Commander Keen in Keen Dreams | Hacker News Reader

Commander Keen in Keen Dreams

github.com

225 pointsTomte55 comments

I used to play "Goodbye Galaxy" and "Invasion of the Vorticons" as a kid. I knew almost every secret way in "Goodbye Galaxy" back then and still remember many levels and secrets. I remember there was a secret way, where you could get 2 "1UP"s, but in the process you die, because you cannot get out of the secret location. Played many hours of that level to get a highscore "record" and thought of myself as so clever ... Oh and who knows about the trick to get 1 extra "gun" at the beginning of "Goodbye Galaxy", entering the spaceship map? ;)

"Invasion of the Vorticons" was a quite difficult game as a child, because the controls were not as responsive as with "Goodbye Galaxy", but I actually liked some of the monsters more and the energy blast of the weapon more than in "Goodbye Galaxy". Overall however, "Goodbye Galaxy" was the clear winner between the two though.

I played "Keen Dreams" years later, but I really disliked the stone throwing in an arc and enemies waking up after some time again. Level design also felt better in "Goodbye Galaxy". I never finished "Keen Dreams", but I often finished "Goodbye Galaxy".

At the time I knew no English (pre-primary school and early primary school time), so the texts made little sense to me, and I interpreted them in my own ways, trying to find words that look similar in my language.

"Goodbye Galaxy" was perfect. I still remember the place where Commander Keen showed his butt.

i knew none of these :( never made it past the ice level or the big pyramid shaped one.

I also played the heck out of Goodbye Galaxy as a kid (as well as all the other commander keen games), and much to my chagrin was never able to figure out the secret of the pyramid levels. Such a fantastically designed game at every level, from the writing to the graphics to the game mechanics. I'll always have fond memories of sneaking into my dads study with my brothers at night when we weren't supposed to be playing on the computer and exploring the world of Commander Keen.

> At the time I knew no English (pre-primary school and early primary school time), so the texts made little sense to me, and I interpreted them in my own ways, trying to find words that look similar in my language.

[EXIT]

¡Sí, éxito!

What is cool is that the "Standard Galactic Alphabet" ("Too bad you can't read the standard galactic alphabet, human!" [0]) is also used in other games, like MineCraft [1].

I could actually read it later on, because in Keen 3 I believe I found the translation on some pyramid level (iirc).

[0]: https://64.media.tumblr.com/20adefd053fe320e3aabc7f7b1deb39c...

[1]: https://vivu.tv/what-is-the-galactic-alphabet-in-minecraft/

At the time I had already translated it thanks to the "EXIT" signs in Keen 1 or 2. It was such a cool optional in-game side puzzle.

Don't forget the letters U and D (for Up and Down) at the series of switches that would open doors.

[1] claims that Quake 4 uses the same alphabet for the Strogg, is that really true?

[1] appears to be one of the web sites generated by either GPT-3 or something like it. Don't trust anything it says.

Doing a web search specifically for "standard galactic alphabet quake 4" doesn't appear to produce any interesting results, so I think it's false.

Get a good read on [1]. Learning how to identify those web sites is rapidly becoming an important skill. Today you're just learning something a bit wrong about Quake 4 because the transformer model thought that sounded plausible, tomorrow it could be something much more dangerously wrong.

that's what I was thinking too. if it's not GPT it's at least a regular ol' content farm

Hmm first time I gave this any thought, I knew about minecraft (the spell book) and looked for a source to back it up. I should be more careful.

To be clear, I don't intend this as sharp criticism against you. These sites are next-level in fooling people and I don't expect anyone to have strong defenses against them yet. This is more a public service announcement.

Good luck to us all.

Could be. Would love to see some references; There's possibly a link to other Id Games.

Why? Commander Keen is spiritually connected to both Wolf and Doom. Read this: https://wolfenstein.fandom.com/wiki/William_J._Blazkowicz_(d...

sure but Quake 4 was Raven and not id proper

I did not know the sources of keen game/(s?) were available. I remember reading in "Masters of Doom" about the scrolling technique [0], and how ID tried to use it to create a port of Mario for the PC. Now I can read the code, too :-). [1]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh

1: https://github.com/keendreams/keen/blob/4348b4719be87a0b873f...

I wonder if there's enough interest in the franchise to reboot it or see it in a new medium in a way that isn't just a cash grab. My worry there's only a 5-year window of PC gamers who would care, but I'd still love to see it.

They made an attempt, but it was apparently a "free-to-play" pvp card game which caused a bit of a stir and got cancelled prior to release: https://www.gamereactor.eu/commander-keen-reboot-seems-to-ha...

While I loved the original games, I did not like this new comic style at all - it is a very different type of humor. Also, the impressions of the new game by these trailers were very unsatisfying and not really like a game I would enjoy playing and not at all like the original games.

So I wondered, how should a modern reboot of the game actually look like?

The graphic style is sth very subjective. I think just keeping the old pixel graphics would not be appropriate. But then what style? Should it be some comic style? Or more realistic? Or maybe sth in between, like GTA? Maybe like Halo? There is a similar discussion around Monkey Island now.

I assume it should be a proper 3D game.

What type of game? I think this should follow the old style. Ie. some small puzzle elements (but not too hard), some maze-style levels, levels where you do not just go from left-to-right but in any directions, where you collect key cards or whatever, activate some mechanisms etc. Maybe it's a bit like Tomb Raider.

The main character should be the same. The setting should be similar, the same, or maybe extended, of course different worlds. I think there should be more and new and different opponents, aliens, etc.

I think the kind of humor should be similar. But this is maybe hard to get right because I'm not sure how it fits together with modern graphics.

Should it be violent? Should there be blood? Maybe that fits the humor. I don't know.

Yeah I think you're right that they maybe missed the mark with this. I know I'm certainly not the target market (my only experience of Keen was killing him in Doom II) but it looked a bit odd to me.

Resurrecting a franchise has to be done with a great deal of care - there has been success with id software games before (Doom and Wolfenstein are good examples) but I guess you're walking a pretty fine line when you try it and there will always be a vocal (minority?) crowd telling you that you're fucking it up.

I don't know if the Keen games was popular or interesting enough to warrant a reboot, but I certainly wouldn't envy the team tasked with the purpose of developing it for exactly the reasons you stated.

> What type of game? I think this should follow the old style. Ie. some small puzzle elements (but not too hard), some maze-style levels, levels where you do not just go from left-to-right but in any directions, where you collect key cards or whatever, activate some mechanisms etc. Maybe it's a bit like Tomb Raider.

Hm, I've been thinking that some format like Super Mario 64, or Super Mario Galaxy, or A Hat in Time would fit how the Keen games worked very well. Using the Bean'n'Bacon-Rocket to cruise between different planets and space stations, chasing hints for the mighty Mortimer, solving puzzles of some difficulty, possibly with some light Metroidvania elements of upgrading the rocket (naturally with a vaccuum cleaner and booze, as in the first game). Maybe you could go ahead and do some of the interesting ideas Super Mario Galaxy explored, with small, strangely shaped space stations with whacky gravity.

So painful that the requirement for so many companies to make sequels to classics is "We'll make it if we can use the IP as window dressing for some exploitative gambling mobile game in the hopes that a handful of whales will pour enough into it a month to justify it"

Yeah I imagine that happens a fair amount, but thankfully it's not always the case. We just have to hope that for every attempt to make a STALKER or Worms sequel w/ NFT tie-ins (blegh), there's a Doom Eternal or a Monkey Island.

It was, to be fair, a standard platformer with no innovative mechanics that was mostly known due to being one of the only ones on the personal computer at the time which lacked the hardware acceleration to normally make it possible.

The Franchise has no identity other than the characters involved.

Sonic 4 and Sonic Generations did not merely bring back the characters of the older Sonic games, but the innovative mechanics that are still fondly remembered.

Yeah that could be a weakness (no built-in audience waiting for the next chapter...) or a strength (you can really take it in any direction if you want it to...). However my opinion is broadly the same as yours - there's not enough meat on those bones to warrant a sequel.

They should do what Sega does with Sonic and just kinda let people use the IP for fan games so long as no one makes any money off of it.

Then make a weirdly popular movie starring Jim Carrey as Mortimer McMire.

I look forward to the angry fan reaction regarding the Dopefish casting.

I feel like you could get Elijah Wood to say yes to that. And it'd be awesome.

Probably not, unfortunately. (I'm also in that 5-year window; the original Commander Keen was the first PC game I played on my own and I played the hell out of it).

The one form that MIGHT work might be something like a tabletop adaptation somehow: A nostalgic/90s aesthetic TTRPG on a group saving Mars from the aliens or something. It'd be cheap enough to produce + distribute and TTRPGs can live on niche, dedicated fandoms in a way that's harder for video games, plus there's some crossover in the people who like both.

Oh, wait. We could reboot it playing as the ALIENS. That might be unique enough to catch some new fans if it were well made. A just plain reboot won't work, though.

Yeah, it would be a good candidate for a 3d platformer run and gun except that the theme of the character is probably considered to not be cool or interesting enough to reboot.

Commander Keen was, in my opinion, the videogame version of Calvin and Hobbes' "Spaceman Spiff", and that character probably doesn't resonate with the under 30s which comprise the majority of the video game buying demographic.

I still hope someone at ID pushes the idea anyway, who knows, if it's a good enough game people will play it regardless of the character attraction.

> Calvin and Hobbes' "Spaceman Spiff" I hadn't put it together, but you're right!

Just release a Commander Keen game pack for the Switch.

Back in 2014 when the source code was released: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8326883

There are a few forks with lots of activity since the original release, this one in particular seems quite active

https://github.com/ReflectionHLE/ReflectionHLE/releases

Just got a Retroid Pocket 2+. There's good support for Dosbox with the RetroArch dosbox-pure core, and having a trip down memory lane playing the commander keen games

The graphical improvements from Invasion of the Vorticons to Goodby Galaxy (and apparently Keen Dreams, although I didn't play this one) were really remarkable.

Wonder if there are any fun numbers hidden in this source code. Although, I guess that would mostly be for 3d...

Aliens ate my babysitter.

The readme says it should be compiled with borland c++. Do you know why wasn't turbo c/c++ used for these ?

Or why not any compiler from the last 15 years

If it ain't broken, don't fix it. What's the point of updating an old game's source tree to compile with the latest and greatest compilers?

Even if one wanted to do that, it would probably be best done as a fork.

Well because GCC

Sometimes the code was written specifically for nuances of a given compiler, and compiling the same code on a different one would produce side effects.

For one, the inline assembly syntax wasn't exactly the same.

When I was a kid I had a DOS game programming book, the worst thing about it was that it came with the Microsoft C compiler.

EVERYONE used Borland back then. So most of the sample code and shit you would find on the AOL forums or BBS's wouldn't work.

Sure, if you knew assembly and your compiler it was probably trivial to get it working. Same goes for functions to call interrupts and things like that.

If you had two compilers for the same language from different companies back in the 80s or 90s, the chances of them both successfully compiling the same codebase without any changes was slim to none. A bit like sharing SQL between Postgres, SQLite, SQL Server and Oracle nowadays.

As far I remember (I used these tools extensively at the time), Borland C++ was the bigger, more complete and more powerful package. It was basically the professional version while Turbo C++ was the hobbyist one.

I had the same recollection as you, but just looked through a Turbo C book I have here and couldn't find any reference to its big brother. A bit of Googling later, and it turns out Borland C++ was Turbo C/C++'s successor. The releases went like this: Turbo C 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, Turbo C++ 1.0, Borland C++ 2.0, then onwards. So Keen may require features that only appeared in 1991 onward.

Microsoft took more of the approach I think we're remembering. For example, BASIC PDS 7.x being the more professional version of QuickBasic 4.5.

So then where does Turbo C++ 3.0 fit in? My copy is (C) 1992, but it was still being sold in 1999, alongside what I'm pretty sure I remember as Turbo C++ 4.5 that targeted versions of Windows that were not out in 1991...

Boy, remembering that really digs up some nostalgia...

edit: I see the "Borland C++" wikipedia page present it as the successor, but the "Turbo C++" wikipedia page describes it as the hobbyist counterpart. The release dates and version numbers line up really well, so that makes sense. I was a hobbyist at the time.

Hmm, weird, I don't know. I only got as far as Turbo C 2.0 and then jumped ship to Turbo Pascal for the next several years (I know, I know.. not a great decision in hindsight!) ;-)

The Turbo/Borland distinction was present for both C and Pascal products from Borland all the way up to Turbo/Borland C++ 4.5 and Turbo/Borland Pascal 7.0.

For instance (different language but same company), Turbo Pascal 7.0 and Borland Pascal 7.0 co-existed at the same time. They were simply targeting different markets. I vaguely remember the same thing about Turbo C++ and Borland C++...

Glory days of computer games - simple, funny and not serious. Such a goofy fun time those keen games.

It always surprised me that Keen never really had a console presence, outside of the Gameboy Color (and ports of the original DOS games).

According to Masters of Doom, the games were quite popular, and I'm surprised that there wasn't any interested in making a SNES version or something.

Programmers back then really loved their fancy visual separators.

Nowadays I would be really surprised if I saw something like that, yet it's extremely common in code from back in the day.

I still use it for projects where I am the main author. I also prefer a handful of files containing visual separators to tens of thousands little files containing a few lines of class definitions. Guess the preference depends a lot on which editor or IDE you use.

Oh. I love that you can build this stuff in BORLANDC even today. :)

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