A Look Back at Commander Keen

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by twiggy

Better than most Amiga platformers.

That is just borderline trolling. The Amiga has quite a few duds but also a large amount of platformers that are adequate to fantastic.

[Matt_H]

As a lifelong Amiga user, I love the Commander Keen games. They’re a good technical achievement for the then-inferior PC hardware and part of their charm is that they don’t seem limited by the EGA palette or PC speaker, but rather those limitations are integrated nicely into the design/look-and-feel of the games. There’s a good learning curve, semi-open level selection, good gameplay physics, funny storyline, and you can *save your game*. I was very jealous of my PC-owning friends at the time and always wished we’d get an Amiga port... alas!

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Matt_H

There’s a good learning curve, semi-open level selection, good gameplay physics, funny storyline, and you can *save your game*.

Sometimes it's easy to forget that Commander Keen wasn't just an impressive tech demo, but actually fun to play. The presentation wasn't up to par with Amiga platform games, but the gameplay was.

[Megalomaniac]

Originally Posted by Matt_H

There’s a good learning curve, semi-open level selection, good gameplay physics, funny storyline, and you can *save your game*.

American and European designers got these things right much less often than Japanese ones with platformers, to be fair, and things like that matter more than audiovisual spectacle (although Keen exceeds its system's perceived limits (regarding scrolling), which is always intriguing). Can't say I've played it much, but you're making me want to.