NFOpocalypse

NFOpocalypse’s resident RPG expert reviews Captain Comic 2, a little known sidescroller from the 90s which was written by Michael Denio and released only on the PC, and rants about how modern game stores are boring.

It might be hard to believe, but there was a time when you couldn’t find a Gamestop or an EBGames in every mall, strip mall, shopping center, or placed haphazardly across the street from Super Walmart, next to the largely abandoned shopping center—you know, where nobody would ever go to it. Part of the reason for this is because, back then, these stores were going by different names—Software|Etc was a common one. Funcoland and Babbages were the other two big ones. I still see stores displaying the Funcoland sign, oddly enough. There’s one in the Dayton Mall in Ohio, and another one in Florence, Kentucky.

There was also a time, by the way, when these weren’t all the same company, but I digress.

Back then—mid-nineties and earlier—if you wanted to buy video games, your options were limited to places like Toys ‘R Us, Office Max, privately owned, non-franchise software stores and, if you were really lucky, your local drugstore would also have a shareware rack—does anybody else out there remember these?

Now, I remember when I was growing up in Lima, there was this little software store in the American Mall in town. I believe it was next to a Sbarro’s, right across from a Pharm, somewhere near a hallmark… Anyway, if you’ve never been to one of these stores, well, you’re pretty much out of luck because they don’t really exist anymore, but the fact that gaming was still a pretty niche hobby—especially computer gaming—made them develop pretty interesting atmospheres. Really, though, I can’t describe it. You either know what it was like or you don’t. In any case, the American Mall only has one viable store now and it’s mostly shuttered. Basically a dismal husk of its former greatness. Actually, that’s pretty much Lima as a whole. Again, I digress.

Now, let’s talk about another software store. I think this one might have been a Software|Etc—I vaguely remember the sign, and it had the purple-and-blue color scheme to it—but I can’t really be sure. What I do know is that this is before the entire EBGamestop chain had all the life sucked out of it by a wide range of things, and you could still find interesting, obscure titles packed away in bargain bins where everyone forgot about them.

It was one of these bargain bin expeditions, at this maybe-Software|Etc-maybe-not store, that led me to acquire Captain Comic II.

Let’s start with the box. Airbrush with lots of ClipArt pasted over it, basically. It’s really not a very good example of visual design but it’s a style I love because it’s linked to the era and really couldn’t have come out of any other time. There’s also something sort of heartwarming about seeing “EGA/VGA ONLY” printed on the front of the box.

The back cover really completes the deal. Ad-blurbs that don’t really make any sense (360 degree scrolling?), grossly misused WordArt, phrases like “Actual IBM Shots,” but then, you know, the screen shots these things had always were pretty enticing. Possibly because things like cutscenes still didn’t exist yet so it was either a case of taking some really exciting looking screen shots or drawing some really exciting looking screen shots (which I’m assuming happened because I can’t find any other reason to advertise that, yes, those are actually real screen shots running on a real computer made of plastic and glass and microchips and little whirring green bits).

Or maybe the screen shots weren’t that exciting. Maybe I just thought they were, because I really wanted to play this game and they were the only things I had to go on, because the stupid thing was missing the copy protection code sheet and I couldn’t play it.

Eventually, of course, I realized that things like abandonware and “large repositories of replacement documentation and code sheets” were fairly popular and that if I did some searching, I’d be able to finally play the thing.

So, some four or five years later, I finally play this thing that’d been taunting me with its promises of mine carts and talking to scientists and shooting fish and visiting bizarre, red-colored ruined worlds.

The simplest description of Captain Comic 2 I can come up with is that it’s a lot like Metroid. But not quite.

The main similarity is that, instead of having linearly progressing levels, you have an open-ended, explorable world. Captain Comic 2 is divided up into several themed worlds, connected to a hub. You can enter and leave these worlds whenever you want, and some degree of backtracking between them is actually required. These worlds are also quite large. For instance, the first of these is actually the planet the game talks about you landing on in the introduction sequence. In this first area, you have a sizable number of underwater areas, an alien laboratory, some hidden waterfall caves, that hilly sort of area you can see in the screenshot, and a temple.

A lot of early PC sidescrollers had slow combat. Even Duke Nukem did, and that was a game that was far more shooting oriented than, say, Keen, or Jill. Apparently, it wasn’t easy to create the sort of fast, smoothing scrolling gameplay on a PC that you’d see on, say, an NES. Which doesn’t make any sense to me, but I’m guessing that Nintendo had some sort of in-house middleware that they licensed out. Or maybe the comparison was to arcade games, which does make more sense. In any case, the point is that PC platformers were a bit (quite) slower.I think this led to a lot of the innovation the genre had, though. Running and gunning through a straightforward level wouldn’t be particularly fun because of this, which is where, I guess, the more puzzle-oriented, explorable levels came from. Come to think of it, the NES really wasn’t that good for fast paced action games either. Maybe that why Yokoi came up with Metroid. I digress, though. Again.

This also led to a major flaw in these games, though—shooting stuff was inevitable, and slowdown took its toll on the controls. Now, Apogee and iD had budgets. Probably not huge ones, but they were there. So they could fiddle with stuff until they at least got an engine that ran smoothly and had tight controls. I’m guessing Denio wasn’t so lucky.

Captain Comic 2’s controls aren’t really bad, per se. There’s not a lot of interface lag, and they’re fairly precise. But the enemies move fast in that game, and in groups, and they do a lot of damage, and while the controls are fairly precise, they feel rather fat, you could say, at times. It’s hard to avoid or kill them a lot of the time.

Your gun also has a rather irritating limitation of only firing forward until you get an item called the corkscrew, which makes it fly in a wave shape. This means that for most of the game, you can’t shoot any of the enemies that are below you, and there are quite a bit. And while the corkscrew (and later, the pinwheel, which randomizes shot directions) does alleviate the problem, it’s still weird to work with.

Another problem is the enemies. They tend to just rush at you, hit you, and explode, doing damage. And they tend to do a lot of damage. Then again, they killed you instantly in Keen, and Duke Nukem 2 had those… spider-things. It’s still stupid, but it comes with the territory.

This also leads to the other major problem—awkward jumping bits. There are bottomless pits that come out of nowhere, ledges that are just out of reach for no apparent reason, and missteps that either kill your or send you to somewhere else in the level you don’t want to be, anyway. This is, really, more of an issue of level design, but it’s the oddly heavy feeling controls that make it annoying.

And the frequent deaths leads to a lot of backtracking. You do get midway points every time you switch to a different ’sub-area’ within a world, but you might be going through a long, double-backing mazing in a single sub-area with no return point in between. And you usually only have four or fives lives to play with.

(You could also, technically, point out that the writing in the game is goofy, the plot boils down to “Something bad is happening! Go investigate,” and then later on, “Bad guys have stolen the crystals! Get them back!” and that most of the names for things are derived by just reversing other words, like Big Jerks and Cosmo to get… Skrejgib and Omsoc, but if you’re playing 80s platforming games with the intent of finding sterling writing, what in God’s name is wrong with you?)

I guess if you wanted a single sentence, the biggest problem with Captain Comic 2 is that it does carry a lot of the baggage that was inherent to the genre as a whole, and then dumps really clunky controls on top of it. The bad parts are pretty much the same ones you’ve seen elsewhere. Nothing really outstandingly, strangely bad or game breaking.

One additional word of caution, though, is that there’s not really any music, and the only sounds are from the PC speaker (or, more likely, from DOSBox’s emulated PC speaker thing). This isn’t something that bothers me, but if you’re used to the high quality music that Epic or Apogee often used, you might be disappointed.

So let’s talk about the good points.

The graphics are fairly simple and they do show their age, but they sprites are large and fairly detailed and clean, and you can tell what everything is (Mostly. The game has some rather… strange enemy. You will get attacked by bushes). The use of color is also quite nice. Lots of bright, primary colors (because EGA doesn’t support anything else), and we don’t see any instances of, say, trying to pass off neon orange as a normal, human skin color.

The first Captain Comic was sort of like Metroid—non-linear, kind of item based (though I believe it only had things like jump boots, the pinwheel thing, and a few keys), and fairly big. It was also kind of boring. It was slow, the controls weren’t any better than in the sequel, and this time the focus was sort of on shooting stuff. And the platforming sections were more obnoxious. And the exploration bits were mostly dead ends.

If there’s one thing the sequel did that really improved on… pretty much everything, it was the introduction of a save feature. I really shouldn’t have to explain why.

The other biggest improvement Captain Comic 2 had was with level design, and even in comparison to other platformers of the era, I think it really stands out. In Captain Comic 1, a lot of the levels were straightforward, left-and-right affairs, occasionally with the little bits interrupting your progress until you got one of the previously mentioned key items. Captain Comic 2 introduces a lot of vertical play.

Another nice thing about the levels is that they, for the most part, actually look like the places they’re supposed to represent. The snow level has a top-side layer along with some caves, the magic-themed level has a forest, with caves, a forest floor, and treetops to explore in one part, and then a castle in another. The crumbling, ruined time-theme world does look like an abandoned city with crumbling architecture. And the Skrejgib laboratory, by God, looks like a laboratory. Only one of the sub-areas really falls into the “random assortment of platforms and walls” category, and even then it sort of makes sense.

And there’s plenty of variety. There’s a mine cart and a bobsledding section, places where you have to swim (with some degree of physics, too), and the bosses are all fairly challenging. Most fights involve figuring out how to get close enough to the boss to hit it, but this is a lot harder and a lot more interesting than it sounds, really. And, as I mentioned before, the levels actually look like the places they’re supposed to represent. Good for immersion, but even better for gameplay variety. What I mean is that, because of this sense of place, every level has a very unique construction. Some areas are more maze-like, some are more platformy, and some let you use the jetpack a lot, although more on that later. I’d really love to get into the details on these levels, but that would probably ruin the experience.

One thing I might have liked, though, would’ve been a better hub level of some sort or other. As it stands, you pick a location on this little terminal, and stand on a nearby teleporter, and you’re in the new area. This isn’t bad by any means, but it’s something that I think could’ve been expanded upon.

The “Law of Miyamoto” is also here in full effect, in the sense that you can bump into a lot of areas that you can’t get past yet, and then need to go looking for another tool or item or key or whatever else to go forward. As I said, in the previous game, this was a bit annoying. Here, it’s a lot more fun for a couple of reasons.

There are four main tools that you get in the game.

The first is your weapon, which is… soda. Or some sort of blaster powered by soda. I’m not really sure and I’m not going to dwell on it and, if it bugs you, the little cola cans you pick up look like batteries. Anyway, as I mentioned before, at the start of the game, the weapon only fires forward, and only fires one shot at a time. You can also only fire a limited number of shots before it needs to recharge, so you can’t just hold down the fire button and walk forward. Later on, you pick up additional cans of cola—called Blastola Cola (with an ‘o.’ Blastula Cola would be creepy)—which means you can fire more shots at a time. You also get a few upgrades to your weapon. The first is the corkscrew, which makes your shots fire in an arc pattern. This lets you shoot enemies that are shorter than you, although it moves in a fairly rigid wave pattern so it loses its effect over a long range. The second is the pinwheel, which randomizes your shots—basically, some arc down, some arc up, and some go straight. This effectively means you’re firing off a large carpet of bullets.

The second tool you pick up is the pickaxe. This lets you break apart certain bits of scenery (jars and cracked ice, for instance) and chests. Usually this gets you items, though in some places it opens up new passages. Some of these breakable objects can be shot, but the majority need the pickaxe. It’s really not the most interesting of the items here, but it’s sort of charming—sci-fi-ish themed adventure, and you’re still using a really rudimentary tool to get through places. Also, to use it, you press the fir key, which makes the Captain hoist the thing over his shoulder. He doesn’t actually swing it till you release the fire button. Again, I think this is a cute touch, though I don’t really know why.

The third tool is the magic wand. This lets you turn some of the junk items you get into more useful objects, like health pickups, gems, and some objects that are necessary to progress in the game, such as keys. You only know what turns into what in a few cases, so a lot of it’s experimentation. The gems and health pickups I mentioned play a somewhat larger role than you’d expect. If you collect 100 gems, you get an additional life, so one strategy is to find, say, 90, drop one of the junk items back at the level-select hub area, which is a temple, and only pick up the last ten gems if you’re going into a particularly tricky level. With health—and later on, jetpack fuel—if you’re already at full health (or full fuel) and walk over a pickup, it goes into your inventory for later use. Hording these is, then, a useful strategy.

The most enjoyable tool, though, is that jetpack I was just talking about. Quite simply, it lets you fly, and makes exploration a lot easier. It also follows some sort of physics, meaning that inertia and gravity apply in semi-realistic ways. It does, however, require fuel, which is limited, so you can’t use it constantly. You also can’t attack while flying, which I do think is a bit of a negative. Large parts of the game, in any case, open up once you get the jetpack. One thing that’s nice that I need to mention is that you can change direction in mid-air. Bad physics, yes, but if you’re comparing it to the jetpack mechanics in Halloween Harry, where you drop quickly and directly down as soon as you stop applying upthrust, it’s a lot more convenient and you don’t waste as much fuel.

There are also some other minor objects you can get that grant new abilities. I talked about the weapon add-ons. There are also a few kinds of boots that can, for instance, make you jump higher. Lots of keys, then the junk items you can’t do much with till you get the wand, and lots of non-essential hidden things.

When you get down to the core of the game, its pretty much about pure exploration. It’s far more adventure than action—maybe closer to Zelda than Metroid, really. The controls are odd and the game can be unfair and maybe a little obtuse, but its one of those huge, sprawling, and slightly unnerving sidescrollers that really could’ve only come from the DOS era, and if I can think of any one game that reminds me of earlier times in PC gaming, it’d be this one.

Tags: company-colordreams, elegnaim, free game, metroidvania, ms-dos, PC, platformer, reviews-try, single player

This entry was posted by elegnaim on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Action, Adventure, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.