The 1998 Japan-only Saturn port of Time Commando sees you taking on the role of Stanley Opar, a special forces soldier thrust through various time periods with a goal of finding and destroying a computer virus.
Fight 3D enemies using your fists and weapons appropriate to each time period to secure the victory! The 3D models are overlaid on pre-rendered backgrounds linked by FMVs for that special ’90s look. Mechanically the is most similar to The Crow, and it looks and controls about the same.
This game was OK on the PC and PlayStation but took a visual and frame-rate dive on the Saturn. Oops. #WhyIsThisOnSaturn?
Why this series is called “BestofSaturn” when there’s basically anything in it?
OK, about Time Commando, I played it circa 1997 in a friend’s house, he had a Windows 95 PC and it was amazing, I still remember how different Duke Nukem 3D was on the PC, compared to the Saturn version.
Time Commando has that PC Game from the 90’s vibe to it, meaning, if you could experience it at the time, you had a unique game that couldn’t be replicated on consoles of the time. There’s a scene in the old west, where you throw a dynamite through a window, blowing up the entire wooden building that was very impressive for a 11yo kid.
The original PC version has a 640×480 mode and it looked so clean, like Full HD at the time.
What they did with the Saturn version is nothing short of disastrous, I mean, my brothers and I played Myst and Riven and had beaten both games, and they were very decent representations of the source material, of course, with the resolution compromises you’d expect. But this Time Commando version looks like it rushed right through the early beta phase and was released as-is.
Still, Myst and Riven have higher resolution than the Saturn version, this is why Riven has 5 CDs, compared to the Saturn’s 4.
Why couldn’t the Saturn render the same games in higher resolution? I’d bet it was a deliberate choice, just like Time Commando could had been SO much closer to the original PC version.
Is Time Commando a game with great gameplay on PC? No, but it has a unique approach, great visuals and atmosphere.
Right, I forgot to mention, the part where Myst and Riven have higher resolution is about the Playstation versions.
I made a patch to fix the game breaking bug in level 8: https://segaxtreme.net/resources/time-commando-un-break-level-8.286/
#RestOfSaturn
LOL