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» April 07, 2006
The Top Five or Ten Best Games that are Awesome - Number Four
Long ago, gamers thrived on 2D platformers, because that’s all there were. Sure, there were some psuedo-3D games in the forms of flight simulators and rpgs, but let’s face it: 2D was the best. VGA graphics were state of the art, and the internal speaker on your 386 had the best sound quality you’d ever heard in a game. Even CGA yellow-and-black games were still good, and your computer was slow enough to play them all the way they should have been played. Now, of course, a 286 won’t play much of anything, but it will play the best old-timey PC platformer of them all: Commander Keen.
Billy Blaze, child genius, battles the Vorticons on Mars, their mothership, and their homeworld in the Commander Keen trilogy, alongside pretty rough-sounding audio and relatively choppy scrolling. In Commander Keen IV: The Secret of the Oracle, Keen was upgraded with Soundblaster-quality music and sound effects, as well as a complete visual upgrade. Backgrounds resembled something of an MSPaint masterpiece. New abilities, like looking up and down, improved controls, and the ability to use switches and fireman-style poles were thrown in for good measure. Bizarre enemies and the ever-present theme of candy as the point items got better and better as the series went on. After all was said and done in Commander Keen VI: Aliens Ate my Babysitter!, another company published “Keen Dreams,” a completely different and not-so-great episode that took place between Keen 3 and 4. Instead of a ray gun, you use Flower Power Pellets. Great. Instead of bloodthirsty aliens, you fought vegetables. Awesome. Nonetheless, it was still a solid platformer by yesterday’s standards. Besides a Keen game released for the Game Boy Advance some years ago, the Apogee classic hasn’t seen any action, save for a cameo in Doom 2’s super-secret hidden level, “Grosse”.
Nowadays, very few games are able to stick to a 2D format and keep their popularity, what with the explosion of FPS’s, fighting games, and (barf) sports games. Thankfully, sites like www.dosgames.net and www.alex-soft.net preserve the shareware and freeware unpredictability of olden games, where graphics didn’t matter for shit – all we cared about was how fun it was.
But, uh, Timesplitters 3 is still pretty sweet.
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