Game Review: Cosmonaut! (Vic 20, Melbourne House)

Despite its relatively short lifespan, the Vic 20 wasn’t short of games and for a while almost every major publisher wanted to release something for Commodore’s first entry into the home computer market. Melbourne House was no exception and trying to cash in on the sci-fi craze seemed like a perfect fit when they released Cosmonaut! for the unexpanded machine…

Cosmonaut! – An Overview

The back of the packaging does its best to make Cosmonaut! sound as exciting as it can. Boasting that it was developed in machine language (and surprisingly for the time, commercial games were still being released that were written in BASIC) and ran on an unexpanded system. Your spaceship has been trapped – caught in a tractor beam – and you have to go into an underground complex to deactivate the beam and get back to your ship to escape.

It’s not that simple as you have to naviate your way down through lifts, avoiding stormtroopers(!) out to stop and shoot you, get to the switch to turn the beam off and get back to the surface. With no weapons at your disposal and just your reactions to run, jump and avoid everything in your path, you’re on your own!

Written by Clifford Ramshaw who was a favourite at Melbourne House at the time, he was also responsible for many of their other Vic 20 releases including Wizard And The Princess and a number of their programming books. But I’ll come on to that later.

Gameplay

The gameplay in Cosmonaut! is quite straightforward. Using a joystick or keyboard you can move left and right and then fire to jump over anything in your path. Walking on to the lifts will take you down a floor and to go up a level just jump on the nearest lift. Collision with anything will cost you a life but you can kill the stormtroopers by jumping directly on top of them. Finally, if you fall through the gaps in the floor or fall off one of the lifts from too far up, again you lose a life.

At the bottom of the complex is a square with an arrow on it. This unlocks a box that contains the switch for the tractor beam. Walk on to that and then you just have to make your way back to the ship to complete the game. But if you lose a life on the way up, the tractor beam reactivates and you have to make your way back down the bottom. Thankfully, any stormtroopers you have taken out along the way won’t have respawned.

Keep The Ship, I’ll Walk Back

All of this might sound promising and could make for a challenging platform game. And on paper it does, but sadly it falls flat in its execution. It has to be said that there are few, if any games developed in the 8-bit era that are perfect. There will always be minor flaws, bugs or issues that will affect gameplay in some way or another but not enough to impact on the gameplay to the extent that it renders it unplayable.

Unfortunately I can’t say the same for Cosmonaut! And that’s a genuine surprise considering the fact that Clifford Ramshaw was relied upon so much by Melbourne House in the early days not only to develop a number of games but to teach others the basics of game design and programming. It feels that in the case of this, most of the fundamentals he passed on to others were lacking in his own release. That may sound harsh so allow me to elaborate…

Collision Chaos

One of the most critical aspects of a good platform game is sturdy collision detection. Yet this is something that the game has got wrong on every level. First, your ship itself. It’s located at the top left hand side of the screen and this is the point where you start and re-spawn whenever you lose a life. When you have deactivated the tractor beam this is where you need to reach but if you attempt to walk up to it at any other time of the game you lose a life!

Still talking about the top level, there is a strange “blob” (for want of a better word) moving back and forth across the screen. Again, collide with this and you lose a life. But if this hits you near the respawn point it will stay there until you respawn and the game continues… so you will immediately lose another life. And this cycle will repeat until it has moved away potentially losing you a few lives in the process! At the start of the game this thing starts on the right hand side of the screen so there’s no reason why it can’t be repositioned when you respawn.

Collision detection elsewhere is hit and miss – on more than a few occasions you can lose lives while jumping over stormtroopers even though it appears that you have plenty of clearance room over them. And on other occasions you can get killed by landing on them – a move you can normally use to take them out – there’s just no logic involved to how the game seems to handle object collision at all.

Help Me, I’m Falling…

Now all of that would be frustrating enough, but it doesn’t end there. When you try to navigate the lifts or step onto them as they approach the gaps in the floor, yet again Cosmonaut! seems to defy all logic. Sometimes you try to drop down on to a lift and instead you pass straight through it and fall to your demise. Other times you can find yourself falling through the floor just by walking close to the lift and once again you lose a life because you have fallen too far down.

Add to that the frustration that you can only go up a floor by jumping onto the lift platforms – and your jumps move you up and forwards at the same time tend to cause issues more often than not.

Running Through Quicksand

At this point you might think that I wasn’t particularly impressed with Cosmonaut! And frankly, you’d be right. I do try to find something positive in every game I play, even when it does have flaws or some issues, but the longer I played this, the more frustrating it became.

Movement of your character is sluggish, and the controls seldom respond the way you would expect – or at the very least don’t respond as quickly as they need to for a game that relies on quick reactions. The game boasts about being developed in machine code, but to be honest it doesn’t feel like it and if this is what he can do with machine code, this is hardly an endorsement for Cliff Ramshaw’s BASIC programming books.

All of these problems really add up to making Cosmonaut! a frustrating experience rather than a fun game that you want to keep coming back to play. The challenge comes from fighting against the game’s flaws rather than using skill and timing and there’s no real challenge to beating your high score either – your score increases steadily over time as you play so it’s quite possible to find a safe spot, eliminate the nearby stormtrooper and just sit there and watch your score grow indefinitely.

Graphics and Sound

Even for a game released in 1983, the graphics in Cosmonaut! are extremely limited and basic. Everything is quite poorly defined and there were much better looking games on the Vic 20 released around this time or earlier, even those written to run on an unexpanded system so the lack of memory can’t be used to justify this.

Sound is even worse though. There is an annoying single channel “tune” that can be heard throughout play with no option to turn it off, and a single sound effect that plays when you lose all your lives. Each time you lose a life and respawn, the current musical note that is playing is elongated and holds for a few seconds before the game resumes, making it even more irritating – something I thought impossible!

Overall

It’s really difficult to find the words to describe just how frustrating Cosmonaut! is. If you strip away or fix all of its flaws and issues, you’d be left with a game that would barely be considered average. But as it’s presented here, this is something that you would have been disappointed to find as a magazine type-in, let alone a full price commercial release. A huge disappointment and one to be avoided at all costs.

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