NES #46: Commando (1986)

(As if they needed to tell you that)

When I wrote about 1942 I talked about how the other two games released by Capcom in 1986, Command and Ghosts N' Goblins, would make people hate themselves after they played them. Of course this thought appealed to me so I decided to go back and play one of them. I am not going to try Ghosts N' Goblins yet because I want to hold on to my last shred of sanity, but I did spend a very late night playing Commando. I am happy to say that I did not hate myself after playing it. Actually I felt better about myself. Maybe the makers of this game knew what they were doing after all.

I always found this game interesting because of its connection to Bionic Commando. In that game you are on a mission to rescue Super Joe and blow up Hitler's head. In this game you are Super Joe on a mission to destroy everyone and everything. Bionic Commando is the indirect sequel to this game although they don't share too much in common in terms of gameplay. If you've never played Commando, it is similar to the parts in Bionic Commando where you run into a truck on the map and switch to an overhead view. It is all overhead vertical scrolling action with that classic one man army motif that was so popular after the rise of Rambo.

(It doesn't look like much, but trust me. This game is pure intensity)

 

The first thing to note about this game is that it is very deep for an arcade conversion from 1986. Hidden rooms abound in every level. Most of them have to be opened up by a well placed grenade, but some of them seem to come out of nowhere. They all have a grey brick look to them, but their actual contents vary. Sometimes you'll find a bunch of bonus points and extra lives. Sometimes you will find poison gas. Sometimes the exits of these rooms are hidden themselves. I would hate to get far into this game and run out of grenades trying to find the way out. This is frustrating and infuriating, but still impressive in its own way. All the hidden rooms means that you will be playing this game for hours if you want to find them all. Now that gaming goals were expanding beyond collecting high scores game developers were starting to think of new ways to give gamers their money's worth. One way was to fill their game with secret bonuses and easter eggs. This works as well in 2016 as it did in 1986. I could see you getting a trophy for finding all the hidden rooms if this game was on PS4. Sure it could ruin your game, but it was an important step in the evolution of gaming.
 

(These houses become deadly obstacles in the later levels)

The second thing to note about this game is that it is very hard. I have had my complaints about one man army games before. They are usually too hard to the point of impossibility like Ikari Warriors or way to easy like Guerrilla War. This game smartly finds a middle ground between these two future releases. It does have infinite continues, but the respawn points are fixed. This means that you can't just mindlessly run forward and hope for the best, but at the same time there is hope for seeing it through to the end. The game uses the same level layouts four times in a row giving this game a total of 16 levels. You would think that it wouldn't be so bad with 16 repetitive levels which are only a few minutes long each, but this game took me almost two whole hours to play though with many instances of self doubt. I almost gave up at least a half dozen times figuring it was too late to be able to focus. Luckily I stuck it out and powered through. The repeating levels are actually a good thing in my opinion. When you have a dozen or so soldiers shooting at you the last thing you want is to be memorizing new level layouts. As I said before, the developers knew what they were doing.

(Thankfully the fourth level is not as quite as hard as the third. This knowledge was the only thing that kept me going through the final run.)

In the end I was left with a sore thumb and a great sense of accomplishment. It's the kind of thing that only defeating a challenging game in one two hour session can give a person. It is the kind of experience that gaming can't duplicate no matter how hard they try. The ending is very simplistic, but that's beside the point. I"m not going to make any judgements on whether games were better back then or if they are better now. I am happy to have both, and spend plenty of time playing modern games. It is nice, however, to be able to go back and play a game from an era where it was all about the journey.