Captain Comic: The Adventure (NES) Playthrough
206A playthrough of Color Dreams' 1989 unlicensed action game for the NES, Captain Comic: The Adventure.
Captain Comic: The Adventure (or "The Adventures of Captain Comic," as its dubbed by the title screen) was originally conceived of as an experiment of sorts. According to the original manual, Michael Denio created the game to explore the viability of running arcade-style action games on late 80s era IBM-compatible PCs, and he wanted to know if there was any money to be made from such a venture.
When the PC game came out in 1988, it became one of the first examples of a scrolling platformer running on Dos, and it was a pioneer for the shareware sales model, blazing a trail for later hits like Apogee's Commander Keen and Duke Nukem.
The NES version showed up the following year courtesy Color Dreams, a well-known American publisher of unlicensed NES carts.
In Captain Comic, you play as the titular hero who hails from the planet Osmoc. Osmoc's three treasures - the Crown of Ages, the Mystical Gems of Lascorbanos, and the Thousands Coins of Tenure - have all been stolen in an attempt to ruin a planetwide trimillenial celebration of peace, and the elders have asked Captain Comic to head to the planet Tambi to retrieve them.
(Flip the name Tambi around and you get IBM-AT, the name of a 286-based IBM PC model that was popular through the latter half of the 80s.)
The captain's adventure begins as he arrives on Tambi's surface. The open-ended structure of the game world takes clear inspiration from Nintendo's Metroid (https://youtu.be/EhnWKcO1byU), and it's an early example of the genre we now refer to as Metroidvania. The planet is made up of several interconnected areas that can be explored at will, and to find all of the treasures, Captain Comic will have to collect special items that augment his abilities. Finding soda cans and a corkscrew will upgrade his Blastola Cola-firing cannon, a lantern will provide light in dark caves, the boots improve his jump height, and a magic wand will allow him to teleport through solid walls.
Captain Comic was a solid game on the PC, but it became a better one in its move to the NES. The console couldn't compete with the sheer computational grunt of a 286-class CPU, but its hardware-based scrolling of a tiled background layer was much better suited to an arcade-style action game. The gameplay is no longer confined to a framed window, the animation and controls are far more fluid, and the sound is a huge upgrade over the PC-speaker bleeps and bloops of the original.
The world is fairly simple in design and the gameplay is a bit on the easy side compared to Metroid, but Captain Comic is pretty good, overall. The controls feel natural, the areas are creatively designed and fun to explore, and the enemies pose a reasonable challenge without being too obnoxious. (Well, all of them beside that stupid purple ball that tracks you on the ground. I hate that thing!)
As a kid, I had a real soft spot for it. I used to borrow this strange baby blue cartridge all the time from a friend who lived down the street, and I had a good time working my way through it. Playing it again recently, I was pretty pleased to find that it's still a fun game all these years later.
Don't let the fact that it's a "bootleg" dissuade you from giving it a chance. It's not a janky, bug-riddled piece of shovelware - it compares quite favorably to the quality typically seen in officially-licensed NES action carts.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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