TBT - Keen On Keen

This week I figured I'd throwback to one of the games I played a metric fuck ton when I was a kid and is definitely a classic for any DOS gamer, that's right, we're talking about Commander Keen. Now for the people out there who have no clue what I'm talking about, Commander Keen was developed by an unknown known company at the time: Id Software. You know, the guys who made Quake and Doom and pretty much invented the first person shooter genre.

Back in the day when I was gaming on my grandparents' computer, I used to flip through boxes upon boxes of floppy disks searching for floppys that might be games. Thing is, most of them were either someone's old book report or some boring office program with a cool sounding name. I can't even count how many times I'd find what I thought was a game just to have it be some anagram for tax software or some office retreat itinerary. Once I rounded up all the games, what I found was: Battle Chess, Duke Nukem, some top-down space shooter called Wolverine and a stack of Commander Keen games. To be honest I couldn't tell you much about the other games because from day one I was pretty hooked on the Keen as the kids would say.

Keen was one of the first solid side scrolling and platforming DOS game of its time and it was touted because of its amazing controls, even playing it today on Steam the game feels solid; you never feel out of control or screwed over because of crappy controls which is impressive for a game that came out the year I was born. My favourite, and the one I'll be talking about mostly, is the fourth installment Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy! It's definitely my favourite game in the series and it brought back the pogo stick which they removed in the third game in the series: Keen Dreams.

So to start I should talk about Keen himself, Commander Keen is the space fighting alter ego of eight year-old Billy Blaze. I immediately related to Billy, because as a kid I loved the Spaceman Spiff stories in Calvin and Hobbes: spaceships, rayguns, I loved it. The story in the game follows a Legend of Zelda style story. You travel between stages, searching for the eight Keepers of the Oracle who have been taken captive by the Shikadi, a race of weird electric ghost-men bent on destroying the galaxy.

The game takes place on the planet Gnosticus IV, which isn't a super important detail; I just wanted to fill you in on that amazingly ridiculous name. The gameplay is your typical side scrolling platformer. They added a wider variety of stages and hordes of new enemies in this installment, and like I said earlier, they brought the pogo stick back, which allows you to jump higher and move around the stage faster.

The game has its fair share of collectibles between ray guns and color coded keys. It's not surprising these are the same guys who brought you Doom, another game with ray guns and color coded keys and doors.

Until I started playing WoW this was easily the game I had devoted way too much of my life to and I don't regret a minute of it. Playing these games was a formative experience in my gaming career. Playing it back when you couldn't just read a walkthrough or watch someone speed run it on YouTube, Commander Keen taught me to search all the venues in a game and to really explore to find as many secrets as possible. If you ever get the chance to play it or see it on a Steam sale, I highly recommend it, at least to see a portion of video game history.