Bio Motor Unitron

There's a strong possibility you've never played or heard of Bio Motor Unitron. Though it was an exceptional game, it had the poor luck of being released on the profoundly underappreciated NeoGeo Pocket Color in 1999, and in fairly limited numbers at that, making its potential audience a small one. Those willing to give Bio Motor Unitron a chance, though, were treated to a well-crafted game that is nearly the corporeal equivalent of the phrase "easy to pick up, hard to put down."

Here we are at the local pub, chatting it up with a cyborg elf.

To call Bio Motor Unitron "Pokémon with robots" would be a fairly accurate way of describing the game if you were in a hurry, but it would also be selling the game short. The game puts you in control of a giant robot, or Unitron, that you use to fight against monsters and other Unitrons. It had a lot of standard 16-bit RPG trappings--randomly generated dungeons, random encounters, menu-driven, turn-based combat, and some basic character-building stuff. All pretty standard, but all executed rather well.

What made Bio Motor Unitron really sparkle were the game's engineering elements. There were dozens of different parts you could buy or find for your Unitron, but you got the best stuff by building it yourself. The process of developing new gear was less of a science and more like alchemy. If your combination wasn't just right, you'd end up with gear that wasn't very powerful or that simply didn't work at all. But the promise of discovering rare, ultrapowerful components made the whole process deliciously addictive and made the game more than just a Pokémon knockoff.

Viney gets his.

Though you could do a lot with a modern remake of Bio Motor Unitron--ditch the RPG stuff for more twitch-based action or render it in 3D--such changes to the game's fundamentals wouldn't do the original justice. Bio Motor Unitron started on a portable system, and a remake would be best served on a portable console like the Game Boy Advance, where 2D graphics are still viable. It could still use a new coat of paint though. More-colorful, dynamic animation sequences, such as those found in Intelligent Systems' superb Fire Emblem or its even more superb Advance Wars games, would make the combat far more entertaining to watch. The core gameplay wouldn't really need to be modified much to make it modern, but it could benefit from a larger scope and a more fully developed story--perhaps something on more of a grand Final Fantasy level, thusly giving your actions more weight.

Bio Motor Unitron deserves a remake not because the original was fundamentally flawed, but because it didn't get the chance it deserved. Simply cleaning it up a bit and presenting it on a platform where a reasonable number of people could be exposed to it would be exactly the kind of chance it should have gotten in the first place.