Commanding Keen

Going for a piece of retro gaming here.

Hands up who remembers Commander Keen?
Yay for Id Software before every game they made involved shooting hellspawn / Strogg!

Yes, the plucky little kid genius from Wisconsin, who somehow made a spaceship (propelled by a vacuum cleaner that he borrowed from his mom) and ended up saving the Earth and then the galaxy respectively. He starred in one of the first sidescrolling platformers for the PC, the original game created by the guys from ID was a reproduction of Mario (in all but name) designed to run in DOS.

Shame then, that game 3, Keen Must Die, which was the ultimate episode in the series' initial trilogy, can be completed in three levels:
Let's just remind ourselves of the blurb for this game:

"Keen blasts through a hyperspace gate and arrives on Vorticon VI,
landing on the island of Vortiville.  Here he faces mind numbing
horrors of suburban life.  Then he will travel to New Vorticon,
where life is a dark, dangerous enterprise.  He will also have to
face the violent forces massed in the Vorticon military installation.
After this, he will face the impossible maze of the Caves of Oblivion.
If he passes this barrier, he will finally reach the castle of the Grand
Intellect, where all his beliefs and fears come together in a titanic,
shocking finale!  Don't miss the incredible shattering conclusion to
the Commander Keen trilogy!"

Well, actually, you don't really have to face that much... just one of the Vortiville cities, then you can pretty much bypass the entire game and go straight to the end. The only mind numbing horrors of suburban life that can be found are unimaginatively designed, blocky buildings that ironically can also be bypassed most of the time.

The Caves of Oblivion is literally an impossible maze, if you enter it, none of the passages will lead to an exit, the only way to beat it is to pogo over the bloody thing. I'm not sure what the developers were thinking...the Gordian knot style puzzles only really pay off for you if you're Alexander the Great.

And then there's the ending - considering that Commander Keen can only jump, pogo and fire bolts from a pistol sized raygun boss battles really don't cut it in this game - but they tried to and came up with this monstrosity:

IT SHITS BRICKS LOL


Yes, somehow this "Mangling Machine" has meeps (the green thingies) trapped inside it. Considering the limited memory PCs had at the time this wasn't half bad but at the same time, a bunch of animated terrain blocks that could crush you didn't have half as much pull as Mario kicking the shit out of Bowser.

Don't get me wrong, I still loved this game, it's just that for a trilogy with awesome parts one and two, it's just a shame that part three is this terribly designed. If all the levels were compulsory it would have been epic.

Oh well, good job episodes 4 and 5 were fraggin' awesome by comparison!