I want to keep moving and start on something new, now that the Genesis list is done, so I decided to finally do this list that I have been thinking of writing for at least a year now. Platformers were probably my first favorite genre on the PC, back in the early '90s, and even if many of the most famous ones are only on consoles, PCs also have their share of great platformers. Just as a warning though, I like platformers a lot, particularly some of the ones in this first update, so there are some summaries (read: Keens 1 and 4, particularly) in this update that are a bit long. The Commander Keen series is fantastic though, they deserve it!
The biggest challenge with a genre-based list is, which games on the margins do you include? I'm still unsure about some -- do Tomb Raider and its sequels, Baron Baldric, or Jump!/Dschump! count? I'm really not sure if they should or not, good arguments could go either way. This is something I will have to decide, but it'd be interesting to hear others' opinions as well, about these and others listed below.
Finally, again this will be a multi-part series; I really like breaking it up, instead of writing a whole update then uploading it all at once. This first update covers 12 games.
First I will post the list of titles I currently intend to cover, though again this could change based on decisions above; Tomb Raider games after the first one probably won't make it into the final list, unless someone thinks otherwise, for example. But who knows. Then after that I will post the first 12 summaries.
I’m going to use the same organization method that I used in my PC racing games list, but with added dividers for 2d, 2.5d, or 3d platformers. So:
Table of Contents
1. Platformers I own physical copies of, not digital.
1A. 2D Platformers
1B. 3D Platformers
2. Full games that I own through digital download services.
2A. 2D Platformers
2B. 2.5D Platformers
2C. 3D Platformers
3. Freeware titles (selected titles only).
4. Demos and shareware (selected titles only).
5. Demos of games I also own the full versions of, but still have the demo of on my computer too. (this section may be removed from this list)
List of Titles
Table of Contents
1. Platformers I own physical copies of, not digital.
1A. 2D Platformers
1B. 3D Platformers
2. Full games that I own through digital download services.
2A. 2D Platformers
2B. 2.5D Platformers
2C. 3D Platformers
3. Freeware titles (selected titles only).
4. Demos and shareware (selected titles only).
5. Demos of games I also own the full versions of, but still have the demo of on my computer too.
1A. 2D Platformers - Physical Copies (Disk or Disc)
Ancient Empires (Educational) (1990)
Arcade America (1996)
Batman Forever: The Real Game Begins (1994)
Blackthorne (1994)
Bumpy's Arcade Fantasy (1992)
Claw (1997)
Commander Keen Episode I: Marooned on Mars (1990)
Commander Keen Episode II: The Earth Explodes (1990)
Commander Keen Episode III: Keen Must Die (1990)
Commander Keen Episode IV: Secrets of the Oracles (Shareware) (1991)
Commander Keen Episode VI: Aliens Ate My Babysitter! (1991)
Earthworm Jim for Windows 95 (1995)
Interplay 15th: Norse by Norsewest: The Return of the Lost Vikings Puzzle-Platformer (2D) (1996)
Jazz Jackrabbit 2 (1998)
Jazz Jackrabbit 2: Holiday Hare 98 (1998)
Lode Runner: The Legend Returns (1994)
The Lost Vikings - Puzzle-Platformer (2D) (1993)
Mega Man 3 (1992)
Mega Man X (1995)
Mega Man X4 (1997)
Mega Man X5 (2002)
Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee (1997)
PCG CGC1: Duke Nukem II (1993)
Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure (1996)
Rayman (1996)
Rayman Forever (1999)
Sonic 3D Blast (1996)
Sonic CD (1996)
Sonic & Knuckles Collection (1997)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989)
Zool 2 (1994)
1B. 3D Platformers - PC Physical Copies
Croc 2 (2000)
Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers (2000)
Emperor's New Groove, The -- Action Game (2001)
Frogger: The Great Quest (2002)
Rayman 2: The Great Escape (1999)
Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc (2003)
2A. 2D Platformers - Digital Download
1001 Spikes (2014)
8BitBoy (2014)
Aaru’s Awakening (2015)
Adventures of Shuggy, The (2011)
Arctic Adventure (1991)
Apotheon (2015)
BattleBlock Theater (2014)
BiT Evolution (2015)
Bleed (2012) - Platform-Action
Capsized (2011)
The Cave (2013) - Platform-Adventure
Closure (2012)
Commander Keen Episode I: Marooned on Mars (1990)
Commander Keen Episode II: The Earth Explodes (1990)
Commander Keen Episode III: Keen Must Die (1990)
Commander Keen Episode IV: Secret of the Oracles (1991)
Commander Keen Episode V: The Armageddon Machine (1991)
Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (1992)
Crystal Caves (1991)
Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion (1991) - Platform-Action
Dangerous Dave's Risky Rescue (1993)
Dark Void Zero (2010)
Dave Goes Nutz (1995)
Deadlight (2012)
Defy Gravity Extended (2011)
Duke Nukem (1991)
Duke Nukem II (1993)
Dust: An Elysian Tale (2013) - Platform-Action-RPG
Earthworm Jim 1 & 2: The Whole Can of Worms (1996)
Electronic Super Joy (2013)
Fly’n (2012)
Freedom Planet (2014)
Gateways (2012)
Gigantic Army (2014)
Gunhound EX (2014)
Guacamelee! Gold Edition (2013) - Platform-Action
Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit (2012) - Platform-Action
Hocus Pocus (1994)
Joylancer, The: Legendary Motor Knight (Early Access Game) (2014-)
Just Get Through (2015)
Limbo (2011)
Love (2014)
Magnetic by Nature (2014)
Magicmaker (2014)
Math Rescue (1992) - Educational Platformer
Monster Bash (1993)
Monuments of Mars (1990)
MURI (2013)
Mystik Belle (2015)
Nimbus (2010)
Oniken (2014)
PixelJunk Eden
Pharaoh's Tomb (1990)
Puddle (2012)
Rayman Origins (2012)
Realms of Chaos (1995)
Residue: Final Cut (2014) - Platform-Adventure
Rogue Legacy (2014) - Platformer-RPG (Roguelike)
Schrodinger’s Cat and the Raiders of the Lost Quark (2015)
Scribblenauts Unlimited (2012)
Secret Agent (1992)
Serious Sam: Kamikaze Attack (2011) - Autorunner Platformer
Shiny The Firefly (2014)
Super Lemonade Factory (2012)
Super Meat Boy (2010)
Superfrog (1993)
Swapper, The (2013)
Tembo the Badass Elephant (2015)
Terraria (2011) - 2D Minecraft
Terrian Saga: KR-17 (2014) - Platform-Action
They Bleed Pixels () - Platform-Action
Ultionus: A Tale of Petty Revenge (2013) - Platform-Shmup
Valdis Story: Abyssal City - Platform-Action
VECTOR (2013)
VVVVVV (2010)
Volgarr The Viking (2013)
Waking Mars (2012) - Platform-Adventure
World of Goo (2008)
Word Rescue (1992) - Educational Platformer
Maybe consider including:
2B. 2.5D Platformers - Digital Download
Bionic Commando Rearmed (2008)
Blade Kitten (2010)
Blade Kitten: Hollow Wish Collection (Parts 1 & 2)
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (2013)
Fez (2013) - Platform-Puzzle
Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams (2012)
Pandemonium (1996)
Pandemonium 2 (1997)
Red Goddess: Inner World (2015)
Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I (2012)
Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II (2012)
Strider (2014)
Toki Tori 2+
Trine (2009)
Trine 2 (2011)
2C. 3D Platformers - Digital Download
Cloudbuilt - Platform-Shooter
Edge (2011)
Grow Home (2015)
Jet Set Radio
Mirror's Edge
NiGHTS into dreams...
Psychonauts (2005)
Puzzle Dimension (2011)
Quantum Conundrum
Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut
Sonic Generations
StuntMANIA Reloaded (2014) - Platformer (3D) (Vehicular)
Tomb Raider (1996) - Platform Action-Adventure
3. Freeware and Full Shareware titles (selected titles only)
2D
Abuse (1996) (originally retail title, now freeware)
Akuji the Demon (always freeware)
BioMenace (1991) (originally retail title, now freeware)
Cave Story (always freeware; has retail remakes)
Commander Keen in Keen Dreams (1991) (full shareware)
Dark Ages (1991) (originally retail title, now freeware)
Dopefish (always freeware)
Dopefish Forever (always freeware)
Dschump!/Jump! (full shareware)
Eternal Daughter (always freeware)
Guardian Twins (always freeware)
Halloween Harry (aka Alien Carnage) (1993) (originally retail title, now freeware)
Holdover (always freeware)
Keen 2000 (always freeware)
Legend of Princess (always freeware)
Mario!! (always freeware)
N (always freeware; has retail sequels)
Natuki (always freeware)
Ninja Senki (always freeware)
Noitu Love (always freeware)
SideSwipe (always freeware)
SkyRoads (once shareware, now freeware)
XEVIL (1994) (always freeware)
3D
Miko-san's Miracle Board (always freeware)
4. Demos and limited-content shareware (selected titles only, this list will get longer)
Adventures of Captain Comic
Aldo I, II, and III
Alien Rampage
Clyde's Adventure
Eduardo the Magical Toaster
Electro Man
Gateworld
Hunter/Hunted
Jazz Jackrabbit
Jazz Jackrabbit Holiday Hare '95
Jill of the Jungle
Rochard
Vinyl Goddesses from Mars
Xargon
5. Demos of games I also own the full versions of, but still have the demo of on my computer too. (this section may be removed from this list)
Nothing I can think of at the moment.
Summaries
And now for the actual summaries in this first update.
1A. 2D Platformers - Physical Copies (Disk or Disc)
Notes: "Saves" mean the game supports save files saved to your hard drive; "password save" means that the game will give you codes that you will need to write down in order to continue from that point. "No saving" means you can't save in that game (shame on them!). Number of players listed is for single-system multiplayer first; if a game has online play support, that will be listed afterwards, and noted as such.
Ancient Empires (Educational) (1990, DOS) - One player, saves. This game was later re-released as Super Solvers: Challenge of the Ancient Empires, but I have a copy with the original title. Ancient Empires is one of many edutainment games from The Learning Company. Sort of like how Operation Neptune is an undersea shooter crossed with a math game, Ancient Empires is one part puzzle learning game, one part platformer. This really does feel like Operation Neptune's logic-puzzle-focused platformer cousin, and uses a similar interface. Both are pretty good examples of edutainment, games which are both decent games and might teach you something. These games always seemed less well known than Super Solvers games such as Treasure MathStorm or Midnight Rescue, but they're just as good or better than those games. Maybe the slightly older "10-adult" (AE) or "9-14" (ON) age ranges on the boxes hurt them, versus the games like MathStorm that are for younger children? These wo games have more traditional videogame action than titles like those, but still have plenty of educational elements. As usual for Super Solvers games, you play as an anonymous person in a blue coat who you name. This time you're a tomb-adventurer variant of this person, so you have a backpack and such, but it's mostly the same as the character in most of these games, Operation Neptune excepted since there you are a submarine. So, this game has two parts, platforming and logic puzzles. The platforming side looks reasonably nice for a 1990 PC game, and has VGA graphics and even soundblaster/adlib music, though it's not great and repeats often. At least it has sound card support, though, which puts it above some games of the day, so it's nice they tried. The graphics are well-drawn and varied, with different visuals for each setting in the game.
As for the gameplay, you control your character with the arrow keys on the keyboard. Up jumps or grabs on to things, left and right move, down goes down a rope or such. Enter switches between your three items, a headlamp that shoots out a beam of light that can temporarily freeze enemies, spring-boots for a high jump, and a limited-uses-per-level shield that protects you from damage. Frozen enemies can still hurt you, though, unlike in Operation Neptune, so watch out, and shoot them when you won't hit them while walking past! The game does not scroll, but instead flips between the screens that make up each level. Again ON works the same way. This isn't a fast-paced action game, then; instead, careful thought should go in to each move. This is a puzzle-platformer, after all, and there is a puzzle to solve on almost every screen. There are five different ancient tomb settings to explore in this game, and you can access four right from the start - Egypt, Greece & Rome, India & China, and Middle East. Each setting has four levels to complete, for a total of 20 stages. There is a harder difficulty option, if normal is too easy; this makes the puzzles harder. Each setting has somewhat different puzzles as well, in addition to graphics. Egypt has many puzzles where you shoot beams of light into rotating prisms; the Middle East mostly has puzzles with numerous switches that move platforms or walls around the screen, and yes solving these requires a lot of trial and error; Greece & Rome has puzzles where you have to hit switches in the correct order in order to move platforms out of your way, a challenge made harder by that enemies will trigger them as well; and the final stage combines the previous types together. The random nature of many puzzles, particularly the switch puzzles in the Middle East area, is kind of annoying as you hit the switches until you luck into the right combination, but still this game will build some puzzle-solving skills among children, or adults, who play it. At the end of each level, you have to put together an image of an ancient treasure from that region. On the lower difficulty these are fairly simple, and thankfully are NOT sliding tile puzzles; you just take the tiles and place each one in the right place. After that is a tougher challenge at the stage exit, to solve a logic puzzle by figuring out what the right tile is for a question-mark block on a 3x3 grid of tiles with various pictures on them. These start out not too hard, but do get tricky; these are definitely good logic puzzles.
So, overall, Ancient Empires is a fun little obscure puzzle-platformer with decent to good level designs, tricky puzzles, and enough enemy-avoiding action to keep things interesting. The gameplay is stiff, and some elements require maybe too much trial and error, but it's at least a decent to good game. The Learning Company were known in the early '90s for making some of the best educational games, and this is one of their better ones. I wish I'd had this as a kid, but getting it as an adult in the '00s I still have had quite a bit of fun with it. Pick this up if you can, and think you might like this kind of game. Also get Operation Neptune, this games' math/sub-shooter cousin! Unlike the more popular Super Solvers games, this game is DOS floppy disk exclusive; it doesn't even have a Windows-port CD version re-release like ON does, much less a Mac version like the most popular Super Solvers games. For the adult gamer, though, if you want any Super Solvers games, this and ON are the two to get. Physical release only.
Arcade America (1996, Win3.x) - One player, saves, gamepad supported (if it works for you). Arcade America is a bad single-screen 'comedic' platformer with a crass, redneck-styled theme to it that I mostly quite dislike. You're a cartoony redneck guy on a road trip across America, seeing the sights and challenging platformer levels in each area you pass through. The platforming levels are okay I guess, though they can be frustrating due to the games' control issues. You navigate the platforms on each stage, shooting or belly-bumping enemies and jumping between platforms as you make your way to the exit on each stage. It works, though enemies can be hard to avoid at times, and cheap hits are an inevitability. This is a hard game, and it's not the good kind of hard. The graphics are well-animated, though, and vary between amusing and unpleasantly gross, which I'm sure is the point, for those who actually like gross stuff, something I never really have. That animation does sometimes that animation get in the way of the gameplay as well, as it can be distracting. And when you're playing a level for the tenth time, those intro cutscenes and animations the game also has get VERY old. There is one more problem: there is a somewhat hidden time limit. Take too long to finish and you won't get the ending. I hate game-wide timers in games, they're awful! Still, the platforming here is okay. Arcade America is overly difficult and not all that fun, but there is some decent platform-action challenge to be had.
The game has performance issues, however. The installer won't run on my newer computer, it just crashes. Copying the game folder to the hard drive seems to work though, though I also tried installing it in a Windows 3.11 installation in DOSBox; that also did the trick. Unfortunately, I have never been able to get most Windows 9x to recognize gamepads or joysticks on my current computer, which is a real pain for platformers like this one; they aren't as good on keyboard! I recommend using a keyboard-to-joystick mapper if you also have this problem. Running it in that Win3.1 installation in DOSBox didn't fix the problem, either; still no joystick. On my older WinME computer the game does recognize that a joystick exists, but I can't get all of the buttons to work, only jump and shoot, and you need four -- jump, shoot, interact (to grab the end-level pullchain, mostly), and belly-bump. And you can't use the keyboard and gamepad together, so you can't use those on the pad but the others on keyboard. And of course, you can't change any settings while in a game, only from the main menu... and you can only save after each level. Great. So yeah, this game has problems. If you can get the game working with a 4-button gamepad or it works well with a keyboard mapper the game is better, but it's still a frustrating game with only adequate-at-best platforming; this game is not that good.
Unfortunately, that's not all there is to this game. It should be, but it isn't. No, there is also a driving component, as you travel between each location around America, finding your scattered companions. The problem is, this plays in the most minuscule window imaginable! It's somewhat unbelievable that they actually thought that that was a good idea, it's an awful one. Almost all of the screen is taken up with a map of America, and you drive in a tiny one or two postage stamp-sized corner of the screen. Here you have a view behind your car, and flip between three different lanes in order to avoid obstacles coming at you and pick up turbo and ammo pickups. In order to have ammo in the platformer levels you need to collect it here, there aren't ammo pickups in the main game. This mode controls just fine, but these segments go on far too long, so they take up a significant amount of time. With something you play this much, they really needed to put some actual work in and make something fullscreen. But no. As it is, Arcade America is one half incredibly bad racing game, and one half mediocre platformer, all with a visual look and comedy style I greatly dislike. Pass on this game unless you have fond memories of it and can get it running well on your computer. Physical release only.
Batman Forever: The Real Game Begins (1996, DOS) - 1-2 player simultaneous, no saving, gamepad supported (kind of). Batman Forever is the PC port of Acclaim's infamous 1995 SNES and Genesis game based on this unpopular Batman movie. This is a sidescrolling beat 'em up / platformer with prerendered graphics and somewhat awful controls. Batman Forever is difficult, frustrating, and hard to control. It does look nice for the time, but the gameplay beyond the graphics is poor, and this has always been the main issue people have with this game. The core gameplay here is that as either Batman or Robin, you explore levels, beat up the guys who pop up in front of you, and make your way through each stage. You can walk, jump or duck, punch and kick, grapple, and drop through floors. Using those last two is much trickier than it should be because you need to stand in precise, but very poorly marked, spots to do either, and the controls for doing so are awful as well; more on that below. The punching and kicking does work, and you have a couple of variations of each type of attack, but enemies seem stronger than you are, at least on Normal difficulty, so the game quickly gets frusrating. And like an old console game, the game has no saving and not even any continues! When you die you respawn right where you were, but run out of lives and that's it, start over from the beginning. There aren't any cheatcodes either, I believe. Awful, for a PC game. For modes, there is the main game, for one or two players simultaneous, and a bad 2-player-only versus fight option. There are difficulty settings for the main game, but it's hard on any of them. My main issue with this game goes beyond any feature quibbles, however. Beyond the bad controls, my main problem with this game is that I've never really been a fan of side-scrolling beat 'em ups. I like isometric beat 'em ups, they're good fun despite their simplicity, but removing that third dimension makes games too simplistic; there just isn't enough left to keep a game interesting, most of the time. This game tries to mix things up with its platforming, puzzle elements, inventory, varied moves, and tough enemies that often attack you from both sides at once, but the core gameplay still isn't all that fun or rewarding. The internet may overstate how bad this game is a bit, as it can be fun to walk around and beat up baddies, but it is extremely repetitive, has control issues, and is far too difficult. Had it had saving it would have been much better.
When compared to the console versions of the game, some things are improved and others are worse. While they did not put in a save system, Acclaim did add CD audio music, voice acting for all text boxes that pop up, and a nice-for-the-time, several minute long CG-rendered introduction. There are also short CG scenes introducing the setting for each subsequent level. Those features are exclusive to this PC version, as there never was a CD-based console release of the game, only cartridge ones. And those are nice features, for sure. However, the controls on the PC are even worse than they are on consoles. You have two options, keyboard or gamepad. On keyboard, the controls are weird and hard to get used to; I list them below. On gamepad, the problem is that DOS only has standard support for 2 or 4 button gamepads, but this game is a port of a console game that used more buttons than that. So, like in Blackthorne (below), you need to use the keyboard along with the gamepad to play this game, if you use one. Movement, blocking, and attacks are on the pad, but the drop-through-floor and grapple buttons are not. You get used to it, but there is a worse problem I have with this game: While the game runs okay in DOSBox on a modern PC, it doesn't like the joystick emulation somehow and when I tried to enable a gamepad, Batman will randomly jump or duck even when I wasn't touching the pad. and the cursor randomly moves around the main menu if you return to it, making selecting anything impossible. Great. Other games in DOSBox do not have this issue. Also, the game only supports one standard gamepad, so if you play a two player game, one player is going to be on keyboard. The only way to get around this is to have a Gravis GrIP setup, which was a multitap for the PC, essentially, for games programmed to support it like this one is. GrIP controllers are, I believe, 4-button gamepads somewhat similar to Gravis's standard classic PC Gamepad from the early '90s. Maybe DOSBox supports the GrIP? If so then that would work, but I haven't tried it myself.
Finally, here are the controls for this game. No, they are not customizable. I'm not sure what all the keys are because I do not have the manual, just a CD in jewelcase, and this game does not have any kind of readme or in-game help, so this is just what I managed to figure out by randomly pressing every key on the keyboard. Finding the grapple and drop-through-floor keys took a while!
left/right arrow keys or numpad 4/6 or joystick left/right - move left/right
arrow key up or numpad 8 or joystick up - jump
arrow key down or numpad 2 or joystick down - duck
arrow key 5 or a joystick button - block
End, 1, or 3 or a joystick button - punch (maybe different types?)
Page Down, 7, or 9 or 2 joystick buttons - kick (maybe different types?)
Insert - grappling hook
Insert+arrow Up/numpad 8 (hit at exactly same time for this to work) - grapple up to next platform above (if at right point)
Delete+arrow Down/numpad 2 (hit at exactly same time for this to work) - drop to next platform below (if at right point)
Esc - Quit to main menu. If there is a pause button, I can't find it - this ends your game, start again from the beginning!
Alt+Q - Quit game.
... Yes, really. No, this is not a very good layout. And again, you cannot change them. So, is the game worth it? Again, it's not all bad; there is a little fun to be had here, as you explore around and beat people up. But with its high difficulty, flawed controls, and mediocre, repetitive gameplay, it's not all that good either. For the few people who actually liked this game on the SNES or Genesis, the question is, is dealing with the iffy controls and emulation issues worth it for the exclusive CD soundtrack and CG introduction? Well, with how dirt-cheap this game should be, maybe. Everyone else should probably pass. Enhanced port of a game also available on SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, and Game Gear. Physical release only.
Blackthorne (1994, DOS) - One player, password save, gamepad supported. Blackthorne, from Blizzard Entertainment and published by Interplay, is a game in the Prince of Persia vein, but with guns and more action. Set in a dark almost fantasy-esque sci-fi world, you are a hero, of sorts, off to defeat the evil king. You've been taken prisoner, but break free, grab a gun with infinite ammo, and begin your quest for vengeance in the prison mines. While you are the hero, you don't actually need to be heroic along the way, as the numerous other prisoners in the game can be killed with no consequence. You can't even free them, just ignore or murder them! I really wish you could free them, the game would be more satisfying that way. Platforming controls are similar to Prince of Persia, so the game is well-animated and your movements are deliberate and controlled. When you move you tap a direction you move a set distance forward, jumps must be pixel-accurate, you have different controls for jumping up and forwards, and you'll need to carefully let yourself up or down platform edges if you don't want to die on impact from the fall damage. You also have an inventory, though do know that if you play with a gamepad you'll need to scroll through it with the bracket [] keys on your keyboard, as this is a DOS game so it only supports the standard 4-button limit on joysticks, unfortunately. Maybe there was no good way around that. It works, but is a little annoying at times. Fortunately you only rarely need to switch items. It's worth using a gamepad anyway, because the rest of the time it's more fun with one. The controls are fine for the genre, though I've always found these games somewhat tediously slow compared to traditional platformers like Mario or Keen. You need to always be careful here, or you'll run off some cliff or walk into a trap and die. Having to carefully face the right direction from the exact right spot to jump up to a ledge above you also gets old fast.
Visually, Blackthorne has classic Blizzard graphics, with an art style similar to The Lost Vikings or Warcraft, but taken in a somewhat different direction. The game looks pretty good and is very well drawn. Each level is large and complex as well, though each area clearly draws from a common tileset so every level in an area will look somewhat similar. The game also uses screen-flipping, instead of scrolling, as in PoP. However, as with Blizzard's earlier great platformer The Lost Vikings, this games was originally developed for the SNES, and the console roots do show in the password-only saving, absense of any features to really explain why this is a CD game and not floppy disk -- the game is under 2MB, has only a Soundblaster or General MIDI soundtrack based on the SNES chiptunes, and does not need the CD in the drive to run -- and console-styled controls. There was apparently also a floppy release of this game in Europe, but they added nothing for the CD version. What is here is good, though, as I really do like the visuals and art design, and the music is pretty good as always from Blizzard.
As for those level designs, this game isn't quite as trap-heavy as PoP games are, but it is still tricky and has plenty of puzzle elements to work through in the stages. Each of the 16 stages is fairly long, so this game will take a while. I've never been a PoP fan so I don't love this either, but the Blizzard touch and more action-packed style makes this a bit more fun for me than Prince of Persia. Plus, no game-wide time limit, thank goodness! The biggest distinguishing element between Blackthrorne and PoP, however, is the combat. While PoP 1 and 2 have the occasional swordfight, traps are your more common foe. Here, however, you will fight many enemies. And while combat is deliberate, it is nothing like PoP, as this games' combat is cover-based. Yes, this is sort of a 2d proto-cover-based shooter, mixed with a Prince of Persia clone. By pressing Up, you hide in the stage background, and while doing this enemy attacks cannot hurt you, bombs excepted. When you let go you dodge back into the plane of action, hopefully to shoot the enemy before they dodge themselves. Naturally prisoners are often in the way, doomed to be killed by you or them. Combat is a tense game of hiding, then popping out when the enemy is vulnerable. You can shoot either direction without moving with two different buttons, which is occasionally useful, as well. The combat system is good. Some stronger enemies must be blown up with bombs, but be careful, because levels usually only give you exactly what you need, so if you waste a bomb somewhere on an enemy that didn't need it you probably won't be able to finish the stage.
Overall, Blackthorne is a good game for this highly-animated-deliberate-platforming subgenre that Prince of Persia created, and mixes things up with its original combat system, but I've never much for this kind of game. I've never gotten more than one or two levels into other popular games of this style, including Prince of Persia, Out of this World, or Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, and while I have gotten to level four in this game, I doubt I'll stick with it; this just isn't my thing. Still, Blackthorne is probably one of the better games in this subgenre. Fans of this kind of game who haven't tried the game certainly should play it. For the rest, maybe try it out if you're interested, you might like it more than I do. Also available on the Mac, PC-98 (in Japan only), SNES, Sega 32X (with a 32X-exclusive graphical overhaul and several exclusive levels), and Game Boy Advance. This PC version is a SNES port. Blizzard has also made a downloadable PC version of this game available on their website for free, though I have the disc.
Bumpy's Arcade Fantasy (1992, DOS) - One player, password save, gamepad supported. Bumpy is a pretty fun but difficult little puzzle-heavy platformer probably inspired by Namco's classic '80s game Mappy. I think it was only released in Europe, but I found a copy sometime in the mid '90s anyway. The game was made by the French studio Loriciel. This is a fairly obscure game, but it's good, though very tough! Bumpy has decent graphics in that classic early '90s European cartoony-videogame style, but it's only a single-screen platformer; no scrolling here. That works well for the design, though, which is around tough single-screen puzzles to work your way through. The number of colors on screen may be limited for something that does support VGA, but the art design is decent. There is also SOundblaster and Roland MT sound support, but only for sound effects; there is no music, unfortunately. There also isn't any real saving, so the high-scores table is useless, it won't save any of that. Fortunately there are passwords to continue from the start of each level. Bumpy's gameplay more than makes up for these shortcomings, however, and that's why I like it, frustration and all. Sort of like Mappy, you move a character around a screen made up of paths separated by narrow walls, and have to collect all the stuff on each stage and then get to an exit. The differences pretty much end there, though, as that is a fast-action scrolling arcade game, quite unlike this one. Here you play as a bouncing smilie-face ball, Bumpy. You bounce as you move, from one tile to the next, so you've got to set up your next move about a tile ahead of time -- he bounces, remember, and you need to hit the button before the beginning of the bounce. You move with the arrow keys or joystick d-pad, but I recommend the keyboard; this game demands precision, and a d-pad isn't quite as precise as hitting the exact key you want, the exact number of times you need to press it. Hitting, or holding, Enter makes you jump up to the top of the screen. While in the air, left or right will move you a space that direction, though you can only do this while going upwards, not down, and only once per jump. Down makes you stop, vital for avoiding spikes above you. You die in one hit, so you've got to get each puzzle right to progress!
And indeed, while Bumpy starts out simple, by the second level this game is hard, and it just gets harder from there. I've never beaten this game and don't know if I ever will, but it is fun to challenge. Each level in Bumpy is made up of about ten single-screen stages, and you can play these stages in any order from a level-select screen. You only get a few lives for each level, though, and only get passwords between levels, not stages, which is probably the key to why this is such a hard game. There are difficulty choices, but it's hard even on Easy; it mostly seems to just give you a couple more lives. The centerpoint of this game are the many different types of tiles you will bounce on. Wall pieces can form walls or floors; you can't stop on wet tiles, though you can jump or turn around; bounce tiles toss you over two spaces; other tiles throw you horizontally across the screen; spike tiles will kill you on contact; some tiles can only be passed through a limited number of times; and more. There are also enemies to contend with, and if you fall off the bottom of the screen you also die. The free stage select within each world allows you to practice any level without having to beat the others, which is great, but you do need to beat them all in one game to actually progress, and the game quickly starts expecting perfection to get through each stage. I eventually gave up on this game in level three, and never have gotten past that point. Still, based on what I have played of the game I do recommend it. I had fun with this game when I first played it in the mid '90s, and the gameplay holds up fairly well. Bumpy is an interesting and somewhat unique game, with a tough but fun style of puzzle-platforming that keeps you coming back. This game is obscure and perhaps too hard, but it is good. Unfortunately this game doesn't have a digital re-release anywhere, but it'd be nice to see someone bring it back; it deserves it. Play Bumpy if you can. In addition to this PC release there re also Atari ST, and Amstrad CPC versions, all Europe-only of course. Physical release only.
Claw (1997, Win9x) - One player single system or 1-2? player online, saves, gamepad supported (if it works for you). Claw is a good platform-action game developed and published by the American publisher Monolith Software. They also released a 2d Gauntlet-style game called Get Medieval around the same time, but this is their platformer. Claw is a hand-drawn 2d title released at a time when more and more platformers were going 3d, but it achieved at least a moderate level of popularity, probably particularly in Europe. You are an anthropomorphic pirate cat named Capatain Claw, and need to run, jump, slash, and shoot your way through many levels of platforming fun as you try to win a hidden treasure hoard and defeat the evil dog-people of the Spanish Armada. Good cat versus evil dogs? This sounds like my kind of plot! :) The game has 17.5 minutes of fully-animated cutscenes, mostly hand-drawn but with some CG elements such as ships, which is pretty cool. There are two reelases of the game, CD and DVD. The much rarer and more expensive DVD version has 640x480 videos, but is otherwise identical to the CD release. I was lucky and found a cheap copy of the DVD version years back, and I do like the higher-quality videos, but the gameplay in both is the same. The in-game graphics are also good, with large, nicely-drawn and animated sprites on detailed backgrounds. As with most of my Win9x platformers I can't get this game to see my gamepad, annoyingly, but at least keyboard-to-joystick software exists. Claw moves fairly quickly, and you can jump, melee attack, and use several different kinds of ranged weapons that you can switch between. You have a percent-based health meter, and your ranged attacks have limited ammo. The game controls well, though sometimes I was wishing you had a double jump. Ah well. The game also lets you set buttons to directly use the four kinds of ranged weapons, but only supports 8 joystick buttons while there are a total of 9 functions, so if you ant to use these and do have the in-game joystick functionality working you'll need to not use one. This doesn't matter much because just switching to the one you need and using that is simple enough.
Level designs in Claw are large and loaded with treasures to collect for points. A little like Commander Keen games, the game is loaded with side areas full of items to get for points. Unlike those games, though, Claw levels are mostly linear paths, not squares or mazes as so many Keen levels are, and they are fairly long. Levels may twist and turn around, but the path forward is usually obvious and well-marked. Getting through those side areas will take practice, though, particularly the ones that require special, one-time-use, time-limited powerups such as the high-jump power to access. This adds some nice replay value to the game. The 14 levels in this game will take longer to get through in a single run than a Keen game would due to the length of the levels. The game allows you to start or continue from any level or save checkpoint you have reached. But yes, there are two kinds of checkpoints here. Each level has some small checkpoints that just continue you from that point as long as you still have lives, but there are also two per stage which save your progress just like a completed level. The levels are long enough that these are welcome, as they do drag on a bit long. If you continue your last game instead of starting a new one, you keep the score you had before, but you also keep the number of lives, which makes progress difficult once your life counter runs low. The solution is starting a new game from that point, but this, of course, resets your score. I would be trying to collect as much as I can in each level anyway, but this is a good dynamic which makes the score system mean something. Claw is a reasonably challenging game, but it's balanced well and is neither too hard nor too easy. This is a good game that is quite fun to play, repetition aside, and I can see why the people who did play it mostly seem to have liked it. And if you do beat it, the game also supports custom levels, which is a pretty awesome feature. A bunch come with the game, and you can also find an editor for the game online to make your own. The multiplayer is level-racing, competing to get through stages the fastest. It is unfortunately linked only, not splitscreen, but it is nice to have as an option, though I haven't played it myself. It supports IPX network, dialup modem, and direct-IP connections. There was also online play on Engage back when it released, though that has been dead for a long time. Overall, Claw is a good game worth seeking out if you are a platformer fan. The visuals are nice, the game plays well, and levels are fun to explore and collect stuff in. You do do the same things a lot, but what you're doing is interesting so it works. Recommended. Physical release only.
Commander Keen Episode I: Marooned on Mars (1990, DOS) - One player, saves, gamepad supported. Part one of the three-part Commander Keen in the Invasion of the Vortions game, Commander Keen Episode I: Marooned on Mars is the first game in this great platformer series developed by ID Software, later to be id Software, and published by Apogee, now better known as 3D Realms. You play as kid supergenius Billy Blaze, a young boy off to on an adventure in a homemade spaceship put together with some parts from around the house. Billy, Commander Keen once he puts on his brothers' football helmet, has taken off to Mars on an adventure, but he crash-landed there, and the place is crawling with aliens who stole parts of his ship! You'll need to find all four parts to win. What, a car battery can't power a spaceship? Nah, it can, and this game is proof! Yeah, the story here is a funny and a great encapsulation of childhood fantasy, except it's a childhood where the adventure is real. I first played the shareware release of this game sometime after we got a computer in early 1992, and this was by far the best platformer I had played on PC up to that point. The game made a big impression on me, and I've loved the Keen series ever since. So, this game is a very hard one to review, or even summarize; how to be even kind of impartial about a game I have this degree of nostalgia for? It's not easy. I have always regarded the original Commander Keen trilogy as my favorite games ever developed by ID, and still say their name as "eye dee" not "id" because that's how their name was originally presented as.
But anyway, on to the actual game. Commander Keen is a platformer, of course. But as it is an ID game, the technology behind the game is almost as important as the game itself. At the time of its release in early 1990 it was a revolutionary game because programmer John Carmack figured out how to get a smooth-scrolling platformer to run on the PC, something no one had done before. ID's first thought was to approach Nintendo about a Mario PC game, but that was immediately turned down, so Tom Hall came up with an original idea instead. It turned out pretty well, for sure. There is no parallax scrolling here, but just getting regular scrolling on the PC had never been seen in a platformer in the '80s. All seven Keen games run in only 16-color EGA, and this original trilogy really can't match up to the kind of graphics seen in contemporary console games on the Genesis, but for the PC it was a huge step forwards visually. The art design is pretty good too. The sprites look great, and stages look alright, though backgrounds in this episode are just solid colors. Aurally there isn't much to say; Keens 1-3 have no music and only PC Speaker sound effects. I like that there are movement sounds for things such as walking, jumping, hitting a ceiling, using the pogo, and more, so at least there is something to listen to beyond silence. PC Speaker sounds are simple, but these are good, I like them. I also quite like the signs written in "Standard Galactic Alphabet", a letter-replacement cypher. Find the hidden code in the hidden level in Episode III for the key to read all those signs! Or just look it up online, but that's less fun. Episode I's Yorp and Garg enemies are iconic for sure! Environment graphics are tile-based, as in games like Mario, and levels all draw from the same tileset; each episode in this game has a consistent look to it that is distinct from the others. There are also only a handful of enemy types in this game, but it's enough, as each one is very different and has its own unique style. Each episode of the three in the original game does look a little better than the one before it, in some different colors, but despite this each level has its own unique look and feel.
Each game also has an overworld map you can move around between stages that fits its setting, so for this game it's the planet Mars. There are 16 levels in this game, but this one has the fewest full-sized levels of any Keen game. This game has 8 mini-stages, and 8 full levels. Mini stages are just little areas with only a couple of screens and few or no enemies. These are all optional, and the pogo is in one, so don't skip it! Some have little bits of story, too. As for the full levels, two are required but do not have ship parts, four have ship parts, and three are optional, one of those a hidden stage. I drew maps of the overworlds of most of the Keen games as a kid, listing the shortest paths, number of levels, and such; came in handy here. :)
As for the gameplay, Keen has large, open levels with a lot of stuff to collect in them, in that Western platformer style but with better level designs and controls than most. Much like Doom or Wolfenstein would later also do, collecting keycards is central here. There can be up to three in each stage, in red blue and yellow just like Doom, and when stages have keycards they are usually required. A lot of items are out there off the main path if you want to get them for points, though. Your goal in each stage is to reach the exit, but four levels have a Vorticon to avoid or kill in them, at the end; they serve as the games' bosses. Going back to it this is not a particularly long game, but there are enough levels here for a few hours of fun anyway, or many more if you're a kid like I was when I first played the game. Once you finish a level you can't return to it, and the game does have a scoring system, so there is a lot of replay value here if you want to get higher places on the high-scores table. Be wary, though! While bottomless pits are in short supply here, sometimes the game likes to try to trick you with lines of powerups leading straight into pits and the like. With enough skill you can get everything, but be cautious as you explore. I think they got the balance between challenge and fun just right, as the game is not a cheap-death-laden nightmare, but beating each level while getting most of the stuff will take at least a little practice. Keen controls well, also. One button jumps, the other uses the pogo stick, and both together shoot; yes, you do have to hit both to shoot, either control+alt or buttons 1+2 on your gamepad. The pogo stick, once you get it, is great and one of the trademark elements of this series. Once you get used to how it controls it gives you a lot of mobility. As for that gun, ammo is limited, so don't waste it. You only get ammo from the somewhat uncommon gun pickups; enemies never drop anything in this series after death. In addition, you die in one hit, and there are no checkpoints in levels, so watch out! You can touch some enemies, such as the small robots or Yorps, without dying, but they still can push you into a hazard, and others such as Gargs and Vorticons are deadly at the touch. However, you can save anytime on the map, so game only is only for the inattentive. Apogee required all games they published to support saving to save files, a fantastic standard that all console games should have been doing since as early as they could save. That I grew up with Apogee games and the like is a huge part of why the absence of saving in so many console games in the 3rd through 5th generations bothers me so much.
As for flaws, there are a few I guess. Playing the game again now, the game is fairly short, and there aren't a huge number of levels. Also, the shared tileset and limited enemy variety are of note. Additionally, sometimes you can accidentally shoot when you meant to do a tricky diagonal pogo jump because of the two-button control scheme. The scoring system is also partially pointless, since you can save between levels and retry stages as long as you have lives, so you aren't working from a set maximum score; it will just go up as long as you keep playing, though watching it increase is fun. Even if most 'only' got me points, I have very often found myself trying to get every item I can in Keen games. And last, some will dislike the often open nature of the stages. I think that the game strikes a good balance here, with levels short and well-designed enough to hold up well design-wise compared to console platformers while also having lots of stuff to collect as was common in Western platformers of the day, but this is a matter of taste. But overall, Commander Keen Episode I: Marooned on Mars is a fantastic game and one of my favorite platformers. This great game was better than any PC platformer that came before it in both graphics and gameplay, and has some of the most fun game design around. The art design and stage layouts are great as well. I really like things such as the lighting in the Yorp temple mini-stages, areas with Gargs suddenly charging in at you out of pipes, and more. This is a fantastic, must-play title for any genre fan. This game is shareware, and is also available in digital-download compilations of Apogee and Commander Keen games.
Commander Keen Episode II: The Earth Explodes (1990, DOS) - One player, saves, gamepad supported. While the first episode of Keen was distributed free as shareware, parts II and III are available by purchase only. I loved Keen 1, though, so via mail order, which was how you bought these games back then, my parents bought me the registered version of Keens I-III back in the early '90s. I still have the original disk and manual. So, ID made this game bigger and more challenging than its predecessor. Episode II of Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons is, essentially, more of the above, but with new graphics and enemies. This time, Keen has left Mars, but finds a Vorticon mothership heading towards earth, planning to blow up the planet! You need to take out its death rays to save the Earth. With the stakes raised considerably above the first games' simple 'get off this planet and go home' story, Keen sets off to defeat each base on the mothership and save the world. So, this time the theme is industrial, with more robots and machine environments, instead of the often-red facilities of Mars. I'll probably always like the first games' look the most since it's the original, but this game looks good as well. I always have liked this game the least of the three in Invasion of the Vorticons, for some reason, but it is still pretty good. This game has as many levels as before, and it's a harder game with tougher opposition; as a kid I beat Keen 1 without too much of a problem, but this game took me much longer. It's not only a bit tougher though, but more levels are required this time; there are 15 stages, one less than before, but this game has no mini-levels, so it's probably got more content. Of those ten are required: 8 with death-rays, two other required stages, and five optional levels. This was the last of the original trilogy that I finished. I can beat it now of course, but it does take more effort than the first one. It's fun though, of course. Also, the game has enhanced graphics and more complex levels with additional puzzle elements. Keen 2 does some interesting things, and really is a pretty good game. The backgrounds are now cross-hatched, instead of just solid colors like in the original, and stages now have elements such as light switches that make everything dark, and jumping enemies won't jump in the dark. That sounds good, until they hit a light switch and kill you, but hey, that's part of the challenge! Overall Episode II of Commander Keen is a very good game. The great core gameplay of the first game returns, but the gameplay additions and greater challenge make this a nice followup to the original. This game may be my least favorite of the original trilogy, but it's still a pretty good game definitely worth having. This game is available in digital-download compilations of Apogee and Commander Keen games.
Commander Keen Episode III: Keen Must Die (1990, DOS) - One player, saves, gamepad supported. Episode III of Commander Keen concludes the original trilogy. This game has the same core graphical style and gameplay as the original, but again the graphics have improved, and so has the gameplay. Keen III is a fantastic game very nearly as great as the original Keen, and in some ways is the best Keen game. I like this game a lot! This time Keen has traveled all the way to the Vorticon home planet, there to end the threat once and for all. There is a nice twist near the end, but the story here is appropriately simple as always. I like the new setting, and the graphics have more varied environments within each stage than before, though it is still drawing from a limited tileset. You'll travel through towns, caverns, and more; the urban theme is a nice change from the sci-fi installations of the first two games. The level designs are really good, maybe the best of the trilogy, as well. There are a lot of mazelike environs to explore of course, but also some very clever areas. As you are on Vorticon you face a lot of Vorticons this time, but most are much weaker than the tough ones from the first game; those were Vorticon commandos, apparently, while these are just the home guard. New foes are harder, though, so there is challenge here, though overall this game isn't as hard as the second game. The world is made up of six small islands connected with teleporters, and if you use the teleport right, you can beat this game having played only three of the 16 levels. Your goal is only to beat the boss you see, you don't need to collect other things along the way. If you play all the levels this will be a tough game, but it's much easier if you take the shortest path. I like having options like that. Mini-levels make a return as well; there are 7 of them, and 9 full stages. Unlike Keen 1 these "mini" levels are pretty much full stages now, though they are shorter and easier than the main levels are. There is also a hidden level again, after not having one in the second game, and it has that aforementioned SGA alphabet cipher to copy down. Once you have it written, reading the signs everywhere throughout the series is fun stuff! So yeah, while Episode has always been my favorite, Commander Keen III is a great game, and a fantastic conclusion to one of the best PC-exclusive platformers ever. This game is available in digital-download compilations of Apogee and Commander Keen games.
Commander Keen Episode IV: Secrets of the Oracles (Shareware) (1991, DOS) - One player, saves, gamepad supported. Commander Keen IV (or 4): Secrets of the Oracle began the second Keen series developed by ID Software for Apogee. Part one of the two-part Commander Keen in: Goodbye, Galaxy game, this is the second shareware Keen game, and was distributed free just like Episode I was. That was how I first played it, and it's great! This game released over a year after the first one, and it shows -- the game has much better graphics with a slightly angled perspective to give a bit of depth to everything, much-enhanced graphics even if they still are EGA stuff that do not quite match up to console games of 1991 like Super Mario World or Sonic the Hedgehog, and actual sound card support for music. CGA support was also added for some reason, but forget that, play in more than 4 colors! We didn't have a sound card when I first played this game, but when we finally got a PC with sound in 1995 it was nice to go back and listen to. The game has 17 levels, about as usual for the series, with 11 required levels, 5 optional, and a hidden stage. Levels are larger and more difficult than before, so despite not having more stages, Keen IV is a pretty tough game and beating it will take effort and a lot of memorization within each level. They added a difficulty option this time though, and Easy mode doesn't just reduce the number of enemies but also slows down your falling speed, so that's a great option for anyone who finds Normal too hard. Again you can play most of the levels in any order, though, so when you get stuck in one stage you can always just try another one, and the stages have a great amount of graphical variety; each is distinct, and many have unique visual looks. The enemies and environments are all new this time, and are more detailed and cartoonish than before. Backgrounds also are improved and look more drawn and less tile-based, and the cartoonish qualities of everything have really been played up. Perhaps for nostalgia reasons I do like the look of the original Keen trilogy the best, but this style Keens 4 through 6 use also looks great. There are quite a few different environments this time, including underwater for the first time in the series, as well as pyramids, jungles, caverns, and more. The addition of music is very nice as well, and the songs here are good. In this game you need to rescue the eight Oracles, who have been kidnapped, so finding them makes up eight of the required stages. Of course, which stages have oracles in them isn't marked, so just play all of them until you find them all.
As for the gameplay, for the most part Keen 4 plays like its predecessors, but with some additions. Keen is now better-animated, and yuou have some more move though this is still a classic platformer. Your gun is now a neural stunner, not a deadly raygun, but in effect it's the same; you just stun foes permanently, instead of killing them. You run, jump, shoot, and pogo like before, though pogo physics may be improved over before; getting used to it will take a minute, but the pogo stick is great and incredibly useful once you learn it. Additionally, Keen 4 adds four-button gamepad support and a dedicated shoot button, so jump, shoot, and pogo are each on a separate button. It's a welcome change which makes getting around a little easier, though you can play in 2-button mode if you want. You can also now grab on ledges and both look and shoot up and down, all very nice improvements. Looking down is particularly useful to see whether jumping down from somewhere is safe. As always ID doesn't load levels with cheap death pits, but there are many ways to die, you still die in one hit, and levels don't have checkpoints, so when you do mess up and bump into an enemy or killer obstacle, you start the stage over. You still have limited ammo too, though it's easy enough to find more. Keycards return, though there are four now, with a green one added. There are also now many switches, usually to turn moving platforms on or off, though some also manipulate other devices. Last, in addition to the many items you collect for points, there are also water drops that do not give points, but instead, like coins in Mario, a 1-up if you collect 100 of them. So, the gameplay here is familiar, but more varied than before. The larger enemy and obstacle variety mixes things up as well. The slugs, invincible bouncing mushrooms, fire-breathing orbs, harmless bouncing smilie faces, and more are fun and varied foes.
Levels are still very, very well designed. Some are straightforward but have optional side areas or hidden areas full of stuff to get, while others are mazes you need to figure out. Your goal is either to get to the opposite end of the stage, in normal stages with exit signs, or to find the Oracle in those stages. Oracles will be in the deepest point of the level, often through a door with a second challenging area behind it. So, you know your goal, the challenge is just to get there. Exploration is key as ever, and levels are just the right size: large enough to be interesting, but not so big that you get lost. Looking around to figure out the path forward and find the many secrets is great fun, if the regular dying doesn't frustrate you. Level size is just right, and the game is not cheap or unfair, just challenging. Like Doom for FPSes, ID showed their impressive level designs skill with games like this one. Just make sure to save after beating a level! Sometimes I have thought it would be nice if levels had checkpoints, but they're doable as they are, once practiced enough. It's quite rewarding when you finish one. The point system returns too, and it's a bit odd as ever -- you get points for everything, there is a high score table, and you can't replay a level once you have finished it, but since you can replay a level so long as you don't beat it and can save anytime on the map, getting a very high score isn't hard if you are good at the game. Still, is is nice to see your score climb as you get farther into this tough game. Oh, lastly, there is also a little 1-player-only Pong minigame in the options menu, with a look as if you're playing it on Keen's watch. It's a nice little touch.
Overall, Keen IV is a great platformer, and certainly a must-play for platformer fans. This game is perhaps the most popular Keen game, and with its good graphics, music, and gameplay, it's easy to see why! This is a great classic, and it's awesome stuff. As with Keen 1, if you registered this game you got its paid followup, Keen V: The Armageddon Machine. I didn't buy that one back in the '90s, so it is covered below in the digital-downloads category. The weird spinoff title Keen Dreams, aka " Keen 3.5", will be covered in the shareware section since I also didn't play that one back then, and it's full shareware. I did buy the last Keen game, the retail-only Keen VI: Aliens ate my Babysitter! back in the mid '90s, though, fortunately, so I'll cover that one next! Keens V and VI both use the Keen IV engine, though, so they look and play similarly, much like II and III do for the original. This game is shareware, and is also available in digital-download compilations of Apogee and Commander Keen games.
Commander Keen [VI]: Aliens Ate My Babysitter! (1991) - 1 player, saves, gamepad supported. Commander Keen [Episode VI]: Aliens Ate My Babysitter! is the final Keen game. It was released shortly after Keens IV and V as a retail-only title published by the publisher FormGen, though apparently it was actually developed between those two because of retail lead-times. Originally this was probably supposed to be part three of Goodby Galaxy, but they got an offer for a retail game, and did not refuse it. Unfortunately, the contract was bad and ID lost the rights for this game to FormGen, so it has not been re-released since the '90s. After multiple mergers the rights now belong to Atari, but that publisher sadly has no interest in making a reasonable deal for someone to publish this game on Steam, GOG, and such, or it would have happened already. And that's really sad, because this is a great game! I am very lucky to have found a new copy of the game to buy back in the mid '90s. I still have the box, manual, Keenings mini-newsletter, and disks, but sadly the Keen wristwatch that also came in the box vanished sometime over the years. That watch did not come with all copies of the game and seems to be quite hard to find now, so it's unfortunate that I lost it.
As for the game though, this is yet another great Keen game, much like 4 and 5 but with even more graphical variety. As this was a retail title they had a bit more space, so this is a two-floppy game, versus less than one for Keen 4. However, in actual file size it is only barely bigger than that game, and it shows. This game does have one of the longer shortest paths to the end you'll find in this series, but the actual amount of content is is very similar to Keens 4 and 5, and Keen 6 still only has the usual 16 stages. So, my initial hopes that because this game is a retail title...
This village now has a routine comedy act where some random white idiot shows up to wear their bullet ant gloves. It's a little bit humiliating to see them all crying out and failing someone else's manhood test so completely, over and over again like that.
If I were to guess, and that village has been doing this test for generations upon generations, they've probably got a partial genetic resistance at this point. More to the point, it really doesn't make outsiders look good. Cut it out people!
If you want an initiation ritual, just do it the western way. Graduate, get your driver's license, and do something stupid at college.
I'm sure this is most all just stating-the-obvious stuff but at length, but I wrote this up recently based on a significantly added-to revision of some posts I did over at neogaf, so... why not post it.
I have started on a PC Platformers Game Opinion Summaries list, but that will take a little while before it gets started. Today, though, I've got this! This article was based on a series of posts I made on another forum a few months ago, but this version is significantly reworked and expanded on.
Introduction
Nintendo once had home consoles that were very popular with third party developers. Those times are now long past, of course; now things seem to nearly have hit bottom, as Nintendo home consoles get almost no third-party games, and handhelds get fewer than they used to thanks to the rise of smartphones. Indie download-only titles excepted, modern Nintendo consoles have fewer games for them than older ones did, and even worse software droughts. And making things worse here in the West, over the course of the '00s, Nintendo separated from most of their first, second, and close third party Western partners. In Japan the 3DS at least still gets some game support, and that helps, but it's not enough. But how did things get to where they are?
First, I must start with the Nintendo 64. In Japan, the N64 was something of a disaster. Sales were only a small fraction of the SNES (Super Famicom), and most third-party developers abandoned Nintendo for Sony and, in some cases, Sega as well. However, here in the US, the N64 was successful and sold nearly as well as the SNES had here. Developers noticed this and its impressive-for-the-time power, and as a result the N64 has a fairly good library of American-developed games. At that point the best American game developers made computer games, but some of the better console teams supported the N64. While Nintendo's primary audience was younger, they did very good outreach to teen and older gamers: the N64 was the console of choice for the first-person shooter fan who wanted to play on consoles, had the best wrestling games, and had some very good sports and racing games as well. Nintendo also built up a team of Western first, second, and third-party studios from the mid '90s to early '00s, starting with Rare and the N64 "Dream Team" in 1994 and going from there. For more on Nintendo's great Western offerings on the N64, read my Nintendo 64 Game Opinion Summaries list; I will not get into that here. This article is about the Gamecube and Wii generations.
These are the major studios Nintendo partnered with in this period.
-Rare: Second party. Rare is a British studio, but they were discovered by great Nintendo of America exec Howard Lincoln, and had their greatest sales success here. The most important purchase Nintendo made that decade, Rare bought an about 50% share in Rare in 1994, changing that developer from a multiplatform studio to a Nintendo-exclusive one. Working with Nintendo, Rare responded and made their best game yet, the all-time classic Donkey Kong Country. With its success, Rare instantly became one of the most prominent developers around.
-Left Field: Second party. This smaller American studio mostly focused on basketball games on the N64 and Gamecube (yes, despite their baseball-inspired name), but they did also make one fantastic racing game in Excitebike 64.
-Nintendo Software Technology, or NST: First party. NST is a small-ish studio with initially young staff, mostly from a game-development school I believe. The studio started out making some Game Boy Color and N64 versions of popular games such as Ridge Racer and Bionic Commando, and continued making both handheld and console games through the GC generation, mostly focusing on racing games on consoles and various things on handhelds.
-Silicon Knights: Second party. Run by the controversial Dennis Dyack, Silicon Knights may be unpopular now, but they did make one of my favorite games while working with Nintendo, Eternal Darkness. The studio didn't release any N64 games, but their two GC games did help the system.
-Retro Studios: First party. This studio was started up by Howard Lincoln in the late '90s, and was initially run by some ex-Acclaim people. After early difficulties, they eventually made the exceptional Metroid Prime for the Gamecube and its sequels.
-Factor 5: Third party. Though Factor 5 was a third party, they worked closely with Nintendo, particularly on system audio, and made a sound program to aid Game Boy Color sound programming. Factor 5 was always a tech-focused company, and released some of the most technically impressive games on the N64 and Gamecube.
Iwata's New Direction
However, around the turn of the millenium Howard Lincoln and his boss Minoru Arakawa both retired from Nintendo of America. Lincoln was a strong leader, and without him the developer network he built up started to slowly crumble. And around that same time, a new boss took over in Japan, as Satoru Iwata replaced the longtime Nintendo head Hiroshi Yamauchi. I'm sorry to be critical to someone who sadly died young, but while Iwata did many great things for Nintendo and I love a lot of his work, particularly Nintendo's first-party Japanese efforts and some of the partnership titles, there is some legitimate criticism I need to make. Iwata wanted to reverse Nintendo's 5th-gen failure in Japan, and take more direct control over Nintendo's overseas subsidiaries as well. He did rebuild Japanese relationships, though the Gamecube ended up selling worse than the Nintendo 64 there, so sales did not recover; the PlayStation 2 proved to be unstoppable.
Meanwhile, he allowed Western relationships, the ones which had maintained the Nintendo 64 and led it to success here, founder. Taking direct control over Nintendo of America also probably did more harm than good, as since the early '00s NoA no longer had the independence to make deals such as the Rare purchase. Reggie may be a good marketing guy, but he does not have Lincoln's authority. Nintendo needed both Western and Japanese developers, and a more independent branch in the region where Nintendo sees the most sales, America, made sense. Iwata's Nintendo needed to put a lot more money into Western development teams, along with the important work he did to rebuild relationships with Japanese third parties, but the first place to look would be to the pretty good teams Nintendo was already working with. Rare is the most prominent of those, but those others on the list above are noteworthy as well. However, Nintendo really needed both American AND Japanese partnerships, not one at the cost of the other. They have never accomplished this, unfortunately.
The end result of this was that of all of the studios on the list above, only only two, the two first-party studios, still work for Nintendo, and only one, Retro, is still as important as they once were, as NST's console team was shut down early in the Wii generation. And even Retro was reduced in size, as in the early days the studio worked on multiple games at once, instead of only one. Of the rest Factor 5, Silicon Knights, and Left Field have closed, and Rare is a shell of its former self. And nobody on their level has replaced them, either; Nintendo has partnered with Next Level Games and Monster Games for a few titles, but that's about it. Satoru Iwata focused instead on rebuilding Nintendo's relationships with Square-Enix, Bandai Namco, Capcom, and other major Japanese studios. Iwata thought that that kind of partnership with Japanese third parties was preferable to Howard Lincoln's system of wholly and partly-owned Western developers, but Nintendo needed some of both, not one or the other. Paying a third party to make a game for you isn't a bad idea, but it won't necessarily lead to lots of support outside of those games, as we have seen on the Wii and Wii U.
I do need to acknowledge, though, that this is not all Nintendo's fault; the other developers often did choose to leave on their own, for various reasons. I think that those developers who left should have rethought it some -- Rare, Left Field, Silicon Knights, and Factor 5 would all find much less success without Nintendo's development support, that's for sure, and the benefits of that Nintendo development support are something that has been fairly well documented from other teams they have worked with more recently such as Next Level, too. Again Nintendo makes developers who work with them better, and those studios all found that they could not replicate that magic without Nintendo's help. But still, as the chief partner NCL deserves the largest amount of fault. And Silicon Knights and Factor 5 particularly were both alienated primiarily by the Wii's seriously lacking hardware power compared to the Xbox 360 and PS3, the other consoles of its generation... and the Wii's low-power, casuals-first design was a response to the Gamecube's failure to sell despite its being very powerful, about as powerful as its competition that generation.
Losing Rare, and Rare's Games
But while all of those studios had been important, the loss of Rare is the signature one. Nintendo and Rare parted ways in late 2002, shortly after Rare's only Gamecube game, Star Fox Adventures, released. Rare's co-founders the Stamper brothers wanted to retire, and Nintendo had first dibs at buying the rest of company, but refused an offer to buy up the other 50% of the company for some not-very-good reasons. Some Rare people wanted to try moving beyond Nintendo, as well. So, both the Stampers and Nintendo sold to Microsoft. This was a disastrous mistake which, in my opinion, Nintendo still has not gotten over. Yes, Microsoft paid Nintendo $100 million dollars for Rare and probably have not gotten that much value back as Rare declined in success over the course of that decade, but Nintendo needed Rare's games more than that money, and Rare needed Nintendo's audience to sell lots of copies of their games. The two worked together well, and neither have quite been able to replicate that since they separated. The expense of buying the other half of Rare would be a $100 million better spent than gained because of the long-term benefit Nintendo would have gotten. I know Rare has many critics who do not believe this, but it's true. I think Rare was starting TO recover when Nintendo and the Stampers doomed any chances of that happening that generation by selling them to MS. That sale is what really messed up Rare, worse than anything from during the Nintendo era.
Indeed, I have absolutely no reason to believe that a Rare that stuck with Nintendo would have released as few games as Rare did during those years, and their games would have sold better as well. Rare's critics significantly under-estimate how important Donkey Kong was to Rare, for example; the DK games were among Rare's best sellers. Donkey Kong 64 is Rare's best-selling 3d platformer, not the Banjo games. Even beyond losing the GC audience, losing Donkey Kong is something that Rare's sales have never recovered from. Rare wasn't sold until September 2002, well after the GC's November 2001 release. Rare had no GC games early on because they had some struggles moving over to the next generation, and then just as they were working through them and were ready to start releasing stuff, they got sold to MS and had to start all over on a new console... and then had to do that AGAIN a couple of years later because of the early X360 release. Maybe Rare's best games were going to be on the N64 regardless, but I don't think the "Rare wasn't worth it anymore" narrative would be nearly as popular as it is had Nintendo kept Rare, their games in the '00s would have been more and better. Nintendo's Japanese studios had struggled with the SNES-to-N64 transition, and Rare helped bail them out there. Losing patience with Rare just a few years later when they were going through similar issues was incredibly hypocritical and wrong.
Had Nintendo kept Rare, the GC absolutely would have done better. It would have helped the Wii as well. Rare was key to Nintendo's success on the GC. People who claim Rare had become irrelevant are overlooking how important that Nintendo audience, and Nintendo input, was to Rare's success, I would say. With Nintendo, Rare would have been a much better developer than they have been with Microsoft; Nintendo makes developers who work with them better, and messes with developers less than Microsoft does. There are bad stories out there of what MS did to Rare! Rare's 3d platformers would have been huge, instead of abruptly ceasing to exist, first. Xbox beat 'em up game Grabbed by the Ghoulies was going to be one had it stayed a Gamecube title, there would probably have been something from the Conker team instead of the Xbox port of the N64 Conker title that they did release, and maybe also a DK and/or Banjo game. More 3d platformers were sorely needed on the Gamecube, a platform with a very thin first-party platformer library. Rare had covered for Nintendo's inability to make more than one first-party 3d platformer on the N64, but couldn't do that again because they left and were not replaced. Donkey Kong Racing would have been a great complement to Mario Kart: Double Dash, as well, in the racing genre. Nintendo also really needed Perfect Dark Zero to bolster their shooter selection, and Kameo would have been just as good as it is on X360, that is, great. Yes, many of these are genres Nintendo made as well, but complimentary games help sell consoles. That's exactly what sold the N64, with both Nintendo and Rare titles, and that's why MS has both Gears and Halo, and not only one of them. And that's what Rare gave Nintendo.
And there likely would have been a few more games than that, too, as having to switch platforms twice that generation, from Gamecube to Xbox and then Xbox to Xbox 360 in 2005, really threw off Rare's game output. We know that Rare had a lot of games well into development and would have started to deliver titles for the GC in later '02 and into '03. Even if some games ended up delayed, Rare's games, once released, would have sold well and filled in those software droughts just as expected. Rare was one of the best developers of the 5th generation, and had Nintendo not been so foolish as to throw them away that could, and should, have continued. Ditching Rare just because they were having a hard generation transition was incredibly short-sighted, considering how just a few years before Rare had saved Nintendo when NCL's Japanese teams were having those same kind of troubles on the N64! Rare found that MS was much less likely to approve the games they wanted to make than Nintendo had been. Iwata's shift away from Western first and second parties was a definite mistake. If Rare finished the games they were working on on the GC in '02, and perhaps added a game or two to that by the time the GC was done, that'd be 5-7 games for the system, all major releases. It could be even more than that if there were more later titles. Some would surely have been successful and good. Even Star Fox Adventures did fairly well, even if the game was disappointing gameplay-wise. So yeah, who can say? Well, just look at their projects in development and extrapolate from there. With Donkey Kong and Rare's own IPs both, Rare would have continued to be a good studio. Even if they couldn't quite recapture their N64 greatness, they still would have been successful and popular.
Losing Rare to Microsoft Made Things Worse
While keeping Rare would have helped the Gamecube, what it would not have done is made the GC as successful as the N64. The problem is that Microsoft's entry into the industry hurt Nintendo the most that generation. The Xbox stole away the core Western shooters-and-such audience who had owned N64s, and after failing to recapture them with games like Metroid Prime and Geist Nintendo gave up on that audience for good. S GC to early Wii-era strategy that didn't give up on almost all of Nintendo's Western relationships would have helped for sure, but I don't think it could have stopped Microsoft, with Halo and then later Gears and such, from taking that audience. The best Nintendo could have hoped for was to hold on to a bit more of it than they did... but even that could have meant a lot in the long run, if it meant more third-party support for the later GC years and the Wii. That may be too optimistic a scenario, but losing all of the studios I listed earlier really did hurt. The new strategy, focused on contracting out single games with external teams much more often than buying developers, works, but leads to less certainty than when you know a developer is working with you. Namco isn't making Ace Combat games for Nintendo systems just because that team worked on Star Fox Assault, for example.
Still, MS was set up for success with the American shooter-fan audience. They aimed right at it, and got the games and marketing just right. Microsoft's most important release was Halo, and with that they won over shooter fans, both those previously PC-only and those who had loved Goldeneye. Nintendo didn't, or couldn't, match it. MS also pushed the mostly PC-focused Western development base to also support their console, and publishers, starting to struggle because PC-only sales weren't keeping up with the rising costs of development, listened. Over the course of the '00s this badly damaged the US PC game development base, but was a big boost to console development. Nintendo ended up mostly missing out on this, as a lot of games either were for Xbox, or were on the PS360 and not Wii. Nintendo selling their one FPS team to Microsoft certainly hurt them, but by the time they sold Rare to MS, a lot of the damage had already been done thanks to the success of the first Halo game.
The problem is, Halo was released in late 2001, right when the Xbox and Gamecube both launched. I don't think there'd have been much of a chance of Rare finishing their next shooter, Perfect Dark Zero, in only a year and a half, considering that PD was an early '00 release. If they could have gotten it done by launch though, or by spring '02 at the latest, yes, I think it would have made a real difference... but MS's entry still would have been a huge problem for Nintendo. Even if Nintendo did everything right, MS's existence as a company aiming straight at shooter fans and PC game developers was going to take away a good chunk of N64 fans. But Nintendo could have done better than they did at trying to hold on to what they could. Instead, Nintendo decided to sell Rare in fall 2002, and PD Zero still wasn't out, though Metroid Prime was only a few months away. As an aside I always did find Halo only decent, while Metroid Prime is one of the best games ever and the far better game, but most people disagreed, unfortunately... and I can't deny that it has good multiplayer (on splitscreen and LAN; Xbox Live didn't exist yet), while MP of course had none. The end result of Nintendo's loss of Western core gamers was the Wii's casuals-first strategy, which was hugely successful for a while before crashing on the rocks of the rise of smartphones, while losing almost all remaining Western developers. Short-term gain, long-term pain, there.
The question is, could a PD Zero in, say, 2003, or maybe even later, have helped the Gamecube keep up with the Xbox in that market? I'm skeptical, and think that it'd have probably been too late. Maybe if PDZ could have released in 2003 it could have made a difference, but if it slipped later than that, it'd be simply too late to matter much. And of course it'd need to be a great game, too. The PDZ we got on the 360 in late '05 wasn't as good as the first game on N64 had been, certainly. Who knows how an earlier GC version would have turned out. But even so, some help would have been better than selling that team to your primary competition for that audience! So yes, the GC would have done better with Rare. How much better I don't know, but it would have done better, and had an even better overall library -- and even as it is the GC is my favorite 6th-gen console. However, the GC would still have finished miles behind the PS2, the Xbox still might have finished second worldwide (though maybe not, the gap was only a few million so who knows), and Microsoft still would have taken most of the American "core" gamer audience away thanks to Halo taking on the Goldeneye mantle for popular console shooting games. Those things are all true.
Still, though, dropping Rare was a big mistake and even if it couldn't have "saved the Gamecube" all on its own, giving up and selling Rare off hurt. Rare's output has still not really been replaced, Nintendo released more 3d platformers on the N64 thanks to Rare than on any console since, for instance... and those post-Rare years in the '00s were painful for Donkey Kong games, as Nintendo struggled to figure out what to do with DK without Rare around to make the games. And yes, DK64 is amazing and one of the best 3d platformers ever, the haters are all wrong! Also, the other games Rare was working on when Nintendo sold them, including Kameo, the original 3d platformer version of Grabbed by the Ghoulies, Donkey Kong Racing, and maybe other unannounced games (Conker 2? Some DK or Banjo platformer?), timing wouldn't have been as critical because those games would appeal to the audience of Nintendo fans who did own Gamecubes. That audience wanted PDZ as well, of course, but a lot of Goldeneye fans had bout Xboxes, not GCs, and if you want to have the GC do better, you'd need PDZ to convince at least some of them to buy Gamecubes. And considering how previously supportive third parties such as Acclaim, Lucasarts, and Midway started abandoning the Gamecube in and after 2003 because of lacking sales, time was of the essence if the system was going to keep that from happening!
So, in conclusion, I cannot think of any situation where Rare gets as irrelevant under Nintendo as they have been for years under Microsoft. Even a lesser Rare would still have still had much better sales than it has had in our history since leaving Nintendo.A Rare releasing a mixture of new games and pretty good DK titles would have had more than enough sales to justify continued support. Nintendo and Rare needed each other, and today Nintendo still needs a new Rare.
Conclusion: The Wii and Beyond
As a result of all of the above, the Gamecube failed to sell in the US as well as the N64 had. Third parties started out supporting the system reasonably well, but as sales failed to match expectations, by 2003 most Western third parties dramatically cut back on GC support. From that point on the system only got more family-friendly games and the occasional major title, with very few major exclusives or ports. As described earlier, Nintendo's response to this was the less-powerful Wii, and we all know how that went for Nintendo and third parties -- the GC-era losses became permanent, and Nintendo now has entirely lost the core Western base, both developers and fans, at a time when they are absolutely vital for success as the number and quality of Western console games rose dramatically over the course of the '00s and beyond, as those studios Microsoft helped lure over from the PC side focused on consoles. Those developers wanted to support systems powerful enough to keep up with the other major consoles and the PC, and the Wii was not that, even if it is a great console and certainly my favorite home console of its generation. Nintendo lost Western developers at exactly the wrong time. I like the Wiimote, but Nintendo needed both traditional games and the new stuff that controller allows.
Beyond the issue of Rare, the basic question is this: Which would be better for Nintendo overall, either doing as they did and prioritizing lower-power systems with a heavy casual gamer focus with the DS and Wii, or making some other system that perhaps still had the motion controls, but was more powerful, enough so to be competitive with the other two systems? The issue is, the Wii had its greatest success in the early years of the generation, when the Xbox 360 and PS3 were expensive and constantly failing due to hardware issues. Could a more expensive Wii have replicated its success? And if not, would it be worth it? That generation, the Wii was just right particularly from 2006 to 2010, so perhaps not. However, losing Western developers as Nintendo did had very serious long-term implications, and the Wii U has done badly in part because of that, as the casuals did not stay and the hardcore were gone. Some would say that Nintendo were doomed either way, but as a Nintendo fan I don't believe that. With more and better games from Western teams, the Wii and Wii U would have been more successful with core gamers than they have been. So, dropping teams like Rare, Left Field, and Factor 5, and not replacing them with Western teams on their size and caliber, did more harm than good. There is no definite answer to what Nintendo should have done, but I have always thought that the Wii was somewhat underpowered, more so than it should have been, so I'd lean towards that. Nintendo did not need to match the PS3, just be closer than they were. Third parties would surely still have mostly ignored the console, but if it was easier to port games over to from the PS3 or X360, we probably would have gotten more high-quality third-party releases than it got.
So, as for me, while it is entirely possible that had Nintendo kept Rare everything else would have happened very similarly to how it did in our history, I do think that it would have made a positive difference for both Nintendo and gaming in general. Would it have been enough to nudge Nintendo into making the Wii more powerful and not giving up on system power, while still innovating with the Wiimote? If that is even a "perhaps", then selling off Rare was a mistake. Rare was a great developer, and keeping them would definitely have meant more great Rare games on Nintendo systems, and Nintendo would have been better off if they had had that; Rare's games were always a draw, particularly their Donkey Kong games. Post-Nintendo Rare made some great games, such as Kameo and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, but without Donkey Kong or the Nintendo audience they could never recapture the level of sales they needed to convince Microsoft to let them keep making games like that. With Nintendo that would not have been an issue. Developers are not all going to stay great forever, but Rare's collapse was largely externally-ordained, not because of internal problems. Even if those other studios would not have stayed great even had they stuck with Nintendo, and as much as I like many games from all of those teams that is entirely possible, having Rare at their side would benefit all Nintendo consoles. And a continued focus on Western developers, with a more independent Nintendo of America reacting to the changing market here more quickly than far-away NCL Japan can, would help.
But regardless of how things could have gone, with things as they are, as casuals switched from the DS or Wii over to smartphones Nintendo lost a lot of sales. But unlike before, there is no obvious route to turn to to turn things around. Casuals are gone, and MS, Sony, and PCs have locked up core gamers. Nintendo today has virtually no third-party support on their home consoles outside of indie games on their eShop downloadable platform, and on handhelds only Japanese studios still release many games for Nintendo. This is worth repeating because even if people today know these things, all of this happened because of Nintendo's reaction to the Gamecube's failure. With a more successful Gamecube, maybe Nintendo does ot react as strongly against powerful hardware. While it is true that Nintendo does not have the same amount of money as Sony or Microsoft, and reacting to their big bucks by retreating and focusing on games and innovation such as the Wiimote instead of continuing what they had always done before and releasing systems as powerful or more powerful than the competitions', the end result of that path has not been good. The glory days of the "it prints money!" DS and Wii have been replaced with today's struggles to find a place in this quickly-changing industry. I love Nintendo, and hope that they continue on as not only a developer, but also a hardware manufacturer. For now consoles do still have a place, and I want to see Nintendo find something that brings sales and developers back to their platforms again. But success based purely on first-party offerings will be difficult, and after progressively alienating developers, and watching a new business take away the people they brought in thanks to the Wii and DS, that future will be difficult to find. Nintendo needs to find it, though, and with skill and luck they can. I badly hope that this industry will not collapse in favor of nothing more than terrible, exploitative fee-to-play mobile games, that would be a dark future indeed... and yes, that Nintendo now makes a few such games is not something I love. But that is another issue. For this article, I will conclude by just saying that yes, I love Rare, and still hope the studio can return to at least some of its former glory. Perhaps their new pirate-themed game for the Xbox One will do that, we will see. But it will probably be less successful than some comparable Wii U game would have been, even with the Wii U's limited sales...
Is websites with autoplay videos on almost every page. I mean, Youtube is one thing, okay. But news sites like CNN, ESPN, etc... no! Stop it! The autoplay videos everywhere are incredibly annoying!
Now, making it worse is that flash runs terribly on my computer now and this makes the videos hard to stop, but even if they ran fine, I don't want to have to click "stop" on a video in a NEWS page every time I go to one. I probably go to CNN's website less often than I used to because of how annoying the autoplay videos are...
So, since E3 is coming up fast yet again, already, the rumors are all over and might be fun to discuss.
For the NX, supposedly it'll be more powerful than the PS4 or X1, but since Sony and MS are both talking about releasing upgraded versions of their systems maybe as soon as this year, that may not mean much. Will Nintendo yet again release a new system quite a bit less powerful than the others' are, or will it be close? That'll be very interesting to see. On the positive side, if Sony and MS release only updated systems, it does make a Wii U-like situation where far more powerful systems release a year later much less likely... unless MS does exactly that instead of releasing a half-upgrade this year, but who knows; we'll have to wait until E3 to learn what all three are going to be doing. Even though a lot of third parties have pulled out of E3, for the big three hardware manufacturers this is shaping up to be a huge Ee!
Of course, whether Nintendo can do anything to start winning back third parties is the other huge question, though that will be very difficult, considering how bad things have gotten now. Or will they just give up on that, and focus on first-party-published games only, again? One rumor is that Nintendo is trying to get more games finished faster than they have recently, and that would help of course if it's true and actually happens. You still need third parties at some point, though, but due to Nintendo's choices in the past they have lost almost all of them. More first party output would help a lot though, with how slow it's been in recent years. I still say that Nintendo never got over their terrible decision to sell off Rare... too bad.
Beyond that, the big NX question is about how it'll integrate a screen-on-controller portion and a traditional console portion. I think there are conflicting rumors here though, so who knows. Nintendo has talked about trying to make their handheld and TV systems more similar in order to make development easier, so some kind of new system or set of systems that all run on similar (maybe ARM?) hardware seems likely... though ARM isn't the best choice for a TV console, I'd think, so we'll see. As for my opinion on this one, I can understand why they would want unified system architecture, but the differences between handhelds and consoles are as significant as ever, and you can't make one system that does both equally well. I know some people like to dream about it, but so far at least you can't make a handheld that is also a great TV console, it would not be powerful enough... but different but more similar platforms could work. It will be interesting to see what Nintendo's come up with though, and if it'll go over better than the Wii U did. Here's hoping, they need it!
As for Zelda, the top rumors are that the game will launch on both NX and Wii U, as with TP and the GC and Wii versions, and that there might be a female playable character as well as the regular male one. The former of those seems very likely, but for the latter, while it'd be great, I'll believe it when I see it. Oh, and third rumor, voice acting for everyone except Link. Sure, why not. http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1205846
As for Sony... that's another subject, but if they seriously are going to release a "PS 4.5" or PS4 Neo or whatever this year, that's only three years after the PS4! Yes, all games apparently will have to work on the older system, but still, you're asking a lot from your customers to get them to buy another expensive system AND games... oh and a VR headset too. MS is also talking about upgraded systems and a short life cycle, but not quite as much as Sony has been. I know people buy new phones all the time, and they need more power particularly for VR, but still, this could backfire... and the idea defnitely has gotten a lot of criticism online too. PS4 Neo potential info: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1209238
I see this everywhere these days. "Don't be a tattletale", "don't betray your superiors' trust", "don't backstab your partner on the force", "don't narc on me", "don't rat me out", "don't snitch", this incredibly poisonous attitude against "whistleblowing" runs at every single level of society, from public to private, from children to adults, from the privileged to the oppressed.
I'm sick of it. I've tried being understanding. I really have. I look at "stop snitching" for example and try to see the systemic prejudice and abuse of power the police have used against that group to understand that maybe the origin of the "no snitching" mindset is about making sure that police don't come in and make things worse for everyone. That's true, that's an issue, but when you see it at every level and notice that even in those poor and oppressed neighborhoods, the "no snitching" attitude often goes way beyond the police, it becomes a bigger symptom of society at large.
Nobody likes the whistleblower because bringing in outsiders to "interfere" is apparently worse than the original crime, even when that crime is murder. But, the primary benefits of this attitude are ALWAYS the sociopaths trying to get away with some shady dealings. Those people don't deserve our loyalty!
Now for me, I've ALWAYS had an issue with this "moral". As a kid if someone picked on me, I ran straight to someone in authority. Sometimes it was fine, sometimes they ignored me, and in one example some teacher decided I needed to be "punished" myself, forcing me to wear a "tattle tail" made of construction paper. Yes, I'm a bit bitter about all that after all this time, but not that much since it only happened when I was a kid, and well worse examples come to mind from later years, but it underscores my point. Reporting someone's crime is seen as worse than the actual crime far too often, and I'm sick of it.
I have no illusions about what's going on with Edward Snowden. Obama isn't just "trying to make sure justice is done". He's making an example of a dirty rat who told on the NSA to the world. That's what that is, and it's got to stop.
Nintendo's getting a lot of mileage out of that trip to Jim Henson Studios. They're using the Star Fox team muppets in the commercial for Zero:
I love these muppets. First thing is I hope they retool the current Muppet Show to more closely resemble the "variety" acts of the 70's show. I mean, at LEAST set those old guys up in the balcony again. (They also need to make the muppets a little less horrible to each other.) Secondly, let's get some sketches with the Star Fox team in there. It could be the new "Pigs in Spaaaaace"!
Well, it's released, anyway. I don't have a computer good enough to run the Rift or Vive, much less the money for one right now... but have been following it, of course. It's interesting stuff; I like the Virtual Boy (and Sega's 3d shutter-glasses for the Master System), and it's cool to see consoles finally try VR again but with much better technology. I haven't used either one of these headsets myself, unfortunately, but I'd like to try. Given how I don't have much negative effect from the VB, I imagine I wouldn't have much of an issue with nausea and such.
Of course, VR advancing to this point raises questions about the future -- sci-fi stories are full of horror stories of future tech gone bad, and VR like this is a step towards that. Does it allow good things too, of course, but also a lot of bad... like, hackable brain implants? People living only in VR worlds and not in reality? Etc etc. It's a step towards at least some of those (mostly bad) sci-fi scenarios becoming reality. And that's not even mentioning things like global warming, etc. But I'm a natural pessimist like usual of course, I'm sure others think of this much more positively.
But as for the actual hardware as it is now, while I may not have one I like watching game videos on Youtube, so I have watched all 11+ hours of Giant Bomb's Oculus Rift stream when it released, and then all of their similarly long HTC Vive stream when it released a few days back, so I think I have a decent sense of where the tech is right now. The Rift and Vive are very cool tech, but they are also quite expensive, too much so at the moment unless you have a lot of extra money lying around. And the games? Well, some look cool, but a lot look early, sometimes Early Access early. And many are overpriced as well, compared to regular Steam game prices. Giant Bomb's opinion so far seems to be to wait until more games that make good use of VR are released (and maybe also lower prices) before buying. Of course the Giant Bomb guys are very jaded and critical of many things in gaming, but still, some of those games... yeah.
The other issue is the thing which differentiates the Rift and Vive -- the Rift comes with a regular 2d controller and a head-tracking headset, while the Vive comes with a pair of motion controllers and cameras to track your physical location in a room, on top of their head-tracking headset. It's $200 more of course, but you get more... hand-tracked motion controllers clearly add a lot to the games, when you compare the two lineups, or those livestreams. The Vive looks more interesting to me than the Rift. The Rfit will get motion controllers of some kind, but not room-scale VR with cameras that track you moving around an actual physical space, apparently. The Vive has better hardware in the box, too, it seems -- slightly bigger field of view is reported. And the Oculus Rift is owned and released by Facebook, a somewhat evil company who wants all your personal information so they can sell it to advertisers. The HTC Vive is released in partnership with Valve, whose Steam isn't the best, but isn't quite as evil as Facebook.
So is the Vive better? Partially, it sounds, but there are two big issues with the Vive, though -- that that room-scale element requires you live somewhere with a LARGE square open space in a room with your most powerful computer in it, and warp-to-move isn't great for many genres. On the first point, most people aren't going to have enough space for the Vive to work as intended. Until people can have holodecks in their house or full-immersion brain implants (with all the serious concerns such a thing would cause), the space requirement (15x15 feet is ideal apparently, or more) is a huge issue. Room-scale is a neat idea, but you can't move around, really, just move around a few-foot rectangle. Jeff of Giant Bomb was saying how he sounds like he wishes he could get a Vive, but just doesn't have the space --particularly with this space needing to have your main PC in it. I wouldn't either, sadly. And how do you move around beyond that rectangle? Warping. You point one of the hand-controller cursors at the floor, hit a button, and it warps the square to that location. That's fine for an adventure game or dungeon-crawler RPG, but a platformer, fighting game, FPS, etc? Forget it, that wouldn't work at all! And you can make games that use regular controllers, that will be better for some kinds of games, but motion controls would be great for some kinds of things that they aren't due to the controls. There are issues here that room-scale VR causes and can't fix.
As for the games, some in each stream looked interesting, but I haven't tried any of course so I can't say too much. I will say, though, that despite their criticism, that tube racing game? It's in my Steam wishlist now, I'll get it for sure once it goes on sale.
But anyway, yeah, VR is here. What does anyone else think? Someone tried it yet?
