Lol, the comments on the video. I left a dislike.

"Official" Keen died when ID switched their focus to Wolfenstein 3D. Good thing we have the fan community and mods!

it's horrible, they attempt to lure fans but no real fan would ever touch that 'cause we all are old farts by now 🤣 🤣 🤣

We don't want to be treated like babies -
"koochie koochie! Here comes the Commander Keen!"

The dislike to the like proportions are hilarious... and I disliked it as well and left a comment.

Why would they do this? Well, other than for a cash grab that is?

keenmaster486 wrote:

"Official" Keen died when ID switched their focus to Wolfenstein 3D.

Close enough - it was at the end of map 32 in DOOM II. 😉

I guess this new game is what happens when Bethesda finds the mangled remains and proceeds to have an, er, Imp Encounter.

I find this all hilarious. I am not emotionally invested in Keen, so watching this play out is highly amusing. Same as with Sonic last month.
You go, keep on being that offended by this. I'll grab some popcorn 😉

Dominus wrote:

I find this all hilarious. I am not emotionally invested in Keen, so watching this play out is highly amusing. Same as with Sonic last month.
You go, keep on being that offended by this. I'll grab some popcorn 😉

Haha.. I'm not really offended.. just think it is a stupid thing for them to do. I'll probably bring out the popcorn when/if this disaster ever gets released.

It seems over the past decade, the theme for game companies is just to find a classic, then butcher the crap out of it. Probably because they have a bunch of teenagers who never used DOS coding for them.

It ties into the general disrespect for kids these days.

They think Keen is for 12-year-olds like it was in the 90’s, and maybe it is.

But the prevailing opinion seems to be that kids are too stupid to understand anything that isn’t “on their level.” So they try to make something that they think kids will understand, but they only ever succeed in making something best suited to that one obnoxious 8-year-old in the playground who has the intellectual ambition of an orangutan.

Management's cluelessness at these gargantuan game shops astounds me.

The fact this "remake" of Keen is a card-style game (no doubt with microtransactions and for-pay upgrades and lootboxes), shows management is one-dimensionally targeting market trends and simply skinning their generic game mechanics with something pulled from their IP-buyout grab bag.

Zero thought process as to who the audience was for that old IP, nor the subtle traits and gameplay characteristics that should be carried forward or preserved in the remake.

Nintendo is a company that really understands this, as the key enjoyable elements of the original NES Mario and Zelda titles have been retained or evolved across tens of new releases spanning 30 years.

Bethesda Softworks is basically EA with microtransactions.

keenmaster486 wrote:

It ties into the general disrespect for kids these days. […]
Show full quote

It ties into the general disrespect for kids these days.

They think Keen is for 12-year-olds like it was in the 90’s, and maybe it is.

But the prevailing opinion seems to be that kids are too stupid to understand anything that isn’t “on their level.”
So they try to make something that they think kids will understand, but they only ever succeed in making something best suited
to that one obnoxious 8-year-old in the playground who has the intellectual ambition of an orangutan.

Hmm, this gave me to think. I was about seven years old when I started writing programs in Visual Basic 1.x on my second-hand 286,
before that I had got my father's old 8-Bit machine with datasette drive and a a dozen assemblers, interpreters of BASIC, Fortran and such.
That being said, at the time I never felt very intelligent anyhow. I was more into novels and phantasy worlds than anything logical. And classic video games, of course.
My younger sister on the other hand, could walk, speak and read almost perfectly at age four onwards. By comparison, I still had trouble with this at age 5-6.
Whenever places of water were around, I magically lost balance and fell into them. 😊

So what makes me wonder: Are current generations of kids really intellectual impaired or are they (some) just behaving this way ?
Noticing all the younger kids in the tram talking about complicated school work, network managment, app development for android and iOS,
I can't help but feel like a relic from a civilisation long gone. Even though I'm not "old" judging by my birth date.

Edit: In other words, I wonder were this prevailing opinion about kids comes from. When I see video like this, it make me feel as if I was from a society 60 years ago or so.
Where are all the childish children gone that used to be all over the place ? The ones that were playing outside or with their sisters/parents/grandparents ?
From what I see, todays kids may be rude (not all), got anti-authoritarian education and are narcissistic sometimes (-> selfies, focus on their own portrayal).
But.. Apparently, that's not the whole story. They aren't dumb by any means. They do say what they think and stand up and protest if necessary (Friday for Future).
Another thing that I honour and respect is that they are brave enough to question old rules, for example why some should solely work for money.
These generations Y (Why ?) and Z may or may not be on the right track. Our world needs a change quickly, though, if we like to live peafulyly with each others in the future.

Whoever are behind this, they were probably high when they came up with it.

realnc wrote:

Whoever are behind this, they were probably high when they came up with it.

I asked myself the same when I first saw the remake of Duck Tales or Power Puff Girls.
It's not just the art style, but also the gesticulation of the characters (totally on sugar).
By comparison, this Keen trailer is golden.

PS: Does anybody remember Commander Keen on GameBoy Color ? 😁

I see 0 issues with this,
it was dead for decades already, most people are going to be exposed to the name for the first time, they own the IP and decided to use it for a new project, whatever.

the old games are still the same just like they were last week.

SPBHM wrote:

I see 0 issues with this,
it was dead for decades already, most people are going to be exposed to the name for the first time, they own the IP and decided to use it for a new project, whatever.

the old games are still the same just like they were last week.

This is also my opinion. Maybe even more people will now find out how good the later Keen games were.

I have just watched the videos that are linked in the opening post, and I must say:
This didn't trigger any nostalgic feelings of Keen whatsoever, the artwork is so fundamentally different that one would be forgiven to not actually realize what franchise it is, if they wouldn't have worded it out. This is as important to the franchise as the new mobile Dungeon Keeper cashgrab, whatever its name was.

A couple months back, I watched my nephew and niece hanging out at a family gathering. They're around 10 years old. They had the TV streaming some video of a girl collecting these Japanese egg-character things, and were playing some game where you ... essentially have like a deck or cards and each one gives you the opportunity to fight something akin to a Pokemon battle, and if you win, you can collect items. Something like that. There's a cost associated with obtaining more rounds of play, which you can pay by watching ads or winning battles or actually paying real money for them. So, basically, legalized gambling for kids combined with a stream of video content featuring squeaky inane babble, impulse buying of worthless trinkets I wouldn't have kept had they come from a gumball machine. I'm sure my parents thought similar things when I was playing Nintendo games as a kid.

Part of me is deeply concerned about the effect this has on young minds in their formative years. The other part of me understands that humans are adaptable, and maybe they'll grow up to have finely honed impulse control. Maybe they'll be a lot more savvy than my generation was, and will know a scam when they see it rather than clicking on random email links and dumping quarters into arcade games set to insane difficulty mode. I guess we'll find out.

All I know for certain is that watching cartoons meant for today's kids is a constant barrage of audible and visual stimulation that is so overwhelming it makes me want to go dig out the CD of Chant that I got back in the 90s, put on some headphones, and close my eyes for an hour.

Or just sit in silence for a while. Honestly overstimulation is a real thing, it’s just like overeating or workaholicism...

Quality over quantity! This goes for the art styles as well; Keen has always been as good as it is partly due to the limitations of the medium - 16 colors and 320x200 forces you to either make a GREAT looking game, or fail drastically.