Sweet but very short. Maybe the shortest demo since Heavenly Sword. You get literally half a level, 2 challenge stages (which I haven’t tried yet), and a tutorial. It’s just an appetizer, at best. Capcom could have given us a little more to fiddle with, without screwing with their sales figures, I reckon.

I guess it did its job though, because I can tell this one’s going to be a winner already – it has all the right heft and inertia, and the animations are meticulously-rendered versions of the old 8-bit classic moves. There’s some new stuff in there as well, like grabbing barrels, that seems like natural extensions to the original game. It feels right.

Plus the music is fantastic. Pitch-perfect to match the visual upgrade, with just enough of the original score to trigger that old nostalgia.

Anatomy of a successful remake: when a game presents itself with all the rosy glow that you remember, but was not actually there. I played the C64 version way back when…

… yeah. Pretty nasty.

The Bionic Commando: Rearmed game and demo are up on Xbox Live now, and PSN tomorrow. I will probably download the PSN version myself for the Remote Play feature, but I expect both versions to be nigh-identical on the HD consoles.

(update – apparently the PS3 demo is already up on the Japanese store, so if you have an account there, you can grab it now.)