Game 144: Cosmic Crusade (1993)

 Written by Morpheus Kitami

 Okay, I'm glad to have Urotsukidoji and Loremaster in the rearview mirror, its time to play some normal, western graphic adventures which don't involve spending hours at a school for no reason. Cosmic Crusade, never heard of this one, and I've been trawling abandonware websites for nearly two decades. Let's see what Wikipedia has to say...

In his adventures, Linus leaves Linoleum (using a fake ID for Larry Flynt to compete in a bumper car contest), quashes a robot revolution in Detroitica and gets gas from an abandoned space station.

Yeah, that Larry Flynt. He of Hustler fame in addition to being one of the most controversial man when it comes to politics. What's he doing here?

Cosmic Crusade AKA Cosmic Spacehead, as I will hereafter refer to it, is a confusing title to understand. It was developed by Codemasters, the same people who published Dizzy, for the NES. Around the turn of the 1990s, Codemasters was getting into the 8-bit console market with the help of an American company called Camerica, who did not release games with the Nintendo stamp of approval. Cosmic Crusade was originally released in a NES compilation including a Dizzy game and some other games of little note. It was ported to the Sega Master System and the Game Gear for reasons I don't have to understand.

One year later, they remade the game for Amiga, DOS and Genesis. I'm not sure of the differences. The DOS version I'm focusing on is clearly a platformer/adventure hybrid, with the original simply seeming cruder.

Side note, the Genesis version's only difference is the music and using the d-pad as a cursor. Right, now, let's fire this bad boy up and...

...oh, no. You can tell this was intended for consoles...I think the only other adventure game I know of that uses codes for saving was Inca and Gobliiins, and I'm still not really sure why. On the bright side, I don't have to write it down, I can just screenshot it.

Meaning it's probably 3095.

In-game. No intro. The menu shifted into a weird demo where there are twenty title screens and five seconds of gameplay. No text, we just get this. Old Lino Town. I can't say what I'd like to say about the font, but suffice it is negative. I'm no font savant though, might just be the alternating capitals and non-capitals. At first glance, my mouse did nothing, as I wrote some of this a helpful infographic showed up on the screen telling me I can use F9 to toggle it, and F10 to toggle the music. Considering it sounds like some children's song intended for consumption by children, this may prove useful.

Left click cycles through actions and right click activates it. Yes, this is annoying. You get your usual selection of actions, with give and pick up being slightly unusual. Linus starts with his birth certificate in his possession, telling us he's born on another planet or on our Earth, but they really screwed up the leap years in the next millennium. On Linus's right is a gold lino dollar and on his left, out of shot is a teleport card which gives unlimited travel to here. Probably useful for later. I can also look at the "cardboard scenery", but this is not helpful.

Linus has a grasp of the obvious.

The other door is a teleporter, probably not useful now, but the other is a post office. Using the door, I'm in here. I've said about several EGA games that they were punching above their weight, looking incredible despite limited color. This is I presume a VGA game. Looks like a EGA game. At first I assumed it was cartoony, but it might very well be 16-color.

Let's talk about our noble hero. You can do a lot with one line of text, sadly, not a lesson known here. Linus's comments seem to range from unhelpful to unhelpful sarcasm. Thankfully he doesn't yet cross over the line into mockery of the player, an action from a PC that's sure to backfire. It still means that the process of looking through a screen is tedious despite it being about five minutes long. What did I get myself into? I also don't like his smug mug and his tendency to yawn whenever I wait for five seconds.

I use the enquiries office and a conversation starts. I'm getting a bad feeling. He's selling stamps and a newspaper for "10 bucks", which Linus can't afford because he might be a child. His (her?) dialog animation is his mouth rapidly moving in addition to his already rapidly blinking eyes. So, we have our first objective, find money. The other window is a lost property window, Cosmic asks what he has, and he says he has a joke book and a missile targeting device. He'll give them to him when he can prove he owns them, wait, he'll give him the joke book because he looks like a joke. I get the feeling that's the only time I'm going to be amused at this game.

Despite being really lame, I doubt this section will have much of an effect on the final rating.

I can't use the teleporter yet, so I use the right side of the screen since there is nothing else I can do, at least not without risking what money I do have, and it turns into the side-scrolling sequence. Very side-scrolling, so side-scrolling you can't even jump on enemies, touch them and Linus dies. I don't necessarily object to this, but it does inhibit my sudden desire to finish this game as soon as possible. I'd just to point out that platformers where you can't kill enemies at all are my least favorite kind of platformers.

This pretty much is how the game is going to go. No explanation, because no manual, and no clue except what the game tells you in the most obtuse possible way. Huzzah!

This Session: 20 minutes

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