Commander Keen 1: Marooned on Mars

The Good
Cute and colorful graphics. The gameplay was also great for it's time. Smooth scrolling gameplay was never (or at least not that I now of) seen before in platform games on the PC. Some cool innovations such as a pogo stick to jump higher made this game an instant classing. The gameplay was similar to that of Super Mario Bros. at some points, but it was not just another attempt to clone that game. The story was different from the classic "save the princess" formula. You are eight year old genius Billy Blaze and must stop the Vorticans from destroying earth. Billy travels to Mars in this first episode in a trilogy (this game was one of the first that were distributed following the infamous "get part one free as shareware and get the sequels too by buying them" idea that was used in a lot of Apogee games and many publishers have copied). On Mars his ship gets sabotaged by the Vorticans and now you need to collect the stolen parts to repair the ship and help keen continue his adventures. This story was quite original at that age.

The Bad
Some things are a bit dated now such as finding keys to put in the corresponding doors and the gameplay doesn't also quite do the job anymore after 15 years. When this game was released it didn't really have notable flaws, however.

The Bottom Line
Though this game is a bit too dated at certain points it's still a brilliant game that is still free available as shareware and you can still buy it's sequels. If you are looking for a good classic platformer on the PC, you may want to pick this one up.

The Good
The one good thing about Commander Keen (and its myriad sequels) was that it broke the mold for PC games- I feel it's somewhat responsible for the explosion of PC gaming. It introduced console-style action games (and, more importantly, the scrolling platform game) to PC users.

The Bad
Commander Keen, looked at in the context of late-80s platformer games, as opposed to compared to other PC games, is a very poor game. The graphics are bland, the gameplay is boring... and it demonstrates how ill-suited the PC was for action games... a trend that continues to this day, with the PC dominating strategy games, and consoles dominating action games.

The Bottom Line
Commander Keen was a huge success, and was a very heavily hyped side-scrolling game in the vein of Super Mario Bros. At the time of its release, it was considered the successor to Captain Comic and one could not avoid mention of the game in PD/SW software catalogues and BBSes. It was designed for mid-to-high spec machines of the time, and was considered something of a wonder.

CK, in my opinion, plays like one of the many boring SMB clones that came out on the NES. The game physics are tolerable, the gameplay is repetitive and somewhat on the slow side. The graphics are average- poor in comparison to any game on any other platform of the time, but for the PC it was decent.

At the time of its release, I was a big Commodore 64/128 user- the Great Giana Sisters and Creatures were 2 hugely popular platformers from the same era, and I played them incessantly. Perhaps the C64's colorful graphics and suitability for action games jaded my eye, because I couldn't believe how utterly lame CK was. After all the hype, the $2000 PC was playing a game technologically inferior to a game played on a $99 C64, let alone the $99 NES and SMS, whose games were responsible for CK.

In the long run, of course, the PC platform has proven itself. Games like CK are responsible- the games necessitated the upgrading and outfitting of PC systems in order to play them properly, lifting the PC market out of the CGA 4.77 mHz rut it'd been in since 1983. Historically the game is important, and I keep a copy on my HD... but it isn't really on a par with any of the other platform games from the same era, and was very quickly superseded in quality and gameplay by other PC games.

The Good
Commander Keen is arguably a legend by now, one of the first really stellar games published by Apogee and famed developers id. The concept is super-simple and fits perfectly for these games: Billy Blaze, eight years old genius, builds himself a functioning spaceship and after donning his brother's football helmet and calling himself "Commander Keen" the biggest badass in space, decides to explore the stars looking for adventure. His adventures would eventually take him on 7 sequels and around some of the weirdest planets in the universe, but seeing as how this was the first shareware release, Keen just decided to take a trip to Mars. What he finds there goes beyond that stupid face, and he encounters the evil Vorticons, which have stolen key parts off his spaceship. Mission? Get the parts back and leave Mars before mom finds out you are gone!

The gameplay of Keen is that of a standard platform game in which you jump around a lot grabbing items, avoiding enemies and clearing insanely twisting levels filled with all sorts of platforms, columns, blocks, etc... You also have a lot of key-card collecting and some levels require more thought that just "getting all the way to the right-side of the level" but that's as far as it goes. While this alone would have meant a "Dear god, not ANOTHER Mario Clone!" from almost anyone, two key factors saved it from that abyss: first the undeniable charm present in the game with it's wacky yet cuddly story, cute colorful graphics, and inventive levels. The other saving factor was that it was for the pc. Yes, FOR THE PC!!! Holy Shit! You mean PCs can handle smooth scrolling and all that jumping-shooting action and not explode?? Yup. Goodbye Nes, I won't miss you... well maybe a little but just until they find a way to emulate Metroid and Zelda...

The Bad
Well, while most of my memories are laced with the sweet smell of nostalgia, I still consider that there were very few flaws in the Keen series overall and practically none in this first release. The backgrounds needed some work for this first CK, and the mixing of the jump, pogo and fire controls was kinda awkward, but overall this is an absolutely solid game whose only other flaws are those defined by its genre.

The Bottom Line
Anyway, very entertaining levels, great graphics, silky-smooth scrolling and no peyote-eating plumbers in sight!! That spells golden for me!

Really, I can trace this game to many childhood memories of my past. Clearly being amongst the kickass games that definetively grounded me into PC-gaming first and foremost since it was one of those games that proved that consoles just weren't any magic boxes and anything they did the pc could do better. :)) Ya!...but even if I am one rambling idiot and consoles are king of the hill, the fact remains that CK is a very very good platformer game.