Public Commander Keen Forum

there has been a topic about if keens gun stunned or killed his enemy's
i think that topic ended when someone linked a picture of a vort ninja with a hole in his chest ...

today i somehow rememberd this topic AND a line of text about it in keen dreams



the answer is both

I've always understood it to be: the raygun kills in the vorticons trilogy, and the neural stunner stuns in the galaxy trilogy. It looks like, once again, Keen Dreams is a sort of transitional episode.

IIRC, Commander Keen was issued a court order at the end of Keen3 to only set his gun to "stun" from then on, or something like that (if someone can elaborate this in more detail it would be helpful). That is why Keen kills everything in keens 1-3 but only stuns them in 4-6. It would be illegal if he killed again and he would get in big trouble. He didn't even have his gun in Keen dreams, but seeing as he was about to fry those potatoes to a "delicate brown" is confusing since he's not allowed to kill anymore...

And it's still hard for me to understand why the Vorticons were so grateful to Billy after he killed a massive portion of their race (e.g., that line at the end that says "the vorticons that keen didn't slaughter presented him with the golden V") The line is obviously there for comedic effect but it still raises a few eyebrows. Did they think it was worth sacrificing half their population to be released from Mort's mind control? Possibly...

EDIT: Hey, a thought came into my head from looking at CKGuy's avatar: The VortiMoms are not wearing mind control belts. Neither are the vortikids for that matter. Did they want to kill Keen by their own will? The vortininjas may or may not be wearing belts, I can't be sure. But I think they are wearing belts, even if it's hidden under their black jumpsuits somewhere.

Keen in marooned on mars was like the vengeful God of the Old Testament, while later on he became the meek and mild Jesus.

My theory on the mindbelt technology is that it isn't actually a physical belt that all Vorticons must wear, but rather an as-yet-unknown way of transmitting some sort of "control rays" in such a way that only the Vorticon species are affected. It is possible that the grunts and Vorticons stationed on Mars DO wear belts that somehow enhance the signal, since they are likely to be stationed in remote locations, but this doesn't explain why the red-uniformed grunts on the homeworld wear them, or why the Vorticon Elite don't appear to.

I have other ideas concerning the details of how the technology works and affects the Vorticon's minds but they aren't really relevant at this time.

This explains why the monsters don't have the stars in Keen 1-3. I never thought of the monsters there as dead until now.

Concerning the mindbelts, it is obvious that the belt is needed to control the vorticons. But the Vortimoms aren't particularly agressive to Keen. Thery're not deadly to touch, and their shots kill both Keen and other Vorticons. There rather seem to be harsh living conditions on Vorticon VI and therefore the moms have to protect their youth at all cost.
Vorticon Youths aren't agressive either, they're only playing so fast that they run over Keen, and knocking him out a few seconds.
The Vorticon elite is a special force trained by Mort himself, and they've already sworn their loyality to him by chipping off their ears, so that's why they don't need the belts.

Another thing that's interesting for the stun topic:
The Arachnut is only stunnable for a few seconds, and it doesn't even show stars (like the dead monsters from Keen 1-3). Is it even stunned, or did it just fall over?

I'm sure the vortimoms just have mind-girdles.

Interesting. But remember Vorticon Hyperpistol is not a gun invented by Keen! I've never noticed this detail before -- was it Keen who mercifully invented stunning, afterall? Hm.

it would make sense that the vorticons weapons are flexible like the star trek phaser

The Raygun and Hyperpistol are lasers, they "fry" the enemies. Keen 3 has a pistol (or was it a railgun?), which kills. The Neural stunner just stuns.

As for the Vortimoms, I agree with Tulip... the moms just protect the youths, and the youths are just playing.

I tend to think that the guns do not have individual settings. Keen was just dreaming in that part of the story!

My theory is that Keen never meant to go kill anyone, but got marooned on mars without any weapons so he had to steal the martian rayguns to get out. Then Keen2 and 3 happened so he had no time to invent a merciful stun gun, until the time between 3 and 4.

Do you suppose ID got a lot of complaints from mothers upset that it was such a violent/bloody game, so they changed it to the Neural Stunner?

I don't know but I doubt it. There's no blood showing except in Keen 3 when you shoot vortininja. If the moms don't carefully read every text in the game, and I doubt they do, especially such as the ending text of Keen 3 that mentions dead vorticons, which I doubt they get much chance to read, they will never know those enemies are dead, to players and watchers they just look stunned. Probably the stunner just fit the Keeniverse better (which it certainly does), and Tom wanted to take it to that direction.

I think the Vorticon raygun killed the enemies because that's just what games were like back then. They probably never thought about it. When they switched to a more cartoon-like style in Galaxy, stunning the enemies fit in better with the light-hearted comic cartoon style, so they went with that instead.

I had to double check this but Keenrush IS right,
there is some blood to be seen on the chest of the shocked Vortininja!
If I'd seen that when I was young, I'd propably killed all my classmates when I was 15.

This discussion seems to move from finding explanations inside the Keeniverse to those of the creators in real life...

One could argue those two things are closely connected.