Old video games have the reputation of being challenging. Often to the point that modern players can’t understand how people used to tolerate the difficulty and keep going back to try to complete games.
Arcade games similarly have the reputation that they may be designed to be punishing to make sure players put more and more coins into the arcade machines. Of course, there is a balance that the games can’t be so punishing that the players don’t feel they make any progress and want to stop playing.
This brings me to Commando. It’s a game that I’ve heard of for years, and all I really knew about it is that it’s a Capcom game that I hadn’t played before. That changed with the release of the Evercade EXP as the retro themed hand held console comes with a bucket load of Capcom games built in.
The game is a top down run and gun shooter where you play as Super Joe, a commando who is on a one man mission in enemy territory.
Having played this game now, I can say that I very quickly found it to be one of the hardest arcade games I’ve ever played through. The problem is that for a shooting game your bullets don’t actually travel that far, probably left than half way across screen. Also it feels like you shoot in eight directions and often your bullets just fly past enemies and miss where you’re trying to shoot.
To make matters worse, not only was shooting an issue, but you’re also next to defenceless. One hit and that’s a life gone.
The Evercade allows you to press a button to insert a coin for additional credits, and using this method you essentially have infinite lives. This did not help my cause as it doesn’t matter how many credits you have you still get a game over and have to start from scratch after a few lives.
The game does have checkpoints in stages but when I found that I was getting killed every few seconds it wouldn’t matter how many lives or credits I had if I couldn’t get through from one checkpoint to another.
The good news is that the Evercade allows you to quick save to your heart’s content. And oh boy was this necessary.
Some people may love this game, but perhaps because I didn’t play this retro game until now I just don’t have the rose tinted glasses to be forgiving of it. I just didn’t find it fun. It was too difficult.
The graphics are old school and may have been impressive at the time, but we’re serviceable at best for me. I didn’t feel much connection to Super Joe.
The Evercade EXP allows you to play the game in Tate mode which lets you hold the console sideways and have the vertically orientated game in portrait mode. An issue here is that I find this fiddly to hold and control as well as I would if I was holding the console horizontally. This has been less of an issue on other games, but in the case of Commando, because the game is so unforgiving I couldn’t afford give up any ground of better controls just for a better display option.
The Evercade gives you some stats and found that I was able to beat the game in less than 30 minutes, but that in order to get through the game I had to quick save 33 times, but loaded the game a total of 178 times. Now, if I found the game to be more enjoyable or at least fairer I wouldn’t have saved that many times and would have attempted to get through more of it without resorting to saving every minute, but I knew I either play and complete the game this way, or I just wouldn’t have bothered.
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