Time Commando (MS-DOS) - Guest Post

I don't give out awards for title screens, but mecha-neko's latest post makes me think that I should.

Time Commando, looking pretty awesome.

Deep in The City lies the Historical Tactical Center. It's a great big scary-shaped building surrounded by armed guards.

Here's Stanley, a technician at the HTC. He's just arrived and checked his work schedule. He's in luck: nothing's scheduled for today! He decides to kick back and play a game on his PDA.

Time Commando to be exact.

Deep in the centre of the HTC lies its multiplayer virtual reality simulator supercomputer gizmo machine interface system. Seriously technical stuff.

Yet, some shady dude is using the machine! When nobody's looking, he sticks in a memory disk... which contains an evil rendered SHARK VIRUS!

Sharks aren't supposed to happen, so Stanley is called to fix the problem. He calmly walks down to the simulator room, toolbox in hand, to find the simulator machine enveloped in a glowing sphere of light. That's not supposed to happen either.

Stanley kneels down next to the sphere... Don't touch it, you fool!

He touched it and was sucked inside. What an idiot. Now he's trapped in prehistoric times! Or is it virtual reality? Nobody can say for sure, but the only way he's going to get out of this mess is by beating the daylights out of everything in his path.

Stanley is the Time Commando!

Wait, what kind of game IS Time Commando anyway?

Time Commando is a 3D-ish side-scrolling beat-'em-up played across prerendered scrolling video backgrounds.

First opponent, prehistoric man. Apart from a couple of rocks lying on the ground, all Stanley has to rely on is his wits.

Time Commando Kick!

Hold the attack button and press the cursor keys to unleash Stanley's martial arts on the enemies!

A few well placed smacks to the chops and this guy is down. Defeated enemies fall to the ground and shatter into polygons which fly into the air.

Next, a cuddly tiger! He's got teeth as big as Stanley's head, but he means well. Eat rock, loser!

Rocks lock on and do loads of damage, but Stanley throws them very slowly.

Eat foot, wimp!

Wait! Please don't!

Stanley's mighty armoured foot blasts the tiger into a thousand spiky shards.

I'd have avoided the tiger if I could, but like most scrolling beat-'em-ups you can't advance until you kill all the enemies. (And that's why I don't play scrolling beat-'em ups.)

Now I'm stuck waiting for the lousy CD to kick in and load the background video where the camera pans to the right.

You think you're special because you've got a dog on your head? How about a metal boot to the face?

I'll be taking that club too if you don't mind.

The controls don't make fighting easy. Stanley has Resident Evil style tank controls to move and turn. To attack and dodge you hold the button and pull a direction. Stanley moves between the different stances and attacks instantly and fluidly, so tapping the buttons repeatedly means that Stanley fruitlessly gesticulates on the spot. It can be difficult to work out how far enemies are away from you and you're the at the mercy of the prerendered background video as to what the camera angle will be.

Crunch.

Don't go getting all upset, it's not my fault! I had to do it in order to escape the virtual reality!

Chhh-bing! Poor Stanley is disintegrated. That's bad.

I'm going to restart and take the difficulty down a notch (from Normal), because I was finding very few healing items on the ground and I didn't want to have to play the first level over and over again just to show you what the other time periods look like.

That meter full of cosmic milkshake at the top of the screen indicates how long I have before the universe explodes (bad). To stop that happening, I have to find floating chips and put them in these devices scattered around the place. You can't backtrack through the levels, so you've got to make the most of these when they appear.

All of this is explained clearly in the... nope, just kidding.

The final boss of prehistoric times is a bear. Stanley smashes its brains in with a gigantic club.

We're in the Roman Empire!

Stanley's left his clubs behind and found himself a dagger and a sword!

Fighting multiple intelligent opponents armed with swords calls for more refined tactics than I used against the bears and tigers in the prehistoric era. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do that without leaving myself wide open to attack. Dodging to the side or back is fast, but the delay after doing so is not. It's simpler to hold Attack + Up and keep executing strong forward attacks whenever the enemy are in range.

Standing on one foot and spinning around isn't doing me any good. Dodging is hard.

Stanley's in a bit of a fix. If I said I had some secret weapon for taking this guy down, I'd be lion.

Whaddya know, we visit Roman times and we end up in the Coliseum!

Poke poke poke! You can't touch our Stanley if you're going to lug around a great big axe like that.

This is a bit of an anticlimactic last boss for the Roman era. The bull just runs around the place and I'm free to hit him with any weapon I please. The only danger at this point is death due to milkshake overload. I've got tons of chips, but I haven't seen an electric sinkhole for some time.

Japanese Middle Ages. Kick to the chest! The background's looking terrible here, but it gets let off because it's a distorted virtual reality.

Most side-scrolling brawlers make fighting as simple as possible: you press 'punch', you punch. Time Commando's press-hold-pull system makes fighting enemies too frustrating to enjoy, especially against multiple opponents. I don't really like side-scrolling brawlers anyway, so I didn't get a whole lot of enjoyment out of playing this beyond giggling at the silliness.

RENDERED FACE.

Okay, I think we're done here.