Commando

The Good
I loved playing Commando in my local arcade. It was a military-themed shooter that let me live out many of my G. I. Joe fantasies. Looking back on it, it was a pretty simple game, but it still seemed light years ahead of games like Pac-Man or Galaga in terms of realism.

Commando is still fun to play—for a while, anyway—because it pretty much just turns you loose to massacre the entire armed forces of a small Third World country. Despite the extreme violence, there is a kind of zen quality to the game; you can just mash the firing button repeatedly and revel in the cartoonish carnage. There is some strategy involved, but not too much. You have to ration your grenades, and sometimes you will be faced with a tough decision regarding which approaching soldier you need to shoot first. Beyond that, Commando is completely mindless fun.

Having said that, it's unfortunate that everything seems to just repeat over and over after the first few levels. I really haven't been motivated to play this game for too long in one sitting. It's fun for about 10 minutes, but after that you've pretty much seen, and shot, it all. It's all pretty much the same once you've played through the first few stages, but the trigger-happy gameplay may have you returning to Commando every once in a while just for the sheer stupidity of the action.

The Bad
I recently played a copy of the NES cart, and I must say I was pretty disappointed. Maybe nostalgia has clouded my judgment, but I didn't have nearly as much fun with this version of Commando as I did so many years ago in that arcade.

This is admittedly a very early NES game, but the graphics are still pretty bad. Everything is basically green or brown. While there are a lot of characters on screen at the same time, there is also a lot of flicker and a little bit of slowdown. In fact, some enemies flicker and then just disappear. No, I don't mean they run off the edge of the screen—I mean they simply vanish into thin air! Also, note that nobody has any facial features in this game. All the better when your mission is to mow everyone down in cold blood, I suppose…

The annoyingly catchy music has an appropriately martial theme, but it is too repetitive. Sound effects for gunfire and explosions are pretty weak. The playback quality is very poor, giving the music and SFX a tinny and distant feel, even by early NES standards.

As for challenge, Commando isn't very hard once you get used to some of its "quirks." Spin around and fire your gun all the time, learn to gauge the fixed range of your grenade tosses, and you are well on your way to clearing level after level of faceless enemy soldiers.

There are a few really stupid things about Commando for the NES. You do have the ability to rotate around 360 degrees and move in any of eight directions. However, this is not a luxury—this is a virtual necessity since enemies swarm onto the screen from all directions. They often continue to come from the same location, "spawning" a lineup of soldiers who mindlessly jump, one after the other, right into your line of fire! There is a tendency for your man to get hung up on the few terrain features (hills, trees, etc.) in the game even though he appeared to have cleared them easily. This results in some extremely cheap deaths. You can fire your gun in all directions, but you can only toss grenades forward (towards the top of the screen). The problem with enemies just disappearing also aggravates me.

I remembered the arcade game having a greater variety of enemies. I could be wrong, but what I CAN say for sure is that the enemies are pretty boring and homogenous, and that the designers relied too much on sheer numbers of soldiers when they should have introduced some more interesting opponents instead.

The Bottom Line
Commando is a fun game, but the NES port disappointed me. Maybe the arcade version wasn't really much better, but that's how I remember it. It's still worth a look if you enjoy this kind of old school shooter, but I wouldn't call it a classic.

The Good
The music! I think half the time playing this game me and my friends would just dance around the room to the music! Only the Commodore 64 version can do this! The gameplay is cool too but that song.

The Bad
Uh. that guy with the grenade launcher by the bridge. I hated him and still do!

The Bottom Line
Shake your butt and shoot the bad guys! This game gets you pumped for combat and makes you feel like your cool and in the A-team!

The Good
I liked the fact that this game was so easy to win so I was able to rack up another win to my personal NES game count without exerting too much effort. And it is always enjoyable to see early examples of poorly translated Japanese video games.

The Bad
Commando always struck me as a rather sorry excuse for a game. I guess I am just easily offended by the fact that the game's 4 levels were actually just the same one level repeated 4 times but with more enemies and bullets during each iteration.

The Bottom Line
Go ahead and play Commando, if only because it will not take you very long. Then move along to the sequel, the far superior Bionic Commando.

The Good
When it was released in 1984, Capcom's Commando was a huge hit in the arcades and the game came out on every possible platform there was at the time. In the game, you play the commando who is asked to destroy two enemy bases. You are dropped off into enemy territory, and your task is to get through eight areas while shooting enemies before they have the chance to either shoot at you first or bomb you with grenades. You have a machine gun and several grenades to use against them.

The game contains every element that the coin-op version had. This includes the animation in which you lose a life, the throwing of grenades by your character, and most of all, the character walking from one spot to another. You can move freely around the screen to a spot where you cannot easily get shot.

The graphics are in line as well. The structures on the ground, including enemy trenches, small shacks, deserted roads, and watch towers, make you feel as if you are walking through war zones as enemies will emerge from these structures.

Although the music hasn't got that energetic feel that the Commodore 64 version had, there is Commando-style music that really suits the gameplay. This type of music is also present in the coin-op version. The sound effects are good, and goes well with the event that has just taken place.

The Bad
The game could have been improved when your character gets near the end of each area, where there are no bosses to defeat. You just have to kill a bunch of enemies who make their way past the huge gate that opens. This got a bit boring after a while.

The Bottom Line
The Amiga version is faithful to the coin-op version, regardless of whether it is missing the C64's energetic soundtrack, which was composed by no other than Rob Hubbard. The gameplay is quite a simple run-and-shoot game. I still think that Commando should have had bosses at the end of each area, like in Ghosts 'n Goblins.

Rating: ***