The Adventures of Captain Comic

The Good
I have noticed that most people who like this game like it because of fond memories of playing it in younger years. Well, that is also the case with me, but to the rest I have to say that it is not fair to compare this game to more modern ones. And in 1988 the PC was still primarily used for work purposes, and not for gaming. When I got my first PC (a 4.77/8 MHz Turbo-XT clone with EGA graphics) in 1989, this was among the first games that I played. Let me tell you why I think that this was an excellent game at that time:

THE GRAPHICS

At a time when many PC games still came in the classic (or let's say awful) four CGA colours, Captain Comic featured a stunning 16 colour palette. The main character's movement is nicely animated (compare it to Sierra's adventures and NOT to Prince of Persia which was released in 1990), the enemies are also well-drawn, but what I like most about the game is the beautiful landscape. It starts out a little lame in the nightly forest, then you get a glimpse of the futuristic indoor world behind the door underneath from where you picked the key, which is also not too exciting (and not the right way in the game, as you soon find out). But then you get to the LAKE area, and this is soooo beautiful! Turquoise water and distant evergreen trees in the background, what a landscape! From this point I was eager to explore the rest of the world, and I remember how excited I was when I first reached a point where I had never been before. Then you get to the... well, find out for yourself, the next levels and the rest of the game are in my opinion very beautiful.

THE SPEED

The scrolling is of course by no means smooth - the screen moves in steps of about one character width (of a 40 character screen). But this does not really affect playability. And can you name an EGA-PC game that had smoother scrolling in 1988? Maybe there were some, but certainly not many. In the late 80s I experimented with programming little games in GWBasic and Turbo Basic. I kept all my games in CGA, because EGA simply wasn't fast enough with Basic on my 8 MHz XT. I remember that I was very impressed how well Captain Comic performed in EGA on my XT even with the Turbo switched off. Another good feature of the game is that it ran on exactly the same speed on all PCs from different eras, ranging from an original 4,77 MHz PC to a 450 MHz Pentium III (the last machine that I played this game on before switching to DOSBOX) - even many commercial games of that time didn't adjust to the proper speed, the developers simply didn't care about whether people would still be able to play their games in future years.

THE CONTROLS

Many complain that the controls react with some delay. I had no problem playing the game, only the big jumps were a little difficult.

THE SOUND

Of course the beeper sound was annoying, but the game was made in the year when the very first game appeared that supported a sound card (King's Quest IV), so in 1988 the beeper sound was still state-of-the-art for PC games. However, it generally sounded best when turned off...

GAMEPLAY

Simple gameplay with only minor puzzles to solve - just the way I like it. There are a few places where you have to decide where to go next, but with a little thinking and some trial and error you will find your way through the game. The game's difficulty level is challenging (and at times frustrating when you once again step into void and lose a life), but not too hard - you always know that you have a chance of finishing the game.

FINAL HINTS

In DOSBOX, I made this little batch file for starting the game to reproduce the scanline look of my EGA monitor that I was using in the late 80s:

CONFIG -set "render aspect=false"

CONFIG -set "render scaler=tv3x"

comic

CONFIG -set "render aspect=true"

CONFIG -set "render scaler=normal2x"

I prefer to play the game in windowed mode, as the scanlines do not look good in fullscreen mode (and also not in an aspect-scaled screen, that's why I turn scaling off).

The Bad
To be honest, I can't think of anything that I wish the author would have done differently. The only sad thing is that the author says that he didn't keep any source code of that game.

The Bottom Line
One of the first games that brought C64-ish gaming experience to the PC. It is still one of my all-time favourite games on all platforms.