Recently on this site, one of my colleagues wrote an article pointing out the rather massive story deficiencies in Infinity Ward's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. This wasn't an attack on the game itself, but more the idea that the game is trying so hard to invest the player in the store when the story is so structurally unsound. While this often isn't a problem, if the game plays well enough... but there's always that moment when a bad plot development kicks the gamer square in the head. 

Bad video game writing has been with us since the medium's inception, and will likely always be with us, but sometimes, a game features a bad plot turn so heinous, so irritating, so "Were-they-even-paying-attention"-ny, They must be pointed out. For if not, we'll forever be... Trapped... in the Plot Hole.

SPOILERS AHEAD

With this first case file, I'll begin with developer Grin's 2009 sequel to the NES classic of the same name, Bionic Commando. In many ways, this game has become the poster child for spectacularly inane plot twists. It's implied through the events of the game, and the case files revealed throughout, that the reason Nathan Spencer's wife Emily is missing is because to make the bionics interact correctly with their hosts, the brain matter of "someone close" to the hosts are used in the bionics. The government kidnapped her, and presumably the relatives of the hundreds of members of the rogue bionic army BioReign, murdered them, and placed them in the bionic apparatuses, and no one is aware of this, no one has made a stink about it, it's not even the reason BioReign claims to be attacking the city in the game (BioReign is responding to the government persecution in general of bionic soldiers). But mightier minds than I, most notably Yahtzee Croshaw, have pointed out how spectacularly silly and wannabe clever this idea is.  

The sad thing is, the whole "brains in the bionics" thing isn't remotely the worst twist in the game.

To wit: Nathan Spencer is hired by Super Joe, his former boss at the FSA. to assist the security force in responding to the terrorist attack on Ascension City. Eventually, his orders change and Super Joe tells him to seek out the hiding place of a super weapon codenamed "Project Vulture" that's hidden in an undisclosed location. After fighting through hundreds of soldiers and bosses, Super Joe is able to get the Secretary of Defense to reveal the exact location of the device that will activate Project Vulture, which is hidden under the floor of a library.

Nathan delivers the device to Super Joe, and- WHATTA TWIST!!!- it turns out he's the leader of BioReign. His alleged motivation for leading the group is- actual quote- "You're too stupid to recognized the difference between patriotism and treason!" The entire terrorist attack was just an excuse for Joe to badger the SecDef into revealing the location of the device and sending Nathan in to get it for him so he and Gottfried Groeder could use it for themselves.

Why, then, did Super Joe and Groeder send all those people to kill Spencer?

Think about this for a minute. The entire purpose of the attack is to create a distraction so Spencer can grab the device. So for this plan to work, Nathan has to survive long enough to actually GET the thing. Now, I know this is a video game, but it's very strange to me that I had to fight off a library full of a hundred of Groeder's goons. Wouldn't it have helped to have Spencer remark that this is "too easy" or have a cutscene where Spencer is suddenly cornered by bad guys and his life is inexplicably spared. Super Joe himself observes the action in a disguise, but even in disguise he seems to be trying to attack Spencer.

And let's not forget: Super Joe had no idea where the device was hidden in the city. So his way of finding it was to attack the city with a nuclear weapon so no one would notice his patsy looking for it. One of the few- VERY FEW- successful things about Bionic Commando is the haunting wrecked cityscapes Spencer finds himself traversing. What if the building that housed the device was buried under some rubble? And given that Super Joe has some pretty high security clearance, why can't he get this specific information from the start, given that he's supposedly in charge of routing BioReign? Wouldn't there be protocols for this sort of thing to begin with? Protocols he, as a relatively high level government official, would have relatively easy access to? And since it's a in a library, couldn't he just send someone after hours to grab the device, since it's the size of a small briefcase and can be easily concealed? It's not like this basic idea- Super Joe stages the terrorist attack to get the information he needs to use Spencer to run his errand for him- is unsound, it's just the execution of it is spectacularly sloppy.

Now, it could be argued that all of this is moot since when Bionic Commando came out in 2009 it bombed pretty spectacularly and led to the eventual shuttering of GRIN. It made lots of worst games list, even though gameplay-wise, it's really not that bad. It's just frustrating to me, that so much effort can be  expended on a game trying to make it an immersive, memorable experience, and then have the story, the carrot that makes us want to experience this game, come out so badly, especially when with a little hard thinking those issues could be easily fixed. Bad stories diminish the experience of a game. And if the developers won't do the fixing, it's high time we gamers get our wrenches out and show them how.

Next time: That's a PRETTY EXCELLENT PLAN, FISHER! TOO BAD IT HAS A FATAL FLAW!