R4 3DS .org

We couldn't have Mario Bros on our PC's... At least not the Mario World Series that was exclusive to only the Nintendo Entertainment system.  We instead had a nifty little gem called Commander Keen.  Commander Keen DS is a DS and Nintendo 3DS homebrew game / remake of the original series of platform games that first came out for the PC.  The game was produced by iD Software, the same people that went on to make Quake and Doom for the PC and all of the sequels that followed.  Commander Keen was actually a series of games.  There were 7 official games that came out for the PC (back when MS DOS was the operating system we had available) and they were considered episodes, and were published by Apogee software.

7 official games Commander Keen came out on PC under MS-DOS. The 8th game in the series is available on the Game Boy Color.  As mentioned above, each game was considered an episode.  Though that word might be a tad misleading because each game was a full game in and of itself.  It wasn't as if though we had a level or two, and had to wait for the next episode of the game.  The Commander Keen series consisted of these episodes: 

• Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons 
• Marooned on Mars
• The Earth Explodes 
• Keen Must Die! 
• Keen Dreams, The Lost Episode
• Commander Keen in Goodbye Galaxy! 
• The Secret of the Oracle
• The Armageddon Machine 
• Commander Keen Special Edition 
• Aliens Ate My Babysitter

Commander Keen is a great example of classic platform games. It brought all of the elements of Mario Bros. type games to the PC and did so with an entire story around the main character.

The original story for Commander Keen:

Billy Blaze is an eight-year-old boy genius who has constructed a spaceship in his backyard from old soup cans and other household objects, called The Bean-with-Bacon Megarocket. When his parents are out and the babysitter falls asleep, he dons his brother's Packers helmet and becomes Commander Keen, Defender of Earth.

In the first game, Keen is exploring on Mars when aliens steal four spaceship componentsthat he must get back. The aliens are the Vorticon, a fierce dog-humanoid race that hadan outpost on Mars. Keen travels through different martian cities, and eventually recoversall the missing parts. 

But when Keen gets back to Earth, he finds the Vorticon mothership looming over the planet, with its cannons ready to attack. In the second game, Keen infiltrates the mothership and has to disable each of the Tantalus Rays targeting different Earth cities. 

During this adventure, Keen learns that the Vorticons used to be a peaceful race, but were enslaved by the mysterious Grand Intellect.

Keen travels to the Vorticon homeplanet, Vorticon VI. In the third game, Keen has to face the Vorticon masses in their cities, all ready to kill Keen. After fighting through many levels of Vorticon-infested cities and military installations, Keen arrives at the lair of the Grand Intellect. There he discovers thatthe leader of the Vorticons is actually his school rival Mortimer McMire.

Click here To Download Commander Keen DS for your Nintendo 3DS.  Remember, you'll need one of our R4 3DS cards to play this amazing homebrew / freeware game.