There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is an area we call…the Comix Zone.
Wait, that’s not right.
Back when the games industry still came up with new ideas, Sega developed and published Comix Zone, a heavily comic-inspired beat-um-up, near the end of the Genesis’s life cycle. Its story is pretty fun – the impossibly named Sketch Turner is working on a comic book whose villain comes to life and attempts to kill him. You know how it is. Throughout the game, you need to beat up a bunch of bad guys, solve a few simple puzzles, and save the world or whatever.
Visually, Comix Zone goes to great lengths to emulate being inside a comic book, down to having the protagonist progress through individual panels and pages. It’s a pretty darn neat motif, and I can’t stress this point enough – as a kid in the mid-90s, this sort of graphical coolness was *mind-blowing*. There hadn’t been a game that looked and moved like this one did, and at least as a kid, that was enough to be completely enthralled. It didn’t matter how good the game actually was; seeing it in motion was more than enough. The point of this story is that kids are dumb and have dumb opinions.
In all honesty, Comix Zone still looks and sounds pretty great. The stylish animation holds up surprisingly well, and the way the characters move through the environments is really neat. Having said that, it’s a bit harder to look past some of its other elements. The combat is pretty tedious – you don’t have a ton of attacks at your disposal, and a lot of enemies take a dozen or more hits to kill. I also can’t help but question the decision to give the player just one life – for a game that’s pretty difficult to begin with, and one that does things like damage you for punching obstacles that you *have* to destroy, this feels needlessly mean. There isn’t much to the game as a whole, either – just six levels, none of which are especially long.
I do appreciate that the fighting is broken up by small puzzle-solving bits, some of which involve Roadkill, a rat who is your friend. Roadkill is also one of several items that can fill your small inventory, which can also hold explosives, weapons, and healing items. This is also a nice addition, as it gives you a few more options to deal with trickier enemies and situations.
In hindsight, Comix Zone was always a pretty good game, but it probably wasn’t ever a great one. It still feels original, and it’s enjoyable to run through the pages of a comic book kicking various alien butts, but a few design decisions – repetitive combat and relatively short story, to name a few – make it feel just a bit short of excellence. It’s solid, but I want to like it more than I do. If you enjoy action games of this era, it’s probably still worth a playthrough.
The game’s reputation is still pretty good, so a loose cartridge will still run you around $15 (or $50 if you’d like a complete one). Thankfully, there are several more practical ways to play it for yourself. It’s available on Steam, as a mobile mobile app and as part of numerous retro Sega compilations. It’s also on the Genesis Mini console that was released recently. Among its more surprising ports its the one for the Game Boy Advance, though that version was only released in Europe. Everything about that fact is weird.
Next week, we’re going back to the NES for a title that’s eight games in one, sort of, and there are maybe a couple of good ones. Maybe. See you then!