Can you name all the captains below? Answers at the end of Sebastien Trent-Sodomite’s review of SNES beat-em-up Captain Commando
Now if there’s one thing guaranteed to put a sentimental tear in the development-arrested corner of any self-respecting retro gamer’s eye, it’s the sight of one of the beloved characters who got them into gaming in the first place. Be it a snatch of product placement gameplay from a stoner movie, a dusty old box of computer magazines in the loft, or even a pair of novelty socks, it doesn’t take very much to get the nostalgia flowing for those halcyon days when every character wasn’t an identikit bounty hunter / intergalactic marine / assassin / whatever the fuck they are in Fortnite: I refuse to acknowledge its existence.
We all had our favourite characters back in the old days, and while some have been lost in the mists of time, others have endured, a select few even becoming mascots for the companies that birthed them. Such is the level of fame afforded these treasured avatars, they are instantly recognisable to jaded, forty-something man-children in Optimus Prime t-shirts, and millennial content-guzzlers with iPhones surgically attached to their Instagram-literate fingertips alike.
Sega have Sonic, Sony have Sackboy, X-Box have Master Chief, whilst Nintendo have a veritable Mount Rushmore, with Link, Samus from Metroid, Kirby, Pikachu- no that’s about it, can’t think of any others there. There are even some mascots whose popularity outstrips that of the companies they represent- both Pac-Man and Bomber Man are arguably far more iconic than the companies they represent, Bandai and Hudson Soft respectively. Yet what about Capcom? Along with Konami (before their nefarious practices in later years led most gaming fans to view them as somewhere on the scale of persona non grata between Harvey Weinstein and Dr Jozef Mengele), Capcom were arguably the third-party developers most likely to trust your hard-earned pocket money with in the 80s and 90s. But whereas Konami had Solid Snake, the Vic Viper, any number of Belmonts and, er, Bayou Billy, it is immediately harder to identify an outstanding candidate for Capcom. The likes of Ryu and Mike Haggar don’t really stand out enough, appearing as they do in ensemble casts, so to speak. Mega Man isn’t a character as such, more a title given to several different robots which appear as protagonists in the series. Which doesn’t really leave much. Ah, what about Captain Commando, I don’t hear you ask. Well, thereby hangs a tale…
This is literally the picture my granddad used to get in his head
whenever he heard the word “youths.”
Captain America
In fact, Captain Commando didn’t actually start life as a video game character at all. Back in 1986, a full five years before the eponymously-titled arcade game was released, he appeared, two pulsing laser cannons in hand, flowing locks of hair and a number of unnecessary pouches, like a Rob Liefield wet dream, on the boxes and instruction manuals of a number of the initial Capcom NES titles. Over the next three years, everything from Ghosts ‘n Goblins to Mega Man was, ahem, enhanced by the presence of this refugee from a future where dandruff had seemingly been eradicated, as part of what was apparently the "Captain Commando Challenge Series" (the challenge apparently to fire off as much high-velocity artillery as possible while still guarding against split ends). Eventually, somebody at Capcom must have realised that these appearances would be entirely redundant if they didn’t actually build on them, especially as their gun-toting space ace didn’t actually seem to do anything beyond congratulating players on purchasing each title, before shilling features such as “colourful state-of-the-art resolution graphics.” Which of course sounds more like the sort of thing you expect to hear from a systems analyst called Graham than an elegantly-coiffured space marine.
“Take Two Bottles into the Shower? No, I just fire photon cannons out of geometric shapes while providing gamers of a certain age with uncomfortable memories of Jim’ll Fix It.”
Captain Marvel
The initial attempt to give CC an expanded role (or “some kind of fucking point” if you prefer) consisted of a line in the manual of NES side-on-scrolling shooter Section Z, claiming that he was the player-controlled character. This presented two problems. Firstly, aside from this single reference in the instruction booklet, there is no reference anywhere else in the game to the character being Captain Commando, rendering this claim not unlike the bloke in Wetherspoons who swears blind he was the original guitarist in Sabbath til that wanker Iommi nicked all his riffs and ditched him. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the avatar in Section Z is a funkily-designed, slightly insectoid android with Gundam overtones, whereas Captain Commando, at least at this stage, looked more like if Phillip Schofield reprised Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.
Honestly, tell me which two are you most likely to see out together on a Saturday night?
All of which meant it came as rather a surprise that Capcom chose to reboot the character in 1989, what with everything going so well up to then. By the time Strider was released later that year, the rear of the manual featured a gritty, futuristic image of a dashing space pilot, complete with lantern jaw, short, sensible hair, a far more conventional flight suit- and a neon blue space monkey in a crop top. For ‘tis written every 80s hero aimed at children shall be accompanied by a “cute,” “quirky” multi-coloured twat, because R2D2. Quite frankly by this point, if Capcom didn’t do something relevant with the captain soon, he would be about as much use as a prophylactic booth at a Comic Con.
And I bet he had an adorable fucking speech impediment too, didn’t he?
So, in 1991, Capcom finally released the Captain Commando coin-op, which to everybody’s surprise became the most successful table arcade release of 1991 in Japan, no mean feat when you remember this was the year that Streetfighter II first came out. It was only a matter of time before the game was released onto other formats, and sure enough, in 1995, he was ported over to the SNES. But did this version live up to the standards of its illustrious arcade predecessor? Well, at least it didn’t have that fucking blue monkey…
Captain Planet
Anyone who is a fan of beat-em-ups of the late 80s to early 2000s will be familiar with the Capcom side-on-scrolling beat-em-up production line, and Captain Commando is nothing if not faithful to the template. Distorted, glowing map of the city at the start of each level? Check. Utterly pointless timer complete with arrows and “Hurry Up” signs? Check. Vast numbers of identical street goons with comically inappropriate first names? You bet yer ass. None of which is meant as a negative. Such titles as The Punisher, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and the Dungeons and Dragons licences all take this blueprint and stamp their own individual identity on them, and as a result are more than recommended for any MAME or Raspberry Pi users out there. The arcade version of Captain Commando isn’t quite as unique in terms of world-building as the aforementioned titles, coming across very much as a Final Fight clone with different characters, but it is just these characters that provide a great deal of the game’s charm…
Captain Morgan
On the subject of elements which didn’t make it through to the SNES port from the original arcade game, sadly there is quite a bit, from subtle details (the first enemies you encounter are sat down cross-legged having a crafty fag, which they flick away before reluctantly engaging you in combat) to fairly major elements; in level one alone of the arcade version, you get to play with revolvers, cosmic rayguns, rocket launchers, and even a giant ED 209-style mech-suit with pneumatic fists- to see the baby use his own robotic suit to control a larger one is pure joy. Sadly, these are replaced in the SNES port with- a mallet, such as you might find in a Daffy Duck cartoon.
The fiendishly hard to master “uppercut to the winkle” technique.
All of this would be forgivable were the pace of the game and the collision detection both not just a little off. The original is fast, frenetic and precise: with a little timing you can not only dispatch individual enemies with ease, but stun them before hurling them as projectiles towards their cronies. This is a necessary feature, as the coin-op’s villains are more often than not dangerous due to sheer number and by virtue of relentlessly coming at you from both sides, rather than showing any real martial arts acumen.
SNES Captain Commando, while functional, suffers (as did the original SNES port of Final Fight) from that most frustrating of traits in a side-on scrolling beat-em-up, the one pixel too high or low phantom hit, where everything is telling you that right jab was right on the noggin, but you find yourself inexplicably punching thin air, while your opponent doubles you up with a combo from seemingly the same position. Sadly, whereas to an extent Final Fight made up for this with meaty SFX to accompany each blow which did connect, and a selection of large, meaty enemies with relatively intelligent pattern movement, here we have much smaller, weedier sprites, tinny, muted samples and predictable, repetitive or even counter-intuitive movement mechanics, giving the overall effect that everyone you go up against is just a little hungover.
Did ye hoof wor lass oot the windee? Did ye? Did ye? Ah think ye did.
Captain Underpants
But what of the enemies? Capcom can usually be relied upon to throw in a selection of varied and interesting goons to plug away at, and with perhaps their most diverse range of protagonists to date, Captain Commando could still be saved by a half-decent rogues’ gallery. Sadly, the results here are at best variable. Level one, the city, is literally just the first level of Final Fight, or Double Dragon even, but with the addition of what appear to be rejects from the Foot Clan in pyjamas one size too large for them.
Next comes the museum, where things liven up with the addition of neon-haired dominatrixes, little bald guys in donkey jackets who breathe fire, and a band of angry Neanderthals - Neanderthals in, er, ripped jeans. The Ninja House predictably produces every cliché in the books; from a set of surprisingly diminutive ninjas, who are so badly coloured, they look like the inept etchings you have stuck to your fridge in order to mask your contempt for your talentless offspawn (Ha. Children suck.); to a set of possibly-mechanised, possibly-just-very-shit Samurai golems. Interestingly, this level also features giant troglodyte cavewomen who, er, weren’t considered a better match for the museum level.
The circus level, by which point the programmers had presumably just given up, features precisely no circus-related enemies, just a load of the sub-foot clan goons from the first stage. Battle your way through the big top, and you reach a lab, where the obligatory evil scientist, with the rather-less-obligatory enormous bulbous nose, has some kind of semi-cybernetic mutant creature in a tank, because of course that’s where you find the perfect mix of peace and quiet and sanitary conditions to carry out biochemical experimentation - a fucking circus.
I haven’t mentioned any of the bosses up to this stage, as they are all basically multi-coloured variations of the same idea; a kind of alien mixed with a kind of bounty hunter mixed with a kind of that’ll do. I have pictured three of the bosses below. They are literally the same person three times, just with different colours. If you made them any more generic, they would already have a dozen WWE tag team title reigns between them.
Eighteen years later, Deathstroke bitterly regretted that drunken weekend on Fraggle Rock.
Captain Birdseye
Let’s wrap this up, because in the process of writing this, a review of one of my favourite childhood fighting games, I have come to realise that I used to be a complete idiot. (Ha. Children suck.) Bonus marks must be awarded for trying to break things up with the seaboard stage, a brief hoverboard level, reminiscent of Battletoads, but minus several hundred for making it virtually unplayable and utterly pointless.
The power-ups are usually the icing on the cake in a Capcom game, providing a welcome and often timely boost allied to a little thematic humour. Here, most levels begin with crates providing food, which you don’t need, and a weapon, which you don’t need. Oh, and the final boss, a steroidal supervillain in a cape named Scumocide, is probably easier to beat than half of the bosses you faced previously. Which frankly, is a blessing by this point. How can you take a set of characters with this much potential, and an existing product which plays so well, and end up with this almost offensive shadow of the original? Who do you think you are, Capcom: George Lucas?
(Answers: Top Left: Captain Haddock. Top Right: Captain Corelli. Bottom Left: Captain James Hewitt. Bottom Right: Captain Insano.)
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