1. Armor Games
2. Small Soldiers Squad Commander Download

IT was inevitable that the Hollywood blockbuster licensing-cross-promotional-merchandise machine would someday create a movie that looked cheap, tacky and shallow next to its spinoff products. Witness 'Small Soldiers,' a popcorn film about cybernetic action figures on a malignant rampage. The movie is egregious. But the plastic toys that come with a Burger King meal are great.

And the video games are excellent.

Ignoring the warnings of Athena, Kratos, the Spartan army attack on Rhodes, with the giant eagle suddenly deviates from its authority and revive the Colossus of Rhodes.

Small Soldiers Globotech Design Lab and Small Soldiers Squad Commander (Hasbro Interactive, $29.95 each, Windows 95) outshine their celluloid namesake by several orders of magnitude.

• Small Soldiers Squad Commander 1-Click Install Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, XP (Hasbro 1998) MY PROMISE My games are genuine, install in one step, look, sound and play in Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista and XP like they did in the old days, or your money back.This is my unconditional guarantee for three years.
• Small Soldiers: Squad Commander Click the Download Free Trial button above and get a 14-day, fully-functional trial of CrossOver. After you've downloaded CrossOver check out our YouTube tutorial video to the left, or visit the CrossOver Chrome OS walkthrough for specific steps.

Small Soldiers: Squad Commander carries on the story introduced by 1998 summer's cinematic hit, Small Soldiers. A highly intelligent microprocessor has been installed in the latest GI-Joe type action figures. The mistaken installation brings to life the Commando Elite, a band of merciless soldiers, and their sworn enemies, the Gorgonites, a. Small Soldiers Squad Commander (Dreamworks Interactive)(1998) Skip to main content Search the history of over 380 billion web pages on the Internet.

Globotech Design Lab is a combat game with build-your-own action figures. Half of it is a design exercise, a virtual model shop where you combine plastic body parts to build the ultimate fighter. Each arm, leg, head or torso has different attributes. It's possible to match parts from prebuilt characters, but it's much more fun to combine arms and legs from different action figures into your own cubist collage of cyborg appendages. My own virtual Frankenstein's monster, Klaatu, consisted of a roaring chain-saw arm, a Kung Fu Grip arm, one robot implant leg, one satellite communications leg and the head of Chip Hazard, leader of the Small Soldiers' Commando Elite.

From there, your character goes to the paint shop, where you pick from an array of colors and textures for each body part. You then select a computer chip to snap into the figure's back and choose from a menu of fighting moves. Punches and blocks consume computer power and chip capacity is limited, so these are resource management decisions. The design process allows each custom-built character a number of taunts ('Show me what you're made of, soldier!' 'Who wants some?') for attitudinal posturing in battle.

Once your action figure is assembled and animated (It's alive . . . alive!), the game shifts into battle phase, a Mortal Kombat-style free-for-all in which anything, even an opponent's fallen limbs (or your own), can be used as a weapon.

As you rack up victories in single combat, additional chip sets become available, allowing you to equip your action figure with more power, increased damage resistance and better moves. It's all about upgrading your technology -- trading up to faster processors, upgrading peripherals and reconfiguring the machine to perform in new ways. When you hit a plateau in combat, it's probably time to go back to the model shop and switch parts.

The tinkering options are endless. It's still the same character, but by the end of the game, all the original parts have probably been replaced. Which begs the old freshman philosophy question about the ax handle: You replace a broken ax handle, then the blade breaks. If you replace the blade, is it the same ax? In the ontological scheme of Small Soldiers Globotech Design Lab, the answer is, 'Yes, because I can use it to beat the Gorgonite boss on level five.' Or, 'Yes, because I can print it out as a trading card.' Or, 'Yes, because I can download it onto a floppy disk, take it over to my friend's house and beat up his action figure with it.'

With a modicum of technical savvy, you could replicate any one of these virtual fighting robots and post it to the Web. It makes the film look retrograde. In the movie, these action figures are made of plastic and silicon in factories and shipped around the country in trucks. In the game, the real-world product, they are made of software and can be transmitted digitally. The action figure is basically a name and a bit of stored information. Dueling code.

In the second Small Soldiers game, Squad Commander, the action figure is a tactical resource. As in real-time strategy games like Command and Conquer, or Warcraft, which are geared toward adults, Squad Commander is about deploying your troops in a series of missions to neutralize the enemy. But unlike the grown-up games, this one is less about amassing wealth and building fortresses than it is about obstacles and puzzles. The deductive reasoning required is equally sharp, if not sharper. But the terrain is considerably more whimsical.

Armor Games

For instance, if you play on the Gorgonites' side (you can play either of the film's two opposing factions, the Gorgonites or the Commando Elite), there is a scenario in a convenience store. The objective is to free a kidnapped comrade, who has been locked in the back room safe.

To accomplish that, you have to navigate a maze of spilled candy, work your way over to the Slurpee machine, climb that and blow up a TNT barrel. That will knock over some cups, forming a bridge to the nacho area. Run your troops one by one across the nacho counter with perfect timing to avoid the intermittent, deadly bursts of scalding nacho cheese. Find the cash register, figure out how to open it, grab the key, unlock the back room and fight your way back to the safe, then unlock it with a combination that you saw flashing on the lotto machine. The entire time, you are under fire by heavily armed plastic soldiers. It makes Command and Conquer look like a parade exercise.

Like 'Toy Story,' the landscape of Squad Commander is littered with references to name-brand games. Here, virtual toys become elements of the game. In one instance, you have to hit the right combination of lights on a Simon machine to get a door to open. A deadly field of zooming remote-controlled cars in an electronics store refers to Frogger. There's a system of secret passageways, a la Clue, a chess board and a puzzle game that looks a lot like Perfection. And of course, there are sly product placements throughout. If you scrutinize the toy shelves in the background, you will see boxes of Mr. Potato Head and Candyland, both made by Hasbro Interactive's parent company, Hasbro Inc.

Small Soldiers Squad Commander Download

Squad Commander is a game about toys. And it points to the distinction between a game and a toy. Games have rules, objectives, winners and losers. Toys have none of these things. Toys are objects, physical or virtual. A toy is a noun. Games are verbs. That's why games are easier to translate into interactive media -- the pieces you push around are just place holders. Action is everything.

That's why Globotech Design Lab and Squad Commander are more entertaining than Barbie Fashion Designer. Barbie Fashion Designer is a virtual doll. It's a toy. And as a toy, it doesn't measure up to its plastic counterpart. The Small Soldiers CD-ROM's are not toys. They're games. And as games, they rival anything you can do with a G.I. Joe. These characters truly are action figures. There is a certain poetic justice in the fact that Small Soldiers' publisher is the same company that manufactured the original G.I. Joe doll on the heels of Mattel's success with Barbie. Toy history repeats itself -- first as plastic merchandise, then as licensed interactive media.