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August 13, 1998,Section G, Page4Buy Reprints
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IT was inevitable that the Hollywood blockbuster licensing-cross-promotional-merchandise machine would someday create a movie that looked cheap, tacky and shallow next to its spinoff products. Witness 'Small Soldiers,' a popcorn film about cybernetic action figures on a malignant rampage. The movie is egregious. But the plastic toys that come with a Burger King meal are great.
And the video games are excellent.
Small Soldiers Globotech Design Lab and Small Soldiers Squad Commander (Hasbro Interactive, $29.95 each, Windows 95) outshine their celluloid namesake by several orders of magnitude.
Globotech Design Lab is a combat game with build-your-own action figures. Half of it is a design exercise, a virtual model shop where you combine plastic body parts to build the ultimate fighter. Each arm, leg, head or torso has different attributes. It's possible to match parts from prebuilt characters, but it's much more fun to combine arms and legs from different action figures into your own cubist collage of cyborg appendages. My own virtual Frankenstein's monster, Klaatu, consisted of a roaring chain-saw arm, a Kung Fu Grip arm, one robot implant leg, one satellite communications leg and the head of Chip Hazard, leader of the Small Soldiers' Commando Elite.
From there, your character goes to the paint shop, where you pick from an array of colors and textures for each body part. You then select a computer chip to snap into the figure's back and choose from a menu of fighting moves. Punches and blocks consume computer power and chip capacity is limited, so these are resource management decisions. The design process allows each custom-built character a number of taunts ('Show me what you're made of, soldier!' 'Who wants some?') for attitudinal posturing in battle.
Once your action figure is assembled and animated (It's alive . . . alive!), the game shifts into battle phase, a Mortal Kombat-style free-for-all in which anything, even an opponent's fallen limbs (or your own), can be used as a weapon.
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As you rack up victories in single combat, additional chip sets become available, allowing you to equip your action figure with more power, increased damage resistance and better moves. It's all about upgrading your technology -- trading up to faster processors, upgrading peripherals and reconfiguring the machine to perform in new ways. When you hit a plateau in combat, it's probably time to go back to the model shop and switch parts.
The tinkering options are endless. It's still the same character, but by the end of the game, all the original parts have probably been replaced. Which begs the old freshman philosophy question about the ax handle: You replace a broken ax handle, then the blade breaks. If you replace the blade, is it the same ax? In the ontological scheme of Small Soldiers Globotech Design Lab, the answer is, 'Yes, because I can use it to beat the Gorgonite boss on level five.' Or, 'Yes, because I can print it out as a trading card.' Or, 'Yes, because I can download it onto a floppy disk, take it over to my friend's house and beat up his action figure with it.'
With a modicum of technical savvy, you could replicate any one of these virtual fighting robots and post it to the Web. It makes the film look retrograde. In the movie, these action figures are made of plastic and silicon in factories and shipped around the country in trucks. In the game, the real-world product, they are made of software and can be transmitted digitally. The action figure is basically a name and a bit of stored information. Dueling code.
In the second Small Soldiers game, Squad Commander, the action figure is a tactical resource. As in real-time strategy games like Command and Conquer, or Warcraft, which are geared toward adults, Squad Commander is about deploying your troops in a series of missions to neutralize the enemy. But unlike the grown-up games, this one is less about amassing wealth and building fortresses than it is about obstacles and puzzles. The deductive reasoning required is equally sharp, if not sharper. But the terrain is considerably more whimsical.
For instance, if you play on the Gorgonites' side (you can play either of the film's two opposing factions, the Gorgonites or the Commando Elite), there is a scenario in a convenience store. The objective is to free a kidnapped comrade, who has been locked in the back room safe.
To accomplish that, you have to navigate a maze of spilled candy, work your way over to the Slurpee machine, climb that and blow up a TNT barrel. That will knock over some cups, forming a bridge to the nacho area. Run your troops one by one across the nacho counter with perfect timing to avoid the intermittent, deadly bursts of scalding nacho cheese. Find the cash register, figure out how to open it, grab the key, unlock the back room and fight your way back to the safe, then unlock it with a combination that you saw flashing on the lotto machine. The entire time, you are under fire by heavily armed plastic soldiers. It makes Command and Conquer look like a parade exercise.
Like 'Toy Story,' the landscape of Squad Commander is littered with references to name-brand games. Here, virtual toys become elements of the game. In one instance, you have to hit the right combination of lights on a Simon machine to get a door to open. A deadly field of zooming remote-controlled cars in an electronics store refers to Frogger. There's a system of secret passageways, a la Clue, a chess board and a puzzle game that looks a lot like Perfection. And of course, there are sly product placements throughout. If you scrutinize the toy shelves in the background, you will see boxes of Mr. Potato Head and Candyland, both made by Hasbro Interactive's parent company, Hasbro Inc.
Squad Commander is a game about toys. And it points to the distinction between a game and a toy. Games have rules, objectives, winners and losers. Toys have none of these things. Toys are objects, physical or virtual. A toy is a noun. Games are verbs. That's why games are easier to translate into interactive media -- the pieces you push around are just place holders. Action is everything.
That's why Globotech Design Lab and Squad Commander are more entertaining than Barbie Fashion Designer. Barbie Fashion Designer is a virtual doll. It's a toy. And as a toy, it doesn't measure up to its plastic counterpart. The Small Soldiers CD-ROM's are not toys. They're games. And as games, they rival anything you can do with a G.I. Joe. These characters truly are action figures. There is a certain poetic justice in the fact that Small Soldiers' publisher is the same company that manufactured the original G.I. Joe doll on the heels of Mattel's success with Barbie. Toy history repeats itself -- first as plastic merchandise, then as licensed interactive media.
Red Alert Junior Addition? Not quite, but that is the general premise of Dreamworks Interactive's Small Soldiers game, Small Soldiers: Squad Commander. This games is basically a no frills real time strategy game, and Small Soldiers is geared towards the under 12 crowd.
As per typical RTS games, you can choose which side you choose to fight on, in this case the Gorgonites or the Commando Elite. As the intro, each mission is usually proceeded by a small video clip featuring the characters animated via computer. They are not the quality level of the movie of course, but they are quite decent. The goal of the game, of course, is to conquer the enemy. You start off in a child's bedroom and fight your way throughout the city, rescuing comrades along the way.
Some things I did not like about this game were limitations that were put in for the 'younger players', such as the low (and I mean LOW) maximum of characters you can control at any one time. You start off with only being able to use 3 characters at any one time. Later you gain control of more, but it still leaves you with very small armies. Another example is the lack of any real resource management. While I suppose these features might have been considered too difficult for children to handle, I think the average 8 year old could handle moving around more troops. Also, SOME resource management would have been simple enough.. such as needing to comendeer batteries to keep the toys running, perhaps needing to build toy factories to increase your army size..
For a non 3d accelerated game, the graphics are good. Not great, but good. Everything is pre-rendered in 3d accept for the characters, which appear to be typical sprites. Everything is quite colorful, and all the objects are rather large (once again, for the smaller players).
Sound is very important in any type of game. In this game, it is more annoying then anything else. Hearing the soldiers talk when you click on them or they die seems cool at first, until you notice 5 minutes later that it's the SAME THING EVERY TIME.
The control is typical RTS fare, you click on a unit, click where you want him to move etc. However, it was too easy to use special weapons on your own troops. If you have a weapon selected and click on your own unit, instead of switching units, the old one fires on the other.
Small Soldiers Squad Commander Free
Overall, for a children's game, this does very well. It opens up a new type of game to children where some actual thinking is involved, before you blow the enemy's brains out.
Small Soldiers: Squad Commander carries on the story introduced by 1998 summer's cinematic hit, Small Soldiers. A highly intelligent microprocessor has been installed in the latest GI-Joe type action figures. The mistaken installation brings to life the Commando Elite, a band of merciless soldiers, and their sworn enemies, the Gorgonites, a peaceful group of misfits.
Squad Commander gives young gamers the option of commanding either of the two sides in a quest to destroy or save the neighborhood.
No matter which side you choose, you'll be faced with 10 different missions, each with its own objective. Missions take place in a wide variety of locations including, backyards, convenient marts and toy stores.
Both factions are comprised of six different characters, each distinguished by their arsenal and a unique set of witty one-liners. In addition to their particular weapon (gun, bow and arrow, club, etc.), individual team members carry a backpack that can hold one item at a time. Items such as firecrackers, cherry bombs, and grenades can be stuffed into the pack and unleashed when needed.
The game puts a child friendly face on an interface popularized by such titles as StarCraft and Command & Conquer. All of the game's action is viewed from an overhead perspective. Also, like the above games, unexplored territory is shrouded in darkness. The simple controls and easy-to-use interface all but eliminate a learning curve.
Young gamers will find a pleasing mix of some of today's more popular gaming elements. There is a little bit of real-time strategy, some action and adventure, and enough puzzle solving to keep the game from becoming tedious. (Old-timers will even recognize some classic Frogger-type arcade action in the toy store).
The combination adds up to the kind of game that requires both a fast trigger finger and some quick wits. Not only will you have to battle a constant onslaught of enemies, but you'll also have to solve some tricky puzzles to advance through the levels.
Oddly enough, the movie received a PG-13 rating, yet the game is geared toward pre-teens. But parents need not fear, the cartoon-like graphics and warfare are no more harmless than an old Tom and Jerry rerun.
Though anyone over 13 may find Squad Commander to be lacking in challenge, the game will certainly keep the next generation of PC gamers entertained for hours on end.
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