Captain Commando (Arcade, 1991)

 

It's Capcom's team captain from MVC1. Who? Yeah I'm wondering that too.

Try saying this 3 times really fast.

"CAPTAIN COMMANDO.

CAPTAIN COMMANDO.

CAPTAIN COMMANDO."

Previously, on Marvel vs. Capcom...

Next up is Captain Commando, from the 1991 Capcom arcade game Captain Commando. It's a beat 'em up and one they're definitely proud of because not only is it a headline act for the 2018 Capcom Beat 'Em Up Bundle, but he's also prominently featured in this game as the main Capcom fighter.

I should take a look at his game next out of curiosity and find out what this guy is all about.

The way the character select is set up, you'd think Mummy Commando was the main character.

Well, I have no idea what's going on here and there's no intro movie to flesh this out. Captain Commando is the main dude and the protector of Earth or whatever, while the other guys are some sort of motley crew of allies. Baby Commando? Seriously? Well, this certainly isn't gonna have a Saturday morning cartoon series and an action figure lineup like they were probably intending.

Alright, so this guy started out as a Capcom mascot that appeared on game boxes, and this 1991 effort was just them giving him his own game.

He's technically a failed mascot who was given new life via his appearances in later Capcom fighting games. They really pushed him in MVC1, where he was more or less the main Capcom representative alongside Mega Man.

This is basically Final Fight, with the level map at the beginning and everything. The gameplay is also Final Fight, move around and beat people up. This game does absolutely nothing new, but it might have still been kind of novel in 1991.

(Editor's Note: It appears that this is actually set in Final Fight's Metro City, in the futuristic land of 2026 (way after that series ended). So this is essentially a sequel to Final Fight. Whoa.)

Mummy Commando is...weird, and wields two knives. This game can be played with up to four players at once on the Switch's Capcom Beat 'Em Up Bundle. It defaults to 3 players max, have to manually set it to 4 in the game options.

Some foes attack with these Magitek Armor type mechs, and you can knock them out of it with a strong enough move. From there, commandeer the mech and beat everybody up with it. Well, that's different from Final Fight.

Level 2 is a dinosaur museum. I should probably look into what the deal is with this story and why there's a freaking "Mummy Commando" here...

Alright, there's some kind of weird translation thing going on here with the character select.

Mummy Commando - Actually a guy called "Mack the Knife" who specializes in, you guessed it: Knives, stabbing weapons.

Ninja Commando - Actually a guy called Ginzu the Ninja, who specializes in shurikens and ninja-ing.

Baby Commando - Actually a guy called Baby Head, a genius-IQ child who pilots a mech and is still legally allowed to have a breast in his mouth regularly without having to mow the lawn first.

.........Baby Head?

Anyway, the main character is of course Captain Commando, which is a correct name, and he's got his Captain Suit. He can jump high with his Captain Boots. He's basically a sci-fi archetype idea of what American superheroes were like.

Speaking of breasts, the next exhibit has some cavemen feasting on a wooly mammoth. This is a particularly successful caveman, as he has two girlfriends and two kids.

I switch over to BABY HEAD to fight the next boss, some sort of Blanka-like weirdo. He's accompanied by his hetero lifemate, Danny Devito.

"I gotta go poddy" says Baby Head while doing quadratic equations.

This game likes pairs of bosses a lot, and they're all lame to fight solo. This next fight has a samurai teaming up with some sort of kabuki beast.

...the hell happened to Metro City as of 2026? How BAD was whoever the mayor was after Haggar?

Next, I battle more mechs in some sort of circus. It's worth noting that while there's no time limit onscreen, there IS an invisible stage timer and once it gets down to 30 seconds, it'll pop up to usher you along. Running out of time means very little though, you just lose a life and enter another coin. On the Bundle edition, there are infinite nonexistent coins so you can't actually lose at any of the beat 'em ups on there. Which I guess was also the case in the arcade. Just keep putting money in until you tap out, or beat the game. Considering this game is only about 40 minutes long, it isn't much of a financial hit.

The next boss is...some sort of cactus man! Not sure who the mad scientist in the background is, maybe he's the villain.

Turns out that red mechs have the particularly awesome power of flamethrowers, and can torch your foes.

Next level is a short one where you zip along the ocean and beat up enemy footsoldiers.

This is like something out of a TMNT game.

Who are the villains in this game, anyway? Well, looks like it's some guy named "Genocide" who they had to rename "Scumocide" for the American version. Alrighty then.

That scientist guy from earlier shows up, escaping on a boat. I DON'T THINK SO.

Next level has guys wearing Xenomorph suits. It's 1991, either you have aliens that look like Xenos or you have guys wearing Xeno costumes.

Now the Devitos can breath fire! The Devil's hands have been busy.

The next section is the underground base of the bad guys, and it has arrows on the floor like a COVID-era supermarket.

Captain Commando is basically Cody from Final Fight if he was wearing a 1991 idea of Future People Uniforms.

Next boss! None of this is particularly appealing. Like I can't imagine any of these bosses showing up in Street Fighter Alpha or something the way Final Fight bosses did.

The endgame takes you out of Metro City and into SPACE. Callisto is the third-largest moon in the solar system, behind Titan and Ganymede, and orbits Jupiter. Callisto is almost as big as Mercury. All 3 of the aforementioned moons are basically planets that are just caught in the orbit of much larger planets. Mercury was lucky? enough to get its own orbital path around the sun.

What does all of this mean in the context of Captain Commando? Absolutely fucking nothing!

The next boss is a Captain Commando mirror image/clone, and probably the game's toughest fight. Get ready to shell out quarters for this dude. Defeating him gets us to the final level, Callisto.

This is some sort of moonbase. It's wild how you can see huge galaxies and pink planets in the background, none of which would be there in reality.

Time to battle my way through the same mob of shirtless goons that I've been fighting all game.

Besides the mechs (which stopped being a thing pretty early), another cool innovation is that you can pick up various guns and use them against your foes. Usually it's just rifles and grenade launchers, but towards the end of the game you can also pick up piercing laser beams and awesome ring-firing ray guns.

Things get weird in the last level. There's some sort of nightclub/lounge here on the Callisto moonbase?

Da fuq?

I switch back to THE BEBE just in time for the control room of this...moonbase? Spaceship? Nightclub? Where I face the final boss:

Scumocide here is one of the most annoying final bosses I've ever fought. He just alternates between torching and freezing every time I try to get close, and both moves stall your character out and prevent any movement for a few seconds. It's suuuuper irritating.

He moves a lot faster than you do, and the fight is designed to eat up quarters. Bring a second player and it's much much easier, at least. That was probably the intention here because this is complete bollocks in 1P. Unfortunately, this was the only thing in the Bundle collection that I didn't play multiplayer (yeah, I got a lot of shots from the other games in the collection, that I should probably make some use of too).

In any case, I eventually win with flying kicks and dying a lot.

Mike Haggar, who now occupies some new position in government (not sure what, maybe governor) tells everyone about how Captain Commando saved the world from Scumocide and his legion of "super-criminals"...what?

Real villains aren't gonna go around calling themselves "Scumocide". They'll be smiling faces with groomed hair who stand for all the right things and pretend to be everyone's friend and stuff, then when they get power they start getting rid of free speech and putting people in camps (but only the bad ones of course). Might as well just kill 'em all right?

Anyway, what a weird-ass game this was. I'm not even sure what I think about it. It's very much a generic beat 'em up. Maybe as generic as it gets. It played fine, and it's better multiplayer. Was it worth the hour it took to play it? I guess, for completion's sake anyway.

Now that Captain Commando has fucked off back to his home planet, or whatever it is that happened here, I'm going to check out more Marvel vs. Capcom lore.