Game:

The Adventures of Captain Comic (1988)

Category:

Review

Duration: 27:54

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13

INTRODUCTION:
You are Captain Comic, galactic hero. Your mission is to recover three treasures from the planet Omsoc, which have been stolen away and hidden on the remote planet of Tambi.

EPISODE I: PLANET OF DEATH - Entering orbit around the planet Tambi, Captain Comic, galactic hero, prepares for his impossible mission: To recover the treasures stolen from the planet Omsoc. Armed with only his courage, he enters the teleport chamber...
• The Mystical Gems of Lascorbanos
• The Thousand Coins of Tenure
• The Crown of the Ages
To find them, he must travel through many varied environments, including:
• The forest
• The lakeside
• A nearby moon (with low-gravity)
• A space station on the moon
• A dark cave
• A gray building
• The inside of a huge computer
• The inside of the castle

REVIEW:
If you have never played, or don’t know this game, you have missed out on a big classic game. Captain Comics was developed by Michael Denio and it is one of the first side-scrolling platform games for the IBM PC.

This is a big game with lots of areas to explore, and it is up to you to decide where to go, because you wander around in a huge nonlinear world, where you decide if you want to go left or right or enter doors/gates to other areas. It does off course matter which way you go and you have to find the right way, some routes is not accessible before you have been in certain other places. For some doors you will need to find a key to open it, and you do also have to find all the three treasures to complete the game.

You start with four lives and the maximum amount of lives you can have is five. It is possible to find shields that gives you extra lives and extra energy, if your energy bar is full when you take a shield you will get an extra life. At the beginning your weapon is pretty poor, but you can find upgrades for this, and you can also find objects that will give you new capabilities. The Captain's weapon is Blastola Cola, a can of drink that allows him to shoot fireballs at his enemies. Every can that he finds will add an extra fireball to his shot.

Considering the limitations for a PC with MS DOS, EGA graphics and internal beeper sound, this was at the time being a pretty good effort of making a side scrolling platform game. The scrolling is a bit jerky and the playfield could have been bigger, but the gameplay is pretty good, and there is a lot to explore, and many upgrades to find.

The PC game is from 1988 and the SAM Coupé version came out a few years later, and it is an exact port of the PC game, but instead of keyboard control and beeper sound, you had joystick control and an excellent SAA soundtrack with sampled speech.

The game was published as freeware for the PC by Michael Denio in 1988, and it was converted to SAM Coupé by Lars Persson.

Rating = 84%

The game can be downloaded for free here: https://www.worldofsam.org/sites/default/files/dl-14/CaptainComic.dsk