Commander Keen 1: Marooned on Mars

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 but it isn't really on a par with any of the other platform games from the same era, and was very quickly superseded in quality and gameplay by other PC games.