"I command you to stay away from this game."

Cobra Command was a game that was given to my brother a long time ago by his friend. Of course, he accepted the game, I mean why not? It's a free game! I say take that game, thank him, and play the heck out of it. Games back then were like $30-60 depending on how popular they were. I was born in 1992, so I wasn't too old to understand the NES games, so I would watch him play it, but let me tell you, playing a minute of this game will help you understand why this game was given to us in the first place.

Your mission is to fly your way down caves and bases and save all the hostages from enemy territory. I still have a fun time understanding how these hostages can walk in mid-air! They move around back and forth trying to grab the rope on the helicopter, however the very first hostage in the game was placed too close to a pit, so he falls, except he doesn't really. Maybe if the game was made by Warner Brothers, then it would be acceptable. Of course, it's not a Looney Tunes game, it's a goof up by Data East. Like seriously? It's the first hostage in the game, and it's the perfect foreshadow of how asinine this game is.

There's one good aspect about this game, and it's the graphics. Staring at the title screen and the first stage misleads you into thinking that this piece of garbage could be decent. The background is nice and colorful with detailed hills, a nice blue sky with moving clouds passing you by while you're getting destroyed by enemy fire. The enemy hideouts are full of extreme detail with several carvings and statues. It's clear what Data East was focusing too much time on. Don't get me wrong, the graphics are excellent, but better graphics don't necessarily make the game better.

The game has really shabby controls. Right from the get-go, your copter speed is messed up. It's common in most games, like Sonic the Hedgehog for an example, for your character to outrun the screen. It's caused by moving too fast, and it's a common error that happens in most video games, but Cobra Command is the exact opposite... the screen outruns you! The copter moves fine, but as soon as it moves to the middle of the screen, it triggers the scrolling, and then the copter gets pushed back to the left side of the screen (assuming you're moving to the right), those are some messed up controls. It's convenient that you can see what's in front of you since the push-back gives you more room and more time to respond to incoming fire, but it's a mess! It can even cause death, because in the stage of the helicopter being pushed back, it moves extremely slow. Imagine trying to escape danger, and the controls keep you bound in one spot, you're screwed, and this is something I have no patience for! The only way to make this stop is to repeatedly tap the D-pad towards the direction you want to go to. That's tedious but at least it prevents death. Oh, and you can also turn around and fly backwards, which makes the controls WAY better, but now you're too far on the opposite side of the screen so you can't see anything in front of you, however luckily the enemy copters start ambushing you from the opposite side instead of in front of you.

All you've got is a crappy gun which can only shoot three bullets at a time, and the bullets usually miss your target. You're also equipped with missiles which are more powerful, but you can shoot one missile at a time! There are upgrades you can get later in the game which help you out, but when you receive the upgrade, the game doesn't automatically equip you with the upgrade. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to use my upgrades! My first instinct was to press pause, but all that does is turn your helicopter around. I tried mashing buttons until finally, select was the correct button to press. That equipped my weapon, but it still doesn't answer why the game makes you do that! Why would you NOT want your upgrade? It should just automatically apply the upgrade so you don't have to go through the select process. Still though, the upgrades can help a lot. There's an upgrade to allow more missiles to be fired at once, there's upgrades to make your copter move faster which help you forget about the terrible controls, and there are several other kinds of missiles that you will find, which are far superior to the piece of crap that you start with. This game has a mild resemblance to Gradius with all the upgrades... wait am I really comparing this pile of junk to Gradius?

Another big problem with the controls is that you can't shoot straight, unless you're perfectly still. When moving you can only shoot diagonally, which is good for the tanks on the ground, but it doesn't help me shoot down the enemy copters above me. Oh man, there are these stupid little red people who shoot at you from the ground, at first I mistaken them as being the hostages; they are always spot-on so the only way to avoid those bullets is by stopping. Of course, you don't want to stop, because then the screen will push back my copter, and then you get hit anyway!

Sometimes it's not obvious what you're supposed to so. It sounds straight forward—just save all the hostages, but you can't advance to the next hideout until you save all the hostages from the previous hideout. It appears to be easy at first, because all the hostages are in plain sight and they yell out loud, but then they throw a curve ball in the later stages! The first two stages are sidescrollers, just move to right and complete the enemy hideouts in order, but stage 3 is when they mess with you! Once you pick up the first hostage, there's an enemy hideout right away. However, there's no indication of how to destroy my way into the hideout. All the hideouts have a barrier and some sort of obvious "weak spot" which destroys the barrier if you shoot at it in order to get into the hideout. However, I shoot at the spot and nothing happens! Well guess what? There's a hostage that I missed because he wasn't there! He doesn't appear until you get the next hostage. So let me get this straight, you have to get the first hostage, and then go BACK in the other direction to get the second hostage, is that some kind of joke? The whole game was all moving towards the right saving each hostage, way to go Data East. Finally the hideout barrier breaks and I can go in.

Like I said, there's no pause button, it just turns around the copter. The select button acts as the pause button. However, in any normal game, the pause button would pause, and the select button would turn the helicopter around, why did they switch the buttons? A lot of times, I hit pause by mistake because I really meant to turn around, which wastes time. When you're paused, you don't simply press select again to resume the game, instead, you have to scroll down to the bottom of the menu and press "Exit." How cruel.

Sorry, but I have yet another complaint about the controls. After all, this game, if I should even call it a game, deserves it. Whenever you lightly tap the D-pad up or down, the copter doesn't respond with that intensity, instead it does its own thing and darts like 20 pixels across the screen. Most games are somewhat sensitive to controls, take Super Mario Bros. for an example, when you tap the D-pad left or right very softly, he takes a small step, or when you tab the jump button very softly he makes a short jump. Instead, we're stuck with these unresponsive controls. This makes it impossible to aim correctly when shooting down barriers. No, it's not a matter of difficulty, it's just the crappy controls again.

There is no life bar in this game. Although you're allowed to get hit three times before dying, on the third time you get hit, your copter catches on fire, and will slightly decrease in altitude. You can still move it up and down without a problem, in fact it helps you aim correctly when you're trying to shoot those stupid barriers down. But why would hostages go in a burning helicopter? Are they that desperate to break free? Finally on the 4th hit, your helicopter gets torched and you fall at a greater speed towards the ground. This time you can't move up fast enough to break out of the fall so it means you're dead. However, the stupid part is that you can still move around when in this stage. Why not just explode? It's sort of like in The Lost World for the Playstation 1 when you lose all your life, you don't die immediately, you can still temporary walk around before the game detects that your life bar is empty.

It's convenient that you can land your helicopter on enemy territory to save the hostages, but what's weird is that when you're moving forward, you can't die by hitting the ground, instead your copter bounces around, which is the strangest thing I've ever seen in a video game. However, if you touch any walls or the ceiling, you're dead meat, but yet you can bounce on the ground. Whatever. It's funny too, because using the bouncing method overrides the scrolling glitch.

The music is pretty good, but the problem is that the music repeats for almost every stage. The music on the surface is the same until stage 4, and then doesn't change again. The enemy hideout area has different music which is always the same, the last stage has separate music, and the stage introductions have separate tune. That adds up to a whopping 5 songs altogether. Think about this on a more wide scale. Look at Super Mario Bros. 3 which was made around the same time, there's songs that are recycled in many stages, but there are far more tunes to listen to than in this game. And no, there's no music on the title screen.

I recommend that you purchase this game. :) No really. I say this because you already know about this game now, and you can prevent everyone else from seeing this game and not having to face it. You have officially contributed in making this world better.

The company who made this game, Data East, seriously didn't test this game before releasing it. All these control flaws, this is the kind of stuff you would see in an unlicensed Nintendo game. I don't even understand why Nintendo would even stamp the license approval on this game when it's almost unplayable. This is legitimately the worst NES game I've ever played. You may have read my review on F-15 City Wars. Yeah, that was a terrible game. But for an unlicensed NES game, it sure has a lot more to offer than Cobra Command. It's clear that Cobra Command had more effort put into it, and it would have been a fairly decent game if they didn't butcher the controls, but the gameplay is completely unforgiving. Also, I probably went in way too much detail, but I wanted to get my point across. For those who have never played this game, you may be having a hard time understanding my explanations, because this game is hard to explain, but to someone who has played this game, I'm sure it makes perfect sense.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 08/23/10

Game Release: Cobra Command (US, November 1988)