Velikiy Drakon article on Duke Nukem 3D (Genesis), translated!

Guess who translated it. Of course! It's Crash Nicker, who else? :P
I'm only showing the bottom parts of the page including this article. You remember the Commandos Genesis pirate article? That was on the upper half of the page both times.

(EDITORIAL) (From our beloved translator... :P)
Men, that review is supposed to be translated long ago. But, as you see, I haven't been making it as long as Duke Nukem Forever (who had to shut itself down eventually) and you got it fresh and cold. Enjoy.
COMMENT ON THE GAME: Whoo, PC games keep storming SEGA MegaDrive! Yeah, TecToy's try to port the infamous 'Come Get Some' shooter was not that brilliant as... no, wait. BLOODSHOT WASN'T BRILLIANT AS WELL! Same for Zero Tolerance. Well, you have a save feature (not passwords!) but you have only 9 levels and singleplayer mode to mess up with. And, just for heck, it consumes 4 megs of RAM (for comparision: Super Street Fighter II used 5, Ultimate MK Trilogy uses 10). At least the monsters are not one-si... No, I don't mean gay monsters, I mean monsters' sprites. And the controls. Only one suggestion: WHY DO I HAVE TO PUSH A, B AND C AT THE SAME TIME TO PAUSE THAT GAME!?!? Perhaps these guys at TecToy are way too lazy to make a 3/6-button joy detector (or, no, ONE guy who made the music and the coding) and decided to put an 'activator' feature in there. Stupid. But, overall, worth tryin' at least once.
COMMENT ON THE ARTICLE: Well, it's okay, but LAWL, the author thought that it was developed by pirates. And LAWL it's not Beretta but rather a Desert-Eagle-looking thing. And LAWL again, a team of programmers. A+B+C, CREDITS, list to the TecToy's part.

DUKE NUKEM 3D

The protagonist of our next game is not needed in any kind of introduction. All the gaming people know him or, at least, heard about him. A big lover of women, big guns, stylish cars and a cool comedian. The humanity's savior and leading pigcop-herd. It's nearly impossible to not to recognize that all-known man after such a description - Duke Nukem.
The appearence of this blondie on MD was less unexpected than in case of our previous game, but anyway. It's not actually known why do the great pirates decided to show Duke in his 3D appearence to people since there are a lot of games starring him but consuming much less power. For those who just started playing computer games, I have to admit that Duke didn't become a 3D Action hero from the very beginning as he was popular earlier, in the era of 2D platform games. There, he was running on space stations ripping all the extraterresial flora and fauna on the way. As I remember, the game was playable on the 286 comps, and that's yet another proof of it's ability to be ported to 16-bit consoles. If pirates would rescramble THIS version of Duke, they would deserve, at least, a statue while the happy owners of MD would get a really splendid action game.
But, alas, pirates decided to go the other way around, like, on the progress side, and went 3D. The 3D, however, got scared and fled, so as the result we have a game resembling Zero Tolerance and Bloodshot but much worse than they both are. Of course, there were supposes that the game wasn't created by pirates either but, by known reasons, the supposes didn't go through well.
During the porting, as everyone could expect, graphics were downgraded. But it seems like it could be much worse. The team of unknown programmers did, even if partly, moved that athmosphere that Duke is surronded with. He keeps trashing his neaty jokes and running with countless bunches of monsters on an unknown space station, shooting them at the same time. Talking about shooting, there's a lot of weaponry to choose from. Beginning from a weak Beretta and ending to the alldevastating rocket launcher. When all the ammo is gone, you may kick those alien bastards with a cleany army shoe. When you tap a combination of buttons, you'll be able to see the map which will help you to not get lost in the labyrinths.
Unfortunately, all the good ends here and now we're going to a morbid part where I'm going to shame the game a little bit.
First, when playing it, you feel a catastrophical lack of ammo and medkits, the worst is that both categories of stuff are decreasing at the same time. You don't even know to what to try to keep. But whatever you do, you still run out of both ammo and health. The death comes much earlier now. Even firing at long distances while trying to dodge a fireball launched at you became harder due to the inaccuracy of the crosshair. To mention, that is the main inconvinience. Thank God they've left strafe in, cos' without it, you won't be able to survive even for a minute.
But, in any case, Duke Nukem is an unkillable classic of the genre which you probably might want to try in any of its' instances. And even some cons (that you will meet here) won't spoil that overall Duke feeling whatever they will do.

CONTROLS:
A - opening doors;
B - strafe;
C - fire;
X - turn run mode on/off
Y - show map;
Z - change the weapon;
X+Y - pause the game (er, X+Y+Z+START I guess - NIX);
X+Y+Z - main menu (that's A+B+C - NIX)

The Ninja's word: I couldn't even complete the goddamn FIRST level! Seriously, this game is just plain cruel on difficulty. If you seriously want to play Duke, then pop in a PS1 version. OR the PC version if you can find a normal one. The pausing in this game is lol - a+b+c... what the hell? - as well as, well the idea. 3D is not always the best idea even on 16-bit, with of course exceptions like Super Mario RPG on the SNES...

Velikiy Drakon article on Commandos (Genesis) translated!

Another article from the Great Dragon, translated by Crash Nicker. Thanks!
The Duke Nukem 3D one isn't translated - YET :P
(EDITORIAL) (Note: This editorial is written by Crash Nicker :P)
Good morning dear malchiki and devochiki. Malchiki particularly, because today is the special release, dedicated to the Day of The Mothership Defender holiday which is celebrated, as far as I know, only in our big and dirty ex-USSR and only on February 23. It's the Great D review of the Commandos port for MegaDrive written by C.J.C. and posted in issue 60 (one of the last ones). My opinon about the game? Well, BEST TOMSOFT GAME EVER. But freaking hard.
Background info. Mentioning 'Ho Sung Pak' in here actually means mentioning the whole Chinese piracy. You know who was that guy actually? He played Liu Kang in Mortal Kombat. Then, one guy (I dunno who was that, perhaps Agent Cooper or Lord Hanta) dicided to koin that name in and here you go. One thing else to mention about that Ho Sung Pak joke. There is a cheat/secrets/easter eggs section in the Great D magazine and (ONCE UPON A TIME) an unknown guy sent them a 'description of an easter egg', where he says something like 'watch the MK staff roll carefully and you'll notice a familiar name'. Then something like 'LOL, I don't get the joke'.
But, just to mention, another guy who wrote an article about Sonic Jam 6 (Super Mario Bros 2 in that case) was even noobier... Well, nevamind Aladdin article coming soon.
Enjoy your coke.

**********

Article:

Everyone knows that pirates keep watering the plentifying soil of MegaDrive. And now, the comrades and relatives of Ho Sung Pak have a whole bunch of projects for the owners of SEGA 16-bit consoles. Today, we're going to tell you about two of them that stand out against the others.

COMMANDOS

The first game was not actually expected by the others, while thoughts about porting it to MegaDrive would be treated like an unreal insanity. But these agile Chinese proved that there's nothing impossible yet again and made a rush on the bastions of "Cold" PCs. Well, who actually noticed that, not counting us? However, I'm glad to present you Commandos in the 16-bit format.
The stiry of the game is taking place during World War II at the Nazis' rear. A small team is going under control of the player and in that small team, every member is being a pro in their favourite jobs. The goal of each level is pretty simple: to complete a mission without losing even a single warrior.
In the MegaDrive version of this game, you can play as the following characters:

GREEN BERET - the most important and skilled saboteur in the team. Some kind of a ringleader. His strong shoulders will carry all the primary tasks in this game. Has a knife, able to move the dead enemies' bodies to a secluded nook. Has a bunch of medkits and a decoy in his posession.
SNIPER - never leaves his sniper rifle alone, which he uses for shooting the enemies out on large distances without any miss. Use this advantage for destroying your opponent who's being far away. His only weakness is a low amount of ammo.
MARINE - as soon as he has a harpoon, he can kill the enemies without any noise. One more unique ability of this character is a scuba gear that allows him to pass water obstacles without being detected, and, of course, the ability to ride teammates on a boat.
SAPPER - the most explosive team member. Knows how to use dynamite, throws grenades with a precise accuracy and sets beartraps everywhere. But, using his abilities is problematic since it's very hard to get to the place of dynamite or trap setting without a proper weapon.
SPY - has no weapon, and that makes him completely helpless when he meets an enemy. But the lack of weaponry is fully compensated with the ability to disguise that allows him to walk freely even under enemies' noses. In addition, you can also stand closer to the enemy soldier and kill him with a poison prick.

The only loss of commandos is the DRIVER who could control all the types of autotransport. But, even without him, the game is still addictive.
Every character should complete only that kind of task that he's able to. And remember: when one of your soldiers gets killed, you have to restart all the mission over.
But the loss of one of the heroes is not such a big one. Since MD can't outmaster the PC by it's power, we have only five missions to play compared to the original ninteen. However, even that is enough to spend at least a week in front of your TV set. And, in fact, five mission is much better than no missions at all.
But in anything else, the game keeps itself close to the original. And you also play the game with cursor (D-Pad will replace a computer mouse in that case). Add the gameplay that will keep you on your toes where you have to be as quiet as a weapon stock mouse. An interactive world where anything may be destroyed. The availabilty of the footsteps on the snow which may be noticed by guards is a welcome feature too.
I guess that the only unrecoverable loss of the gameplay is the unability to see to where the Nazi guard is looking at the moment. Now, you have to be patient while looking at the opponent's head and then determining where does he actually look. Because of this, at the first sight, little problem, the game became much harder than before. But that's not the reason to reject this game at all. You adopt to this inconvinience really fast and then you begin to be happy about making your humble donation to the Nazis' army destruction.

CONTROLS:
X - take
Y - draw the pistol
Z - get up/lie down
A - confirm action
B - change the character
C - cancel

**********

The Ninja's word: Awesome article. I can understand why it's the best Tomsoft SDK game ever made. I'd definitely take this over the HORRIBLE NES port by ESC, AKA Waixing. Even though this one has absolutely no ending, just the results screen and then the title screen... so yeah. Still, it deserves a ride.