DOS Nostalgia Podcast #29: Commander Keen (with Mat Bradley-Tschirgi)

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Writer, podcaster, and game designer Mat Bradley-Tschirgi returns once again, this time to discuss the legendary PC platformer series from id Software and Apogee. Can we look at these games without rose colored glasses? Find out as we go through all of the adventures of Billy Blaze!
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[@silkwesir1444]

I was really surprised about you guys saying the jumping in Mario is easier. For me it's the other way around. In Mario it feels very slippery, but in the Keen games it feels a lot more precise.
Maybe that's because Keen 4 was my first jump&run platformer I ever played and as such shaped my expectations.

[@dosnostalgic]

We mentioned that when we talked about the first three games. Mat mentioned that jumping was "fixed" in the second trilogy, as you get plenty of air control in it.

[@GAG091186]

It's unfortunate that an official VGA version of the Galaxy Engine Keen games aka Keen 4-6 never came to fruition. The games could certainly benefit from a higher color palette, as Keen 4-6 seemed more like the "SNES sequels" to the Keen 1-3 "NES variants", but were still stuck with a 16 color palette.
However, there’s a source port of the Commander Keen games named Commander Genius that I highly recommend, and this source port has the ability to import custom graphics for those games. As it turns out, I have recently recolored the graphics for Keen 4, 5 & 6, with the new graphics being stored as png files that can be copied over to the games directory of Commander Genius. I recolored most of the graphics using Aseprite with the VGA 13h color palette, in other words the same exact color palette that MS-DOS VGA games used.
If you go over to the Commander Genius homepage, enter the forums and enter one of the top topics there, you can find all the VGA recolored graphics for Commander Keen 4, 5 & 6 stored as png files (large tilemaps and a few sprites).
Commander Genius is still being heavy improved upon, and also has 4 player same-screen multiplayer support. Highly recommended.

[@Gencoil]

Awesome work! One thing that always bothered me about Keen's limited color palette is how pale Keen looks. I'd like to see an enhanced version where he has a beige skin tone. Would it be possible to implement parallax scrolling with this engine?

[@GAG091186]

@@Gencoil Regarding parallax scrolling, I posted in the Gitlab Issue tracker this as a suggestion some time ago (under CGenius main page, and then the Issues link). The parallax scrolling suggesting is now under Closed threads, as both the author of CGenius and later I (after recoloring the tilemaps) saw that having parallax scrolling would result in much of the hidden graphics that's actually hidden because there's only black tiles there, would be shown (parallax scrolling could then only be applied on some of the levels). I didn't change the coloring of Keen sprite at all, but it's fully possible to do so in fact. With my graphic edits I wanted to achieve the graphics one remembered through he/her rose tinted nostalgia glasses (although fake memories), but Keen's pale skin color I suppose is something everyone remember clearly (I think he has red hair in the cover art, so a pale skin tone can be justified).

[@n86cc]

Amusing episode of DOS Nostalgia 😃

[@0374studio]

Спасибо!

There is a hacked version of Darkwing Duck in which the titular character is replaced with Rockman.

[@Romero666]

Great podcast! Some inaccuracies ;)

[@dosnostalgic]

Thank you so much for listening, John. I thought I caught some of the bigger inaccuracies in editing, but I guess I didn't get them all after all.

[@StusGameReviews]

FroggMAN :)

[@directionlessstudios7210]

Yay

[@jberg5441]

What's the song playing at the end?

[@dosnostalgic]

Level 1 music from a Castlevania clone "Rusty"

[@jberg5441]

Thanks! Great episode btw.

[@antdude]

Is there a text transcript?

[@dosnostalgic]

No.