Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade - Over and Done With (And Final Rating)

Written by Morpheus Kitami

Right, let's get this over with. The Genesis version, hallowed be thy joypad mouse cursor, on earth as it is in hell, etc., etc..

Welcome to Detroitica, is that right? Five CAPs if I'm wrong and you correct me. I think the music was intended for the Genesis primarily, if you can believe that, because it sounds the least like the person designing it wishes pain upon players. Or maybe just luck, considering everything else I don't believe that to be true. The only thing I can interact with here is a computer, which is switched off. I can't use it, so I guess I have to turn it on somewhere else, like how most computers work.

You know, Dante's depiction of hell is really lacking in the platforming stages from this game. Yeah, sure, being a head stuck in a frozen, screaming vortex while Satan is at the center crying and screaming sucks, but imagine having to live in this stage in real life. This is merciful in one way, you don't die by getting hit by lasers, but it is crueler in the sense that you get shot and you are slowly taken back to the start of the level. This is right after a password point. (I decided against playing this from the start.

Ah. This room looks like it was taken from a Pajama Sam game. Which isn't a good comparison to make right now, this game wants to be totally unique, its less bad if it screws up something it alone does, if its comparable to something, its going to look bad. There's nothing I can do here, but there's an exit on the right. I'll get to that in a moment, but first I went back after seeing it, because there is some...hoo boy.

I went back to see if there was anything I missed having used a password. There was a bus depot, but what I didn't spot was a computer key in my inventory. Ah, that makes sense, must be a subtle attempt to screw over people who skipped ahead with passwords...nah, they're not that clever. Anyway, using the computer key activates the computer, which allows me to pick the robot deactivation code. Its Mastermind, or whatever the British call it. Its the most fun I've had all game, but it is a 5/10 implementation of it, only three colors, I get it right on my second attempt. Still the most fun I had all game.

So, a boss. It throws metal junk at you, you get knocked back, then try to get past it. At first, I thought this was the ultimate joke. These people designing a boss? But, it actually ties the two types of mechanics together in a clever way, adventure and platforming, get knocked off the platform down to the conveyor belt and be sent to the next area. Congratulations, something clever is suddenly coming out of this game.

Which brings me to the scrapyard. Here's another unintentionally difficult puzzles if you used a password, there's a fire extinguisher here, which you naturally need to grab, only its under a car wreck. That is, the tire. I have a metal bar, which solves the problem. After going back through another platforming stage, you use the extinguisher to put out the power generator. The stage back just takes you to the computer room for some reason. This allows passage past the boss.

Leading me to a password. Six passwords, according to the internet, for this version and two of them are in this section. Talk about skewed ideas. There's a painting, Cosmic's home apparently, and a button which frees the staff. This gets me some guy's car keys and takes me to another platforming stage automatically. Another platforming stage, this time jumping over sputtering electrical equipment, its annoying.

Now there's more from Cosmic, or Linus, saying how he'll finally discover Earth, taking the guy's car. I'm sure that's not what he had in mind, but he did give his car keys to a random dude. Now I have to avoid rocks in outer space. That was five minutes, it's actually badly designed, you have a massive car, and even if the hitbox is smaller than it, its still a massive amount of screen space to avoid stuff on. Its also completely randomly placed with no thought as to whether or not a player can avoid it, at least the health of the ship is quite generous.

This cost a lot of fuel on the car apparently, so now we're at scenic space gas station. But I can't just use the pump, because I don't have space bucks. So I'm going to have to explore this place, the exit here just takes me to another room, with six doors, two hidden in the foreground, with strange titles like "No.1 weighs a ton" and "No.4 no floor", which I guess are clues as to their contents.

These six rooms are a sort of connected puzzle, except it breaks game logic. All of them require Linus to move like in the platforming stages, except he can't jump in these, so you have to use various items. It isn't that hard to figure things out, just lengthy. Like if someone designed that one part of every adventure where you continuously go through the same old rooms intentionally rather than the player just not grasping something.

So I find an anti-gravity slide, which works like a ladder, only you have to place it. I use that to get a trampoline and here's where this chain of puzzles break down, I go around the station twice and the only thing that jumps out at me as something I can use the trampoline on I can't use, and the anti-grav slide can't solve anymore puzzles on its own. Instead the trampoline just pushes me up to higher than what an anti-grav slide could do. Eh?

This gets me a bridge, which I can then use with the other two items to get a blowpipe. Then I use the four of these to perform this overly complicated task. The joy of this is rather underwhelmed by how stupid it feels and how unhelpful the game is. Sure, a Myst-clone might be similarly unhelpful, but the point of those is that the player is you, you're not playing as a small child who tells you that a camera is a camera.

This, for a box to carry 10 spacebucks, which moves around like a Pac-Man ghost for some reason. This is enough to get Linus to Earth and back, glad to see inflation has calmed down over the centuries.

We get an end cutscene and then the credits. There are multiple names in the credits, including multiple graphics artists for some reason. Funny, it doesn't seem like a ten or so man operation, excluding the people at Codemasters. That's another twenty people, it's funny, even if it's in a game as crappy as this, to see so many more people who didn't contribute to the game credited. As much as I would like to end this, we're not done.

Two Player Pie Fight

Another game in this already tangled mess of game. This time two players throw pies at each other in a surreal nightmare world. There's no distinct health bar, the two players get one bar showing who's winning. If both players hit each other, it goes back to the middle. So two evenly matched players could be at it for some time, while one better player will quickly win.

NES port/original (?)

It's basically the same game except cruder and simpler. At least for as long as I could stomach. The controls aren't that bad, except that the platforming stages are now horrendous. You get no air control, which wouldn't be a problem in of itself, except every time Linus jumps its like being on an ice level. It's like the DOS version in the first entry, everything sticks. Yeugh.

Quattro Adventure

Originally, Linus was in a four-in-one cartridge on the NES, unlicensed because Codemasters didn't want to play Nintendo's fees, this is where the plotline of Linus trying to find the Earth comes from. Not just because platforming is terrible, but because its designed in such a way as to be completely player hostile. The first level requires you to climb up some bubbles to the surface while dodging fish, while under a time limit. Oh, and in this game, Linus is stunned if he falls from too big a height. This is something that should be on the Angry Video Game Nerd, not here.

This Session: 1 hour 20 minutes

Final Time: 5 hours 10 minutes

Puzzles and Solvability

The game has such a bizarre assortment of puzzles that between blatantly obvious ones and the non-sensical ones you wonder what the heck was going on. It was only luck that I managed to solve some of these, sheer bone-headedness from these past few years of solving puzzles and realizing that everything probably has a use somewhere.

But, its not just that the game has non-sensical puzzles you can only win by virtue of remembering what you haven't used, it does these puzzles poorly. I'm going to get to why in the next section for most, but multi-part puzzles often require you to put things in a specific order or guess which verb the game actually wants you to use.

Now, not all of these are terrible, some are clever, which does earn it a point.

1

Interface and Inventory

Firstly, it was extremely unnecessary for there to be about five games in one, that is, platformer, adventure, racer, mastermind and the pie fight. The latter three have real "because we can" energy to them. The platformer and adventure sections have the most focus, but only the Amiga and Genesis versions actually make the platformer sections playable as opposed to the NES kusoge we get on other platforms.

Now, in theory, the whole five commands plus inventory isn't bad in theory, but in practice I think its somewhat pointless. There is only one command you will ever actually use on any given character, others will produce a generic unfunny message that might as well call the player an idiot, and look tells you nothing the name of an item wouldn't tell you.

Going over them, as I said, look is useless, it tells you nothing you can't already figure out by using it. Maybe if descriptions were more than one line it would be helpful. For instance, telling the player that a telekey takes someone to what's labeled on it as opposed to teleporting someone somewhere else from there. Give, for instance, is entirely useless, you give items automatically in dialog, except for one time you give a balloon to a scary monster, which feels like more of a use command. That's useless. Pick-up is useless because you would never use an item before picking it up, its not like a bear trap is activated and you need to set it off before picking it up.

That gets us to use and talk, again, you aren't going to use someone you can talk to, and you aren't going to talk to something you're going to use. So the game should have been a universal cursor. Usually when this comes up, there are reasons why you would have various actions, reasons to use someone, reasons to talk to objects. This makes the game perplexing, because the adventure portion is the focus, yet it feels tacked on.

Minor complaints, having three lines of text on the GUI for everything from dialog to inventory items. The usual complaint about half the screen being taken up by the GUI, not that what they were showing looked any good anyway. I hate the font choice, dialog is painful to look at. You have to turn on the mouse for some reason, but the joystick is a choice at the start.

2

Story and Setting

The story is something of a non-entity, Linus's quest to return to Earth is rarely mentioned in-game, even though we're always working towards it. I guess in context it works, Linus is a kid, probably and his plan is stupid. It is hard to keep track of what little there is.

That said, this world is bizarre, its the future and Earth is a mystery, yet somehow Earth also looks like it did at the time the game was made? This is to say nothing of the grand scale the game takes place on yet constantly shows areas that could have been right next to each other.

3

Sound and Graphics

There is sound, music tracks are about 12 bars each of very simplistic stuff. I can't imagine children would be very fond of it either. Its exceedingly annoying and worse still, a lot of tracks are variations on the same theme. Come on! The rest of the sound is forgettable.

Graphically, this game looks odd, like a EGA with clever use of color even though that isn't actually right, since the Amiga/DOS/Genesis versions all had the same images. I say clever use of color because it doesn't look like it uses more than 16 colors a screen, while looking colorful in a way most EGA games don't. I'm probably wrong, I don't care, because that's all it has going for it.

Everything is very simplistic, with simplistic shading going on, simple gradients everywhere. There's nothing necessarily wrong with it, but its done in a way that shows that the artists are one trick ponies and is done without any thought to the lighting of a scene. This is to say nothing of how each scene is simplistic in design and execution, coming off like someone putting lipstick on a pig.

2

Environment and Atmosphere

Most of these complaints tie into past complaints, you don't get any text so everything you get is one line of dialog, and most screens consist of one or two items you can actually interact with.

I'm not really sure what this game is trying to be. Its doesn't play like a children's game, yet I'm not sure how it would come off as a game for adults. It's another unclear aspect of the game that makes me wonder, what the hell was this game trying to accomplish?

1

Dialogue and Acting

"I'll give you the joke book because you look like a joke" is about the height of the game's dialog. There's a lot of trying to be funny, there's a lot of failing to be funny. This ties into the game's problems with not having enough text on-screen, when you only get one line of dialog you can't really make much that's actually funny, so it comes off as annoying and insulting the player. Which is tricky to get right and there's no way this game would get that balance.

1

1+2+3+2+1+1=10/0.6=16.666 or 17. I'll subtract two points, so 15.

Laukku gets the lower end score with 28. Some of you need to be adjusting your lower end expectations. As I said, this game doesn't really know what it wants to be, from a game that really wasn't worth a sequel to begin with.

Next up for me, sadly, isn't going back to Valhalla, I don't have the computer I left my notes on that on at the moment, so I'll be going straight into Kronolog, an adventure game recognized as bad, though if it is bad, it is at least bad as an adventure game and not bad as four/five different games.

CAP Distribution (Note, this is just applying to this particular game, not any other mainline or missed classics, owing to a bit of programming adjustment)

100 CAPs to Morpheus Kitami

• Not Much of a Crusade Award - 100 CAPs - For playing Linus Speacehead's Cosmic whatever for our enjoyment.

10 CAPs to Laukku

• "Low End" Guess Award - 10 CAPs - For getting the closest guess on Cosmic Crusade/Spacehead/whatever.

5 CAPs to Alex Romanov

• Observant Award - 5 CAPs - For spotting that I looked something up that may have been considered a violation of the rules.