Commander Blood and the brilliant trilogy that was a poster child for the bizarre

In between sessions of educational PC games that my parents required me to play as a child, I'd swap out CD-ROMs and play a sci-fi adventure called Commander Blood. Timing was all-important, as I had to find the right moment to swap out programs if my father happened to walk into the bedroom where the family computer was. I was caught red-handed a few times, but I always cried my way out of it. Around the tenth time my father walked in on me zipping around the galaxy, he was so fed up with my dishonesty that he tore the game from the disc tray, snapped it in half, and tossed it into the trash.

I never saw it again, at least not until I reached my early 20s. I often lamented the fact that I wasn't able to fully explore the psychedelic narrative I'd fallen in love with as a child. Eventually I decided to grab a sealed, boxed copy from eBay and took my first few shaky steps back into a world that had been closed off to me for years.

Cryo's Commander Blood is a poster child for the bizarre, with Muppet aliens, a funky Eurobeat-inspired opening theme and an impenetrable sort of weirdness that made it nearly inaccessible to newcomers. Still, my malleable young mind was eager to wrap itself around it, and as an adult, I was finally able to jump into the series wholeheartedly.

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