Cosmic Cruiser

Cosmic Cruiser intro screen

Cosmic Cruiser intro screen
Cosmic Cruiser game screen #1 Cosmic Cruiser game screen #2
Cosmic Cruiser game screens #1 & 2

Cosmic Cruiser is an original arcade style game, originally done for the Dragon 32 (which explains the color set being in the "bright green-ness of space..."). The game controls can be joystick or keyboard based, but the keyboard controls are a little strange, using entire rows of keys for the same specific function, or every second key for the bottom row being left or right. There seems to be some physics applied even to the joystick controls, which makes it harder to control. At any rate, the game has the alien ship above you (and it houses aliens and captured crewman of yours; it also drifts up and down a bit), your ship at the bottom, and a couple of satellites in the middle. The premise is that you are in your spacesuit outside of your ship; you have to move to the big gun turret on the right on your ship, hop down to activate it, and then blow up the portals on the alien ship (which can free both your crewmen, and the aliens). You also have a smaller gun on your person for when floating in space, so that you can shoot the aliens. Your crewmen you have to gather up and drop them down the portal on the left side of your ship. One twist is that if you fire your handgun, you let go of the crewman. You can anchor them to one of the satellites, and then have free range on shooting, and get him back. The game also features good sound effects and title song, as well as a high score list.
If you have a Coco 3, doing a PALETTE 0,0 before running will change the green background to black, which I think helps a lot.

Title: Cosmic Cruiser

Author: Simon Bell (idea by D.H. Lawson, graphics by Steve Cain, music by Fred Gray)

Publisher: Imagine Software Ltd.

Released: 1984

Requires: Color Computer 1/2/3, 32K RAM, cassette or disk, joystick optional.

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