Description of Commando ROM - MAME

Commando is a classic top-down shooter, where you take the role of an unnamed soldier fighting in an unnamed war (although based on the appearance of the chopper presented in the game and the cabinet artwork, it is rather safe to assume the unnamed soldier is in fact a US Commando operating in Vietnam war era Vietnam), and your job is to make your way through several levels, and to defeat a garrison of soldiers inside a fortress on the end of each stage.

Now, Commando is a legend and a forefather of many games to come after it. And essentially, it’s not a bad game at all, yet—and let’s be all frank—it aged a lot since the date of its release in 1985. And quite surprisingly it’s not the graphics and nor it’s the sounds that aged so drastically, it’s the gameplay itself. I mean, I’ve tried even the NES port of Commando, and although it pretty much looked as crappy as one would have expected from a NES game, I actually liked the NES gameplay a bit more than that of the arcade version. For you see, there’s difficult and then there’s difficult but fun. Unfortunately, arcade Commando falls rather into the former category, and suffice to say, it’s not at all that super glorified “non-stop action” the Computer Gaming World magazine describes in its review of the NES port.

You see, until you reach one the ’fortress areas’ at the end of each level (which serve as a kind of boss fight), the enemies are spawned continuously in Commando. So, basically, you can never shoot them all, and they’ll just keep coming and shooting at you, no matter what you do. And, why yes, it is a problem—and in fact a major one. For there’s virtually no reason for you to actually shoot, if you know from the very beginning that there is no chance of you succeeding in it anyway. And so you just rush to the end of the stage, kill the garrison of the ’fortress’ (which—fortunately—doesn’t spawn indefinitely like the rest of the goons you encounter throughout the game) and go straight into the next level.

Well, it’s not that easy, actually. But, you get the idea why exactly is it a problem: because—just as one would guess—the never ending streams of enemy troops pretty much ruin the gun part of the run-and-gun game, which Commando boldly tries to convince us it is.

That being said, though, Commando was a major success of its time. It was selected as the ‘Best Arcade Game’ of 1986, and I can imagine that the players of the era must have been going all over the wall the moment they first saw it. And Capcom sure seized the opportunity to create a new successful franchise; the major success of Commando spawned two more installments (Mercs and Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3).

For a decade to come, Commando would be the template, the blueprint for dozens of other top-down shooters, on which they would build and which they would further refine, in their own attempt to catch at least a pinch of the fame Commando managed to gain in its own era. And as such, it is something worth at least seeing in action, even were it just for the mere curiosity of witnessing to the actual history at work.

[veo]