| paleface [sys=MD; cat=Beat_em_up; reg=NA] |
| | | By a western Sega studio back in the day--they had a funny name like "Sega Games Research" or something; dang, I'm going to have to go back and write it down. Anyway, the odd origin should tip you off that this is an unusual game--and it is!
You play inside the "pages" of a comic book; in each panel, your hero has one or two ways to go, which inevitably involve flipping over or ripping through the white page space between panels. And everyone talks in big corny comic-book letters, and stuff like that.
You beat up a lot of icky monsters in these panels. The controls seemed a little squirrely to me at times, like maybe some of the animations weren't quite as smooth as I'd have liked, I don't know. But overall it works pretty well, and you can beat the tar out of monsters again and again.
There are lots of switch-throwing puzzles. I'm never really infatuated by that sort of thing, but at least the ones I saw in the first few "issues" in Comix Zone weren't too obscure.
The game seems to have invested quite a bit of dev time in giving you alternate routes through the pages; heck, I hear there are even multiple endings. That's probably cool for replaying, but really, who replays games these days? Eh. They should'a just made it a linear game that was twice as long.
And really, they did put an impressive amount of scripting into each panel; like your hero will get in there and say something, and then your operator pops up and says something, and then you may have to throw a switch, and it does something, and meanwhile certain monsters are appearing and attacking you in a specific way. And each panel has a background that seems more or less hand-drawn. Yeah, they really put a lot of time into every single little panel environment here, and it just kills me that they took all that extra time for the multiple paths. Oh, well, no skin off my teeth, I suppose.
I see this snuck out as an unlockable on a PS2 Sonic Mega compilation. I need to get that. |
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| | | | Ooh, okay, I found out the cool rat stuff now. See, at the beginning, you rescue your pet rat. He goes in your inventory. Now, any time you want, you trigger that inventory slot (you get three), and ratty jumps down and sniffs around the panel, finding all the hidden stuff, or helping with puzzles--he'll even go through narrow places to throw switches for you and stuff. Normally I might find this kind of gimmicky, but he's just so cute/badass, with that black rodent body and neat squeak of his. |
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