so expect to leave this level with no health or lives oh that's not even where the [ __ ] starts you can get to crystal shards in this level a blue one and a light blue one and one opens this beam to the exit but you can't use it because the glowing green tiles are radiation and they instantly kill you but the other way you can goes through this long tunnel full of mutants and laser turrets and the laser turrets technically aren't an enemy but if they were they would be the worst see if you could discern a firing pattern from these [Music] yeah there's still [ __ ] pattern you'll try over and over and over again to find a way past these things and you've got these four health bars that will never ever last maybe if you were uneasy and had eight but that's still nearly impossible I tried over and over and thought maybe you're not even supposed to go that way because there's secret where you can jump between ladders over an instant death laser and I can't do that either but no there's a secret right above the entrance with an invincibility potion in it and you won't see it you won't know it's there and you absolutely needed to get through this level from here on out we're dealing with uncut sadism more problems and you could possibly deal with it once mine's here grenade shooting robots here turrets here these robots who soak up damage and also insta kill you if you're anywhere near them because there's a level later that's called circle of death where you have to climb in platform around them and it's [ __ ] misnomer circle of death because there's three sections where you have to do this and one of them is a leap of faith into them so have fun that's three circles of death here's mutants attack and I don't know if the designer knew what he was setting up here when he made this but I'm gonna tell you see if there's a funny little way that explosives working bio menace when you collect them the regular grenades are low tier so when you get the insanity era grenades they replace them like you don't lose the regular grenades you just have to use up the incendiary grenades first that's weird right you can't switch between them but here's where the [ __ ] comes in if you pick up landmines which are nowhere near as useful it's grenades because you can't toss them they take priority and you have to use those up before you can get back to your regular grenades so take a look at this area you have a choice here you can pick up two Rene's and use them but you can't go over and pick up that automatic weapon over there because the way coalition works in this game you'll have to pick up the landmines too and if you pick up the landmines those aren't any good for dealing with the bots stirs up here because as soon as you hit the floor that snake is gonna wreck your [ __ ] more so since you have to place the mine so maybe I'll hit you twice it looks like the game is giving you resources but it's really a jigsaw like trap that forces you to take a handicap if you want an advantage oh yeah and also the spikes [ __ ] the spikes this level took me hours you wouldn't think it would be any harder than the instant death bots but it's about the enemy placement kids and in a game that gives you not enough health and forces you to take damage finally finally after the circle of death after robots attack after mutants attack we face master Kane and thank [ __ ] I accidentally found the secret warp gem that gave me some extra lives because if I wasn't able to die like five times I wouldn't have beaten this game ah snake Logan you have proved most troublesome to me and for that I shall make sure that you die a most painful death I don't know how you survived all of the traps I've laid out for you but you'll not be escaping for me I have been waiting a long time for this moment and I am going to enjoy very much getting rid of you once and for all then there will be nothing left to stand in my way now we shall see just how good your fighting skills really are ah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah so Master cane shoves a broom handle up your ass and you're lucky to get those text boxes the first time you played because when you respawn or load a game the [ __ ] just starts shooting at you as soon as the level starts but you can't hit him from there and since you have absolutely nothing to fight him with you have to get across the level past mutants and landmines and so then he turns into a ghost that insta kills you I'm telling you Jim Norwood knew it was up he wanted to make a ballbusting Lee hard game and he did he succeeded for all the dickish this in this game it's totally intentional it's well-crafted dickish ness pnew look at this there's a checkpoint at the other end of the boss level a checkpoint in the level where it's you and the boss in one big room because all the supplies you need are all the way across the goddamn level and the boss is designed so that you can't cheap him out if you're up there trying to hit him he'll revert to his normal form notice that you're up there and then immediately turn into an invincible one-hit-kill flying ghost monster it's not too hard to avoid but it will catch you if you haven't dealt with all the other monsters and the landmines so I killed him but then I died and the blue shard he drops well it dropped but he wasn't dead yet he went into Ghost mode and as soon as he was out of it one hit killed him [Music] it only took about ten lives and two reloads to beat him but it turns out master Kane is actually agent Carmichael Carmichael yes remember me from operation swap dog you and the agency deserted me I swore I would get revenge if it was the last thing I did so I somehow found the resources to mount a catastrophic attack on major cities and learn to turn into an invincible one-hit kill ghost no we thought you had surely been killed by the KGB you're insane Carmichael and you're coming back with me but instead he pulls a predator it self-destructs no you are going with me snake Logan straight to hell finally it's over and ancient carbonyl will not be a threat to this earth ever again snake has succeeded and we are all safe again for now you might think I hate this game kids but I don't it can be fun and challenging when it's not being terribly dickish and the design itself is competent especially for the first game this guy ever made himself steak Logan is pretty badass and maybe he deserves another outing more than someone I can think of logged all the glory with his 3d game and then self-destructed way harder than Master Kane did but this isn't the last we'll hear a Jim Norwood he worked on Shadow Warrior and currently works as a senior software engineer for Sony Computer Entertainment America good for him here's to you mr. Norwood your game from 1993 boned me pretty hard but it's like getting a terrible hangover from a fine bottle of scotch [Music]

Channel: Civvie 11

Views: 501,429

Rating: 4.9523492 out of 5

Keywords: cv11, civvie, civvie's dungeon, dungeon, civvie11, 3d realms, apogee, bio menace, review, recap, walkthrough, let's play, classic, pc, DOS, 1993

Id: f8RG9uHrvgQ

Length: 22min 27sec (1347 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 02 2018