I keep thinking of a line from a song. It’s Hello Saferide’s “Overall”, a parenting satire in which a mum and dad obsess over all the things they might have done wrong. “You never should have got him that video game for Christmas/They shoot people in that game, pixel people without names”. I keep thinking of it both as an effective mocking of my own squeamishness towards certain game violence which I will be working through one way or another, and because there is also a real distinction in there.
An arcade conversion from an original by Japan Capsule Computers (or Capcom for short – another iconic name), Commando is far from the first game we’ve seen involving guns. As a gameplay mechanism, shooting goes way back. But shooting spaceships or throwing grenades at giant ants doesn’t really feel the same as directly shooting people, even pixel people without names. And that’s an essential part of what you do as you, lone soldier, fight your way through the enemy in Commando. Its basic nature and where games have gone since make it feels almost quaint in 2018, even as the enemies wiggle their arms and legs in agony before disappearing, but it’s worth noting that one of Crash’s reviewers at the time called it “horribly violent”.
The purpose of how Commando works makes a sort of sense outside of just violence for the sake of violence. It’s a looser take on the Sabre Wulf school of roving everything-at-once game. It doesn’t have any emphasis on exploring and instead has a straight route scrolling from bottom to top, but it relies on the same thrill of constant movement and unpredictability. The desert setting has some flickering trees and bunkers and things, but it’s very much less structured than Sabre Wulf’s jungle, and without the structure in the setting it needs something else to offer it. Using the enemies as the source of structure makes an obvious sense, and making them more intelligent and more against you is one way to do that that also easily leads to people, to soldiers in a war setting.
Of course, one soldier taking on a whole army is preposterous, but preposterous in a recognisable action movie way. Things do need a bit of tweaking. The horrendous aim of movie bad guys has to be replaced by the the game bad guys’ bullets moving with all the pace of a paper aeroplane, but that substitution works. The chance to observe the enemies for a bit longer than the typical action scene is more weird, in that they fall into an awkward halfway zone between having you as their focus and just going about their day. You can actually do much of the game without shooting, and once you run past them they’re not too bothered to do anything to defend their base. Maybe it reflects a kind of rational self-preservation in the face of a hero with an unfairly better gun, intentionally or otherwise. I actually found trying to get by without shooting, dodging increasingly ridiculous numbers of bullets, more fun to play than the alternative.
That approach falls apart at the end of each level. A big boss that you have to defeat before progressing would be the expected thing, although maybe that’s only retrospective. Instead, though, Commando holds you in one place and throws lots of soldiers at you at once. You have to kill them all in a climactic slaughter. Everything falls away to the final indelible idea. They shoot people in that game.
