This past weekend, we stopped at a tiny arcade at the hotel I stayed at with the family. They have one of the two greatest arcade games of all time - Ms. Pac-Man and Mortal Kombat II.
Don't argue with me...that's totally a fact.
Regardless, as the main screens cycled through I took this picture. There was a screen that showed up with details on how to order the soundtrack as well as two different Mortal Kombat comic books back when this dropped in 1993.
I wonder...do you think that's still valid? And if not, do you think there's folks out there who still have copies of these comics / the CD? Cause...I kind of want them.
Also, who stood around in an arcade in 1993 with a pen and paper to write down all this information? Cause I want to meet those people too...
Around 2020 or so I started doing a series of video reviews of forgotten games that hadn’t seen official US distribution. That channel is gone, but the spirit lives on. I’m going to adapt these into text reviews as a series here, in a roughly chronological order. Arcade titles are going to be a little tricky as regions weren’t rigidly defined, so consider inclusion of these games as a “to the best of my knowledge” kind of thing.
1979 saw more than a few Space Invaders clones. Our first arcade title Cosmo is closer to Taito’s Galaxian, released the same year in Japan by the company TDS. There’s enough variety here that it’s worth examining on its own.
As expected of the year of release, the enemy sprites are simple and single-colored. Unlike many late 70s games the sprites are individually colored, not relying on a screen overlay as in Space Invaders. The action is fast and frantic, forcing the player to keep moving to avoid destruction. However, the enemy ship patterns are simple enough once you’ve seen them.
This overlooked arcade title definitely doesn’t look as “nice” as Galaxian. There’s more variety in each wave. Enemy sprites have a lot of variation. Their attack patterns are very different, though in general they fall into the category of “fly around the screen until they decide to take a dive at you.”
One nice touch is that after every wave you get a little trophy in the corner to track your progress.
Minibosses
It’s generally accepted that the first real Boss in video games comes in 1980’s Phoenix. In Cosmo every fifth enemy waves that serve the role of mini-boss, presenting you with a single tougher enemy. That, too, was an unexpected element in a relatively unknown and simple game.
Unfortunately what you see here is an imperfect emulation. I’ve seen the real game, and it features multiple hardware improvements like moving starfields in the background instead of a blank void. As I can’t really judge the game’s visuals based on what I’ve played, I’ll leave that out of my evaluation.
I’ll be ranking each game against its contemporaries released the same year. In Cosmo’s case, that’s Galaxian and Asteroids. The game isn’t really up to their level, but it’s a fun hidden arcade gem with some unexpected – and fun – complexity. I’ll give Cosmo a B ranking.
Around the time I was born (1979), Atari's "Asteroids" was about to appear and Namco's "Galaxian" had improved over the previous year's "Space Invaders" with tile-based color graphics.
Both used existing 8-bit CPUs (MOS' 6502 and Zilog's Z80 respectively) but 1979 also saw the introduction of the two most significant 16-bit CPUs:
thread of my #arcadeexploration posts, starting with my latest:
exploring the arcade in the 1978 movie 鬼畜 / Kichiku (The Demon)
each blog entry features an arcade in a movie (mostly from #japan) and tries to identify all of the machines.
This is an exceptionally difficult task because:
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