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Comment by sdfghswe | Hacker News Reader

Oh man Commander Keen was such a lovely little game. I gotta find a way to run it again.

BTW. Recommendations how to run this? As a "grown up" I haven't used windows in about... 20 years? How do I play this on Debian?

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You can start playing right now: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_1_-_Maroone...

The Internet Archive's browser emulation is an excellent way to scratch a nostalgic itch over a lunch-break. If you'd like something a little more local, Commander Genius¹ is an open-source engine that plays all the Keen games (and apparently Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, too).

¹: https://clonekeenplus.sourceforge.io/index.php

I disagree. It was for kids who for some reason had access to a computer but not a Nintendo (computers cost 10x what a console costs back then, so it was usually due to strong opinions by adults about what kids should be doing). It is lacking soul compared to all the NES and Genesis games. I liked it at the time, but I recently tried it in DosBox and realized that it pales in comparison.

I think it just depended on your family's circumstances. My father was a mechanical engineer, so we naturally had a computer in the house for his work. As a child, I couldn't convince my family to splurge on a dedicated entertainment device, but it was trivial to get a hold of a copy of the shareware version of commander keen and install it on the computer.

Hopefully you still got to play a lot. I played at arcades, and at other kids' houses, and we rented an NES a couple times, including when I was recovering from getting my tonsils removed. I really liked Mario 1, Mario 3, Super Mario World, NBA Jam, Duck Hunt, Ninja Turtles on NES, Sonic, and some others I'm not thinking of right now.

I see online that there aren't a lot of negative reviews about Commander Keen (like you would find about bad movies), and I suppose it makes sense. I mean, it was still fun. I would put it below Mario 2 though, and Mario 2 was the one I would leave out of a list like the one above.

On the PC, there were a lot of great games too, but side scrolling was definitely something to play on a console.

Keen had item collecting, lots of verticality in the maps, and some backtracking IIRC. It seems like a better comparison to Metroid, than Mario.

Anyway, most games are not as good as Mario, it is a genre-defining series. I think it is not a great comparison—what does it tel you that I’m slower than Usain Bolt?

The later keen games are legitimately good platformers, even in comparison to some of the best of the genre at the time like Mario 3. The levels in keen games are enormous and way bigger than a NES could handle or even think of loading in its tiny RAM. I do agree the first few keen games are pretty luke warm compared to consoles.

Just à nitpick, consoles at that time didn't load levels to ram but rather the part of the level you're seeing. You could access rom as normal memory (rom banks considerations aside) so everything was already accessible (sometimes compressed)

You needed to store the state of the entire level, like what enemies are alive, what treasures have been collected, etc. and that turns into a non trivial amount of stuff to store in RAM (only about 2kb on the NES!) for large and complex levels. You can't store that stuff in ROM since it's changing as the player progresses. A PC at the time could guarantee 640k or more of RAM alone.

I don't think they are nearly as good. Mario Bros 3 apparently inspired Keen, but Keen was always very slow-paced, because of the one-hit death system. You also needed to defeat enemies with a gun, which was less risky and fun than jumping on the head of enemies like in Mario. Ammo was also limited, which again rewarded slow and careful and boring gameplay. The slower gameplay did fit the few puzzles, but those also weren't too great. I didn't play Keen 6, but I assume it's about the same as 4 and 5.

The NES doesn't load levels into its tiny RAM. It renders directly from the cartridge ROM.

Like I said in another reply that's just for drawing tiles, but it has to store level state (what enemies are alive, where they're at, what items have been collected, etc.) in RAM and is severely limited to less than 2kb of data there. A DOS PC has 640kb to multiple megabytes of RAM--you can have thousands of enemies, items, etc. with tons of room to spare.

With a lot of the Apogee shareware stuff it was exactly like that, especially if you actually tried playing the registered version "other two episodes". Lots of levels that were filled up with stuff to collect and enemies to bop, but usually not a lot of experience design or specific tests of skill. Keen ranked better than average on this, especially the second trilogy.

Crystal Caves remains one that captivates people's attention though - it's very unassuming, no particularly strange gimmicks, but it has the right mix of stuff to be surprising and engaging. It even got a remaster on Steam.

I've never cared much for consoles due to their "walled garden" aspect (not user-programmable, locked down hw & sw).

PC, 80's/90's home computers: programming bits & pieces Lego style by oneself, exchanging software + knowledge with friends, exploring assembly code, coding straight to the metal & so on, is so much more rewarding + extends creativity / skillset for use later in life.

In comparison, game console is just 'dumb' appliance like a toaster or TV set top box: hit button, watch it do its 1 trick. ;-)

Dosbox runs old VGA games really well and on any platform, including right in your browser: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_1_-_Maroone...

Dosbox is my guess

Commander Keen and Jill of the Jungle was my introduction to PC's back in the day. Such lovely memories!

you can run it in the broswer

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