LDreamcastast night, I broke out the Dreamcast for some old-school gaming with my friend Rodney. More specifically, we played our perennial favorite multiplayer game, Toy Commander. I can’t even describe how much I love this game. The single player game was quite good - a series of wonderfully imaginative mini-games played with toys. All the levels are in the house of the child Andy (you) who is the Toy Commander, and you control a wide variety of vehicles, depending on the mission, from fighter jets to tanks to firetrucks to an alien vessel, etc. All miniatures flying/driving around inside a furnished house, which makes for some very cool level design.

No Cliche, the defunct French developer of Toy Commander clearly added the multiplayer modes mainly as an afterthought, and it was only by accident that we discovered what an incredibly fun two-player game the Cat and Mouse mode is, provided we play with land vehicles. You’ve got seeking missiles, guns, mines, and bombs and the idea is to ‘tag’ the other player, making him the cat and you the mouse. Every second you stay as the mouse, you get a point. First to 480 points wins.

Sounds simple, but it’s the level design and the particular weapons you get that make the game great, accidentally, I am fairly sure. For instance, one of the major tactics one has to master to even hope to compete is damaging your own health by using your own mines and your bombs to blow yourself up at the last second, just before someone catches you, causing you to respawn somewhere else in the level. Sounds stupid, I know, but it works very well as a mechanic, aside from the fact that we had to create a couple rules to deal with spawn points which leave you invulnerable due to the inability to get there or shoot there in any way but spawning there.

Another enjoyable aspect of the game are the ramps that move your orientation. So, you’re driving along on the floor and drive up a ramp, onto the wall, at which point your orientation changes and now that wall is your floor. Each level has a couple teleports (mining the other end of the teleport is a favorite strategy) and there are also automatic missile launchers placed around the level that you can claim for your side by shooting them. They’ll then shoot at your enemy (making him the cat if they hit) until he manages to tag it, turning it back to his side. There are choices to make, like whether to upgrade your weapons or not (generally a good thing, but the level 1 mines are a lot harder to see when you’re zooming around, making them more valuable in terms of tagging an opponent than more visible mines) and whether to bet that your opponent’s mines are no longer on the other side of that warp (you can only have X mines on the level at once, and placing X+1 destroys the oldest existing mine of yours).

All in all, it’s difficult to describe how much fun this game is multiplayer, once you come to realize how accidentally brilliant the Cat and Mouse mode is. There is no game that makes me sweat so much or gets my adrenaline pumping so hard. Rodney actually prefers to play with a rubber glove on his controller hand, since his thumb gets sweaty from the tension and starts to slip off the joystick.

Unfortunately, we have yet to encounter anyone else who has spent enough time playing it to be good at it, and as it was a minor game on a ‘failed’ (only in the financial sense! The DC kicked butt in every other way) console, in 1999, I don’t hold out a lot of hope, but who knows, perhaps there are other Toy Commander devotees out there that we’ll meet someday. I have the sad feeling, however, that Rodney and I may be the finest Toy Commander Cat and Mouse players in the world.

Top two in a field of two. Woot.