ok well it finally finished downloading, but the files are .idf, and ares uses .mmi for these games. uhhh…
anyone have any idea how or if it’s possible to convert the files?
1 Like
COSMO'S COSMIC ADVENTURE
SHORT VERSION: A colourful, charming, but also clunky and sometimes frustrating platformer with enough design-sense and ideas to keep things feeling fresh. Not quite out of this world, but can still be a good time!
LONG VERSION:
This is a colourful platformer I loved as a kid, where you’re a little green alien with plunger hands (which are used to cling onto and climb walls) out to find his lost parents so they can all go to Disney World. That’s really the plot.
Also, the first episode ends with a first-person vore scene.
Anyway, I was worried at first because the opening few levels were very bland with functional level design at best. Thankfully, it gets more interesting soon after, with the game introucing more mechanics, colourful environments, and fun enemy designs. The first episode especially has a real feeling of wanting to see what’s next, as there was always something new.
Some levels are exploratory (i.e. switch hunts but none were tedious), some are left to right, while others focus more on verticality. Oh, and you kill enemies by bopping on them or blowing them up with bombs.
Compared to contemporary console platformers (and even some PC ones), it’s a rather slow platformer, with jerky scrolling and a stiffness to the whole affair, but it still plays well enough. The large size of the sprites also stops you from wanting to move forward too fast as you may strut into an enemy.
Enemies can also be hard to see sometimes due to clashing with the background. There are also cheap shots and blind jumps, increasingly more in each episode, but the game at least gives you infinite lives and plety of life power-ups. Still, some levels got a bit frustrating, especially with the amount of enemies and hazards thrown at you in the last episode.
Being able to scroll the camera up and down plus sticking to walls helps with the blind jumps and keeping a look out for enemies. Smoother scrolling and a zoomed out camera would help this game immensely, I think.
But yeah, it’s a bit clunky and sometimes frustrating, but overall this is a fun little mascot platformer that keeps things feeling fresh with fun ideas.
EXTRA TIDBIT: I finished the final level of Episode 2 but accident, due to Cosmo’s angel flying up to the end level trigger. Thank goodness, because that was a rough level.
EXTRA EXTRA TIDBIT: You get to meet Duke Nukem in Episode 2. He gives you a burger and advertises Duke II.
EXTRA EXTRA EXTRA TIDBIT: Someone made a mod of this game that puts jeans on almost everything.
15 Likes
Decided to bust out the Mega Dive Mini II again. For 30 years I’ve thought that I’d seen everything there was in Soleil, but turns out there’s one golden apple I’d missed hiding at the top of Hot Daisy. I used to have dreams that the game contained One More Secret, so I guess that’s it.
Although I could have sworn I’d seen the apple counter go to 4x before and i feel like I’ve made a post like this before so maybe I’m just completely forgetting it and rediscovering it over and over
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i always liked Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure, tho i only ever played the shareware episode. it’s not up there in the top tier of DOS platformers because it is kind of slow - but it also is generally likable. has a bit of a Sega Genesis or an Amiga vibe in the visuals in some ways. it’s also a game that feels more kid friendly, other than one or two things that are genuinely scary for kids like the ending of Episode 1. but then again i played Wolfenstein 3D as a kid so Cosmo wasn’t nearly as bad.
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i recall noticing as a kid that the background music in this level copied a guitar solo from “move it on over” by george thorogood. god bless bobby prince
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playing Viewfinder, click on everything and start an uninterruptible bit of audio narration from a gramophone. quit the game, changed the interface language to Chinese and the voice volume to 15%, ah that’s better. hearing someone chuntering away in the background, seeing notebooks & signs
the ending was a bit odd for skipping all the exposition. reading a plot summary: Jesus Christ. fuck. two BAFTAs for this wank
puzzle-wise, it’s hunting for secret doors. pretty similar to Superliminal, which at least is self-aware enough to make jokes & include non-optional hard puzzles
14 Likes
Now that I’ve seen this clip I’ll never not think about it when it comes to Viewfinder.
The characters just…go on and on and on.
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Are the baftas ever not terrible?
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All cops are BAFTAs
(Brain garbage thread post)
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EDF6 is unbelievably good. it’s good even by EDF standards; probably the very best one yet
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reliably terrible, extremely depressing seeing the nominees for even British Game & what gets passed over. but two awards, come on
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i just wanna say here as someone who fully expected to hate it based on just general vibes, i thought Viewfinder was honestly pretty good.
that said, i found the voice acting absolutely terrible and i turned it off immediately - which immeasurably improved my experience. if i was forced to keep it on i would have stopped playing the game way sooner.
the story is not great and the game indulges in some of the cringier indie game cliches (i.e. “can you pet the cat?” type stuff). but on the other hand, i at least felt like the game did a good job by the end of addressing implications of the sort of ‘1 clever mechanic’ (aka 1cm) puzzle design that stuff like The Witness doesn’t - even if the story was just okay at best. maybe it’s just because part of me still kinda likes and misses these kind of games in a strange way and wants them to be made and contextualized outside of the world of programmer dudes with dark triad traits - but honestly i feel like Viewfinder might be a little unfairly hated because of the voice acting, but that’s just me.
7 Likes
Honestly the writing is what’s more cloying than the voice acting specifically. The frequency of voices is a bigger issue than the quality of them as well.
I think the game is ok but as others have mentioned the puzzle stuff is just oil to its fiction’s water
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yeah i think maybe i’m just able to separate elements of these kinds of games better. like i dunno, because i’m coming in not expecting to be fully immersed i was just able to enjoy the puzzle elements. this is in contrast to stuff like Edith Finch where i expected to like it and just couldn’t and it hinged so much on the story (to a much greater degree than Viewfinder) that i just didn’t enjoy the experience. but that game seemed generally beloved - so i guess my reactions don’t tend to seem to match up with critical consensus or whatever.
having played Manifold Garden, Superliminal, and Viewfinder all around the same time around a couple years back - i do feel like there are inherent limitations to the genre and it’s a hard type of game to really make work, which is why you see so few of them at this point. and i think they all kind of struggle with that in different ways. like i think Superliminal had the best framing of any of these games but the gimmickyness sorta wore a little thin by the end. Manifold Garden had the best visual effects and environments but there are times when it just feels like an expensive tech demo. i at least appreciated Viewfinder’s attempts to make a full blown story out of this sort of game, even if it didn’t work that well. i will be curious to see if this subgenre of games end up coming back in some different permutation down the road though.
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Unfinished Swan felt like my favourite balance if that fits in this subgenre but I appreciate what each goes for. I used to be a big Witness fan but I feel like I’m a recovering Witness fan these days (if you wanna talk about writing/VA tanking things). Quantum Conundrum is the lower end for me, much less enjoyable than Viewfinder.
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just reinforcing for me that videogames should not have writing, especially puzzle games. Inkle gets a pass. every other game should be about if you are a bad enough dude to get icecream for the studio audience, or you are a frog who has to file his taxes on time
please don’t make me sit through your amateur theatre script/attempted podcast
please bear in mind I am serious, bad at communicating, of an analytical bent, and very stupid
6 Likes
i’ve been playing the new rimworld expansion while i’ve been sick
here is my rimworld privateer gravship after 2 in-game years. i like that the design pressures you’re subject to when you build these things (basically, every tile is expensive and you can only add them irregularly) encourage you to make a cramped nightmare vessel with hoarder paths between all of the equipment and storage
the gaps between the inner and outer hulls form courtyards where the crew can grow crops when the ship is landed
this thing has all of the facilities to turn raw materials into machine parts, microprocessors, clothing, guns, bionic limbs, etc. this crew of privateers has begun to accumulate lots of battle scars, missing limbs, traumatic brain injuries, etc and they don’t have the rare resources needed to fix any of it yet
this campaign has been a cakewalk so far because all of my initial efforts were geared toward building advanced guns en masse, and that hallway in the stern with the right angle bend in it (i call it the cloaca) exploits the enemy ai (most forms of it) into walking one by one into the barricades, where they immediately get shot by up to 30 shells from semi-automatic shotguns. but that is only going to hold up through the late-midgame, and again, many of the crew have TBIs and/or hook hands by this point
i think this thing is spaceworthy but i haven’t tried landing it on any asteroids or space stations yet
i have thoughts about rimworld but they seem too numerous to write down. some day? it has serious foundational problems and yet i keep playing after over a decade
10 Likes
I thought Viewfinder was cute as a mechanical thing to play around with, both wish the puzzles pushed you and the mechanics a bit harder and the writing was… less so.
It is funny this came up as while I was debating whether to pick up Silksong now or wait for a bit I ended up randomly starting up Super Crazy Rhythm Castle and I may have shouted out loud to an empty room “dear god would you please just shut up!” on more than a few occasions. It doesn’t let you skip the dialogue, but you can hold a button down to make it fast forward; fast-forward is regular normal human talking speed. I literally cannot access my thoughts on the rest of the game as thinking of it immediately makes my brain jump straight to “just shut up” >_>
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First thing I thought of reading your post
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