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Captain Commando Release year - USA:1995 Company: Capcom System: snes Genre: Beat 'em up Players: 1-2 |
Review by: PrimeOp
| Captain Commando is one of Capcom's oldest icons as an unofficial mascot mentioned in mostly in their NES manuals and has had numerous Capcom game exploits unofficially said to star him. Despite all this, he's never truly had his own game until this excellent side-scroller. But how did the SNES port stack up to the arcade version? |
| The evil scientist and overlord known only as Scumocide has unleashed his bio-engeneered minions on a hapless world. Luckily for the constantly-hapless world, Captain Commando gathers a team of off-beat heroes to save the day. Along with the ninja Sho (a.k.a. Ginzu), the mummy-rapped Hip-Hop alien Jennety (a.k.a. Mack the Knife) and the genius Baby Hoover (in his spiffy-suit-mech), the Captain leads a four-commando war throughout a city to underwater and extends into outer-space with a duel against Scumocide. One of my favorite parts about this game is that it never seems to take itself too seriously. I mean, c'mon, it starts off with a bank robbery and ends in outer space! That's just crazy and I dig that. The locations are very as wild and varied just as your opponents. From the goofy hooded menaces like Wooky, the knife-throwing city thugs, electric-powered women and ninja, military bosses, mutants, and robots, this game is almost like a collection of every form of enemy found in every other side-scroller. Since Captain Commando has been said to have fought in so many places and time-eras, how could he settle for fighting anything less? |  Captain Commando and Ninja Commando breaks up this Silver Age comic book bank robbery. |
 A hip-hop mummy-alien armed with knives fights side-by-side with a hyper-intelligent baby riding in a business suit-wearing mech. In the same game. This is the kind of content we need more of in video games. | This game sticks to the arcade version pretty closely with a few minor changes and two glaring omissions. First and foremost, this game has tight, solid controls. It's a Capcom game, so that's pretty much expected. Second of all, it's 2-player simultaneous, so that's another good thing. You can do everything in the arcade game... but the wall-jump seems to be missing. I don't have the manual, so perhaps I'm doing it wrong. But if it's in the game, you definitely don't do it the same way that you do in the arcade game. If it can be done, then I apologize. The other thing left out of the game are the giant, controllable mechs. That's probably due to the limitations of the SNES, so I don't fault the programmers for this. They actually changed the areas that the mechs appear in to make up for the loss of the mechs. Graphically, the game looks pretty much like the arcade game. There are a few differences though. For one: the female characters Brenda and Carol seem to be a bit more covered-up in this home version. The samurai also seem to be missing the arrows in their backs. Marda no longer vomits her green toxic spew. Also, the "special deaths" (being cut in half and burning to a crisp) are gone, but probably done to save precious cart space. As far as I noticed, the music is all there and sounds close enough the arcade version too. |
| Capcom learned the ins and outs of the Super Nintendo very well by 1995 and it shows in how close this port of Captain Commando gets to the arcade version. If the SNES is all you've got and you need a co-op brawler, this is a good one to get if you see it for a good price. |
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