Cosmic Spacehead (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
28Cosmic Spacehead is an adventure platforming game, developed by CodeMasters, and released in 1993. It contains some great graphics and some great music and atmosphere. Is this an unknown gem, or a misguided cash grab. Lets find out.
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Recorded: 14th Feb 2024
Narrated: 7th May 2024
Uploaded: 12th Oct 2024
Version: 2
I bought this game for 24.99 from my local video game store, which was called PV computers. They knew me in there, because I would normally take the games home, copy them, and treat the place like a lending library. I bought only a few games. I got Turrican 1 on the Hit Squad? release, but playing the game in the store, it only loaded up to world 4 and then asked for disk 2, which was not in the 1 disk release! Another game I bought was Lotus III the week of release, which felt clunky on A500. I also remember Cosmic Spacehead. It seemed a no-brainer for me, as I used to love the Dizzy series, and this promised more of the same. I got it home to find a point and click adventure!? But with enough joystick sections between the areas to keep me interested. I reached the Rocket launch section, probably after reading about the multi-use teleport tip in Amiga Power or CU? I dont think I figured it out on my own? But then I abandoned it.
Fast forward to 2024, and the list included a handful of games I had back in the day, including this one. After probably reading through a solution of some kind to refresh the old memory, the game was loaded and recorded. Although there were a few times I had to go back to look up the solution, and chop out some aimless wandering footage. These guides were never meant to be the whole game, although I have completed quite a few, I always like to leave the last third of the game as a mystery in case people want to play them. Ive only ever seen the second planet on longplays.
Somehow the scrolling was an issue on playback, maybe because of the capture? The scrolling was not so bad playing it in the game itself. I think the WHDload version is somehow now optimised for an 030 and fast memory, and I remember the game felt ok on a basic A500. Not sure if the original game had choppy scrolling or not?
Danscore:
CodeMasters loved I.Ps - usually with the word 'Super' as the first word in the title, and 'Simulator' as the last word. After the Oliver Twins jumped ship for the NES, the Codies wasted no time ripping off their games, and releasing the likes of Bubble Dizzy, Dizzy Panic, and Fast Food, and also in 1993 Fantastic Dizzy. Looking at the stylised box art and unique Goth Punk screenshots, it would be easy to imagine Cosmic as Dizzy on acid. And yet the interface is immediately cumbersome due to the inability of CodeMasters to use a mouse. Dragging the pointer around with a controller seems a waste of time, when walking the character into doorways and objects with a joystick would have worked instead, so the dumb interface could have been done away with altogether. The arcadey sections start out very fair for young players, and things only become tricky later with the pixel perfect jumps. Progress is initially interesting, and fun to use teleports to zip around. But they are very slow, and using the teleport as a super-human ability giver gimmick fell flat at the first hurdle. So the adventure feels weak, and the arcade parts and mini games feel childish - like they were aiming for the 7-13 age demographic. But the puzzles; which sometimes make use of unique keys on the keyboard, and glow-in the dark teleport shenanigans; are not intuitive, and range from strange to inane. Cash is not used for buying items, but to unlock missions, and it seems a total waste of time to keep spamming a gambling addiction on a machine which is rigged to give out money. Players could have won money with the surfing and driving mini-games, but these seem like an after thought, or unfinished and tame.
So Sonic the He... sorry Cosmic the Spacehead could have been a proper classy odd-world adventure, or a funky hidden gem. But it feels more like a rip off of Day of the Tentacle, with platform sections like a C64 title. It has a great atmosphere, great graphics, really great music and presentation!, but the adventure and platform elements fuse together badly, like a cocktail of sweet Guava fruit mixed with used engine oil. I wanted to love the game, but I can only give it 6/10. It stands above an average or ok game score, but any game which relies on using walkthroughs to even play them makes sure the game is only just above average, and the insane puzzles make sure Cosmic is barely playable for that reason. Ironically, if the game had been just a pure platformer with a dotted map and story between the levels, I might have given this a 7?