Hey! Anyone remember Commander keen?

N

Nilaul

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Commander keen? Anyone played it? I use to play number 2 all the time when I was a annoying kiddo. I was addicted to; I'm not sure if it was because it was because it was sooo good, or if it was because it was the first game I ever played (also I way dumber back then).

I'm no replaying Number one online:

http://www.play.vg/games/148-Commander Keen.html

God the controls are kinda floaty. The graphics still look nice and clean at the lower resolution, but does number one have no music at all or is that an error in the port?
 
I remember that it blew my little five-year-old mind when I found that one secret level in the third game that gave you a complete conversion of the Vorticon alphabet into English, and I realized that all three games were actually chock full of hidden messages written in that shit. I think I went through every level, looking for every message I could, and by the end I was pretty much just reading it without a chart.
 
I do. I forget it was done by Id before they went on to Doom. Back then PCs had to compete with the SNES and Genesis and Keen was the answer. It didn't compare at all to the console games at the time. Pretty generic and bland. Funny how now PCs are the reference platform for gaming.
 
Loved Commander Keen!

Played the original on my PC, I was thinking of trying to find the game so I could play it again for old times sake.
 
It's criminal that the collection on Steam doesn't have 6 and Keen Dreams.

Keen Dreams could be a fragment of my imagination though.

Keen 1 is the first game I ever played and it's well documented on video.
 
Yep, Keen 4 is where it's at, played it a ton as a kid. Love watching Cosmo's speedruns of that game from time to time.
 
Why did these these never show up on GOG? I'd have bought the whole lot, even that crappy Keen Dreams one.

I mostly played 1, 4 and 6.
 
God I think the first one is hard because of its controls, there so floaty. Ill take a look at the 2nd one (the one I use to play non-stop).
 
I don't think the first one had any music-- just PC speaker sound effects. Incidentally, the first Keen game was one of the first PC games I'd ever played. I have many fond memories of that series from my early childhood.

I remember how excited I was once my dad bought a sound card-- not so much for the audio, but for the sake that I could then start using a controller instead of the keyboard (controllers plugged into sound card MIDI ports in those days).
 
I liked this series a lot. The only one I never completed was Keen 5, I think.

Shame that you can't get Keen 6 anywhere. Licensing issues or something like that, right?
 
CoG said:
I do. I forget it was done by Id before they went on to Doom. Back then PCs had to compete with the SNES and Genesis and Keen was the answer. It didn't compare at all to the console games at the time. Pretty generic and bland. Funny how now PCs are the reference platform for gaming.
Click to expand...
I think your memories are a bit messed up.
It was an attempt to make the PC viable for a specific genre where it didn't work (platforms with dynamic scrolling) but PCs were already a very prolific source of quality games in plenty of other genres.
 
Commander Keen never clicked with me, but I really loved the Apogee action platformers, especially Duke Nukem 1 and 2 and Monster Bash.
 
These games were great. Were there only six of them? I know I had six. I remember the first one had you stranded on Mars... The second was in a hard-as-balls space station... and the third was on a purple planet, possibly the home world of those dog-like aliens that are the main foes of the game.

Then there was a SNES-like jump in graphics and sound for the fourth one, which was on a lush green planet with cool cave areas... The fifth one was once again in a space station, this time full of crazy robots... And the sixth one had that AMAZING alien world where you're trying to rescue your babysitter. I remember being endlessly impressed with it.
 
Aww yeah. Commander Keen 4 was the first I played and still my favorite. I remember looking up maps/solutions on the internet 'cause I got stuck in one of those pyramid levels.
 
It was a decent series of games to play back then, since I couldnt afford every superior console plattformer that I wanted. Tried to go back a few years ago, but they felt pretty poor too me unfortunately :(
 
No music, the first game came out before sound cards were common, and composers in game studios were rare. Commander Keen was great, it was one of the first games really pushing EGA graphics, and I was amazed at the console-like smooth scrolling. PC's in that day just couldn't match consoles, except the super expensive Commodore Amiga.
 
Used to play CK4 and the CK6 demo all the friggin' time. Like all of the early Apogee/id games, I never got far enough in any of them to bother with the later chapters, happy to mess around in whatever free stuff we could get. Played a bit of Keen Dreams, too, as well as CK1 (which my friends and I came to after CK4, and thus thought it was worse because the graphics weren't as good and did you even have a pogo stick in that one?).

I have no idea if I'd have the patience for any of those games now, especially given that Mario games make me hate life (I'm so bad at them).

Also: Commander Keen 6 was released to retail by FormGen, which eventually ended up in the hands of GT Interactive, which became--guess who?--Infogrames/Atari. That's why 6 isn't included in id's CK Complete pack on Steam; all the other episodes were released as shareware through Apogee.
 
CK is a big part of my childhood. Totally loved it! Me and my cousin even sent fan letters (via snail mail) to the devs.
 
I've been meaning to make a retrospective thread on the series for ages. 4 and 5 in particular are brilliant games, and you can see a lot of DOOM's ideas and style in them.

Rash said:
Shame that you can't get Keen 6 anywhere. Licensing issues or something like that, right?
Click to expand...

Yeah, they cut a bad deal to get retail distribution for 6 and lost the distribution rights outright in the process, and these days they're held by Atari, who couldn't care less. Keen Dreams is in a similar boat, but that was always owned by SoftDisk due to their contract, and I think you can still buy it somewhere despite the full game being shareware from day one.
 
Sure! late childhood spent playing them along with X-Wing and Dune II. Great times, great games.

There's a Commander Keen Collection on Steam (only 5 out of the 6 games though).
 
chrominance said:
Used to play CK4 and the CK6 demo all the friggin' time. Like all of the early Apogee/id games, I never got far enough in any of them to bother with the later chapters, happy to mess around in whatever free stuff we could get. Played a bit of Keen Dreams, too, as well as CK1 (which my friends and I came to after CK4, and thus thought it was worse because the graphics weren't as good and did you even have a pogo stick in that one?).

I have no idea if I'd have the patience for any of those games now, especially given that Mario games make me hate life (I'm so bad at them).
Click to expand...

Yep you had it in the first one too. The first one was actually my favorite but I played it a lot and it was the first one I played.
 
Dreamwriter said:
No music, the first game came out before sound cards were common, and composers in game studios were rare. Commander Keen was great, it was one of the first games really pushing EGA graphics, and I was amazed at the console-like smooth scrolling. PC's in that day just couldn't match consoles, except the super expensive Commodore Amiga.
Click to expand...
Commodore Amiga weren't "super expensive". They were pretty much considered the popular family/gaming computer here in Europe.
And to claim that PCs couldn't match consoles is a vague and misleading statement.

Unlike Amiga or consoles they didn't have a chipset dedicated to scrolling or hardware sprites, which is why they struggled in the platform genre, but they were obviously more powerful than the typical console in a lot of other areas, which is why you had stuff like Ultima VII (and few months later Ultima Underword) on PC.
 
I loved these games, I played all 6 of them back in the day.

I think there was a side-game called "Keen Dreams" or something like that, so maybe there were actually 7 games.

The first three were more difficult for me; I was better at the later games.

Anyways, those were some of my earliest computer games. I used to think the music in the 5th one was the coolest, ahhh, so lame!
 
I played 4 all the time. Grew up with a PC, and no consoles at all, so it was pretty much platformer staple.
Couldn't be bothered to replay any of them on Steam though.
 
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