Shooter
November 1986 (Capcom)
I have to preface this whole thing by saying that I generally don’t like shooters, am not very good at them, and get fed up with them rather quickly because of the previous two facts. I’m going to try not to hold this against any of the games.
So far Commando is the best shooter for the NES. Granted the competition is Donkey Kong 3,and it’s a stretch to count that. The only other thing that comes close is the collection of light gun shooters and none of them are really all that close either.
People knew what they were getting with this game back in the day. It had high resolution graphics. It was state of the art. The box says so, and the box is never wrong1.
I’m not going to get on Capcom for saying that stuff, partly because I don’t have a good way to check it. What I will say is that the graphics on some parts were flashing so much that stuff seemed to disappear for small periods of time.
Ignoring that, I see it as a shooter. It’s going to take something special to convince me that any shooter is more than just a shooter. But for what it is, Commando is a fun game. At least for the parts that I survived to see.
There is a two player mode. Sadly I don’t have a second player to play with me.
I wish I could get into more details, but that would require being better at the game and not dying. I don’t see that happening very soon.
- I lie, sometimes it is. See some proof. [↩]
I keep wondering how did people manage to deal with the sprite flicker back in the days? I mean, it’s not like it’s something unnoticeable, in many games it makes the game virtually unplayable.
I have no idea either. The only thing I can think of is that there wasn’t really anything else available for your home. Sure, Atari had systems. But let’s be honest, those just aren’t as good. Plus I’ll bet that most kids who had an NES didn’t want to go out and buy an Atari anyway.
So if your option is to deal with sprite flicker or not have anything the choice is easy.
The other thing that makes it a bit bearable is that a lot of these games were in the arcade first. Commando was out in 1985. So even if the home port wasn’t as good as the arcade, which didn’t really start happening for a while, you were still playing Commando. At your house. Instant cool points.
Well, Atari games had lots of sprite flicker as well, didn’t they? I think Atari programmers invented sprite flicker. Funny, playing games way back when, sprite flicker didn’t seem particularly noticeable or irritating. I don’t think it was quite as jarring on older TVs as it is on emulators or modern TVs. Back in the 80s TVs were all fuzzy and flickery and some were black and white!
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And now my ignorance of old things not Nintendo shows. I have no experience playing those. And emulation doesn’t give you a 100% authentic experience.
I used to use FCUltra for NES playing. That thing was written to perfectly emulate an NES and not for perfectly playing the games. I got fed up playing Mega Man and hated it until I figured out it was the emulator and not the game.