In the good old days, Nintendo had Mario. Sega had Sonic. And the PC had... nobody. And, to be brutally honest, it still doesn't. For some reason, the PC has never really managed to get along with platform games - and certainly not those of the quality available on the consoles. However, at around the same time that the Gameboy was starring a little Italian plumber, Sega were proudly showing off their super-speedy spiky blue hedgehog, the PC community was introduced to their own would-be cult hero: a certain Commander Keen. The first three episodes were only ever available in EGA format (if anyone would like to correct me, I'd be delighted!), thereby ruling out the possibility of playing them on the palmtop. For the fourth installment, however, a CGA version of the game was produced. Despite taking up a fair bit of system memory (unless you have expanded memory, you'll probably need to quit System Manager before being able to run the game), Commander Keen IV works fine on an HP palmtop except for a few slight problems with the graphics, more on which later. As far as gameplay goes, Commander Keen IV is little more than your average platformer: run... jump... shoot... and little else. There are, however, a few neat - nay, innovative - touches of which the programmers can feel justifiably proud. The first is the pogo stick - when activated, as the name suggests, our hero, Keen, finds himself pogoing around the screen like a maniac. Not too useful on it's own, but when used in combination with a standard jump, larger than normal distances can be achieved - good for clearing the odd bottomless pit, or line of fire. The second is in the diversity of levels - you'll be in an Aztec temple one minute, underwater the next. A nice touch too is the game of Paddle War on the menu system (a.k.a. Commander Keen's wristwatch) - it might be little more than a highly simplistic game of pong, pitting your wits against the computer's, but it serves as a fun little diversion. The one major downside to the game is, understandably, the restrictions of playing it using the palmtop's LCD screen. Whether it's you or an enemy, once in motion, blurring does take place - and because of the limited colour palette, certain things are hard to make out. Especially troublesome are spikes which rise from the floor (as featured most frequently in the temple levels), and the little slime patches that the slugs leave behind. Both can kill, and the annoyance factor can be high when such an event occurs. Overall, you can't be help but be impressed by Commander Keen IV. A feeling of quality oozes throughout the game, right from the menu system through to the gameplay itself. As far as platform games go, this is actually a decent effort which still shows up well today, despite its age. The only real problem is with the HP's screen limitations - if you can put up with them, however, this game is well worth the disk space. |
