The 1987 MSX version of Commando was a Japan-only release through ASCII Corporation, and – the truth be told – it’s a pretty awful conversion.
If you’re searching for the game you need to look for the title “Senjō no Ōkami” [“Wolf of the Battlefield“], which is the game’s Japanese title, as you’ll not find it under the name “Commando“.
The 1986 NES version of Commando is a flickery mess to be honest, although that didn’t stop the game becoming a smash hit – selling over one million cartridges worldwide.
The Amstrad CPC version of Commando – published by Elite Systems in 1986 – is easy to write off, due to its chunky graphics and mostly featureless backgrounds, but it’s actually one of the better 8-bit conversions.
The Atari 2600 version of Commando was programmed by Mike Reidel and first published by Activision in 1985. Considering the console’s limitations this is a surprisingly good conversion of the vertically-scrolling shooter.
Last Resort is a scrolling ‘bullet hell‘ shooter developed by SNK and first released as an arcade game, on Neo Geo MVS hardware, in 1992. From what I can ascertain it doesn’t seem to have been released on cartridge for Neo Geo AES home systems, but it was later released on the Neo Geo CD.
Cabal is a third-person, war-based shooter developed by TAD Corporation and distributed into arcades by Taito in Japan, by Fabtek in North America and by Capcom in Europe, in 1988.
The Atari ST and Amiga conversions of Commando are more or less identical and play pretty much the same, because they were both developed by the same group of people, for publisher Elite Systems, and released in 1989.
The 1989 Amiga version of Capcom‘s classic Commando was ported and published by Elite Systems, and it’s not too bad, although it’s definitely not perfect.
Alongside Donkey Kong, Sega‘s Zaxxon was another ColecoVision arcade conversion that wowed gamers back in 1982 when they first saw it. And it was so close to the original that it drove sales of the console itself, because gamers wanted the arcade experience in their own homes.
Frenzy is a 1984 conversion of the 1982 arcade game of the same name, which in turn is a sequel to the maze shooter, Berzerk. The ColecoVision port was developed by Stern Electronics, who made the original arcade game, and is therefore very authentic to that game. In fact: it’s even better than the arcade game, because it’s less archaic, more playable, and is more varied.
The King of Grabs 