Comix Zone™ Reviews

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Hell! Surprisingly amazing!

One of the best games, but can be completed within 15 minutes :-)

Once I played SEGA and thought "someday I gonna have something better to play on, like PS or PC or something", so then I got PC and later even better one just to play SEGA games on it.

Шикарный представитель поздней SMD, с прекрасной рисовкой и отличным саундом (гранжуха лежит на ютьюбе). Игра детства все дела. Топ 1 для меня с этой платформы. One of the best if not the best SMD title in my opinion. Would be cool to see remaster or new imagination of this kind of game stylistic. 10/10

Comix Zone is a Beat-em-up-like 2D Action game for Sega Mega Drive. Single player. It's not just a comics-styled game, it actually takes place 'on-paper', with hero jumping between frames. It was developed by Sega Technical Institure in North America and published by Sega, yep. Also notable as being very 90s. 16 Megabits of comic awesome. Most of the copies of the game in the West came with “Roadkill” bonus audio CD with 6 nonsense vocal tracks. It was rereleased as part of “Sega Tunes” a bit later. Sadly, Sega didn't include any such bonus stuff in this release. Also notable the original US manual had a little comics to explain backstory, you should find and check it out. There also was PC port and GBA one much latter. Former is pretty much same but pain in butt to run on modern PC. GBA one is dirt. The game that you have here is nothing more than emulation of Sega Genesis version. Now, technical part about Sega's emulation here: The Sega Classic games that you purchase on Steam count as DLCs for "Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics" game that should appear in your library. It has Bedroom HUB which is the one with many features yet lags for many and Simply Launcher which lacks Workshop and Online but at least it works just fine for everybody. However, Simple Launcher has it's fair share of glitches as well. It can crash. And it does the second time you go to main menu, so always quit after saving there so it doesn't crash when you want to save next time! Emulation itself, mostly sound, isn't that good but it does it's job. Also, yes, emulator supports quick saves. As alternative, you can use external emulator to run games that you purchased. Sega kindly placed in all games that you purchased in "uncompressed ROMs" folder that program itself doesn't use, just change file extension to ".bin" or so. The file for this one being "COMIXZON_U.68K". I also demand you to read digital manual of this game first. You can find it here on store page or go to "manuals" folder of game root and open "CZ_PC_MG_EFIGS_US.pdf". The game makes use of 6 Buttons controller. So X, Y, Z are used as shortcut for items in your 3-slot inventory. You play as Sketch Turner, an artist drawing Comix Zone and is also a freelance rock musician. He also plays Sonic Spinball in free time. Until Mortus, megalomaniac mutant, comes alive by lighting striking into comic page and goes to trap Sketch into comics along with his pet rat Roadkill. Now Sketch knows martial arts and Roadkill is electrifying. Can somebody tell Sketch to stop farting when he ducks randomly? This easter egg occurs too often. It's not just comic style, action actually takes place on paper. With hero jumping between frames. The story is basic and cheesy but it's bubble speech delivery is extremely amusing. Kinda like one-lines you hear from what they call ego-shooters. Another way that game makes use of comics setting is by letting you occasional choice between two routes. They all connect in the end however. It does look extremely stylish and awesome in presentation. The game is extremely short. There are three episodes, each having two pages with boss battle. Developers make it up with high difficulty which mostly comes from unforgiving puzzles and monsters having high health. Albeit latter feels pretty fine, just showing that they tried to stretch game time out. And there are no extra life. I bet that most people get game over on the pit at the end of Page 1, haha! Well, you secretly gain extra continue when you reach Episode 2 and 3 so there is that. The game is mostly excellent mix of action and puzzles. For action part you got a mix between fighting game and beat-em-up. You got a whole bunch of moves, all done by pressing attack with movement input. Attack while pressing forward-up, pressing forward-down or while simply standing gives you three different kind of combos. You can kick while crouching and you can do uppercut by holding up while attacking. Changing direction and attacking gives a nice kick and changing direction twice before attacking gives shoulder bash. Of course you can also do jump attack. A lame jump kick while jumping forward and awesome circular one while jumping on the spot. Ah, and you can grab enemies. You have to get close and hold attack button for a second. Then press it again to kick into their face. Or back+attack to throw them back away. You can also initiate powerful strike immediately. Scissor Kick is done by pressing down, up and attack. And Shaolin Kick by pressing up, down and attack. And to top it all, there is a super dangerous move: paper plane. Just hold attack until Sketch is done creating it and sends it flying, destroying everything, with you included if you aren't careful. It does take a huge health as a price. Frankly, the way that battle system done, it's not about what move is best for what situation as most of them are very similar in what they accomplish. Instead it holds on AI of enemies that starts to block and counter-attack if you keep using the same attacks so you have this huge yet simple to execute movelist to vary it all up. And the fighting does feel good, enemies getting knocked against walls with a huge boom. Oh, and you can block. You will be too busy being offensive however. As for puzzles, you got the inventory with three items that you fill with items that may be used for battles or to solve puzzle. And sometimes confined within frame. The puzzles are simple and are often satisfying to solve. But gotta be honest that they are also cheap and are designed to make you replay the game. To solve some puzzles you have use the item that you would find in previous frame. Let me remind you that you can't backtrack. And to get that item you have to use Roadkill, the rat that you can keep in inventory, which you may not have because you ended up using him in battle. Yep, you can use him to electrify enemies, however if he takes too many hits he will fall off Comix Zone. He comes back in some frames. So it's all about you learning what items to keep and where to find through replaying. Another strange thing is that punching stuff takes away a tiny amount of health. It mostly works as punishment for not 'solving the puzzle' in the frame but sometimes it's cheap. So do randomized '?' items that may explode. It does have bosses. They are nice all three of them. There are actually two endings, bad and good one. Which one you will get depends on how fast you will beat the final boss. With a silly lame attempt at 'to be continued' with "until..." line at the end. What else to say. The graphics are totally awesome, even having a nice water surface effect in some frames. Drawn by the real comic artists, ads said, but I can't verify it yet. Sound effects are fancy. And music is awesome. A lot of people may thing that it sounds grainy due to GEMS sound driver but I think that guitars are awesome there. People call it grunge genre. There are options. Usual sound test. And controls. In the latter you can set what C does. You can set it manual blocking. But I recommend to set it to something else for automatic blocking if you stand still, it fits to the game better. Macho yell is cosmetic. I recommend setting it to Shaolin Kick shortcut as it seems to fail sometimes when I do it normally. Overall, it's not very fair but pretty awesome game. I mean, you can use save states at the beginning of each page in emulators if you want it more forgiving, so. Unique too. I wonder, why no one else tried to create similar games? Well, probably because they have patented it, like capitalist pigs. And then they didn't bother to make further use of it. Good thing the patent expired in 2012. So, indie devs, I hunger!

While the super cheesy comic book story is a bit too much for me, this is a good example of late-gen Mega Drive technology. With some particularly novel gameplay elements and fluid, responsive, quasi-beat 'em up controls it's still surprisingly fun to play and not a bad buy if you are looking for something a little bit different to blow $3.50 on, although I'd recommend grabbing it in the Classics bundle instead. It's also got an awesome (?) midi-metal soundtrack that Sega actually released through their record label back in 1992. Look it up, I'm not kidding.