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Review: Kosmic Kamikaze (Rainbow 1981-12)
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Home / Publications / Rainbow / Rainbow 1981 / Rainbow 1981-12 - Review: Kosmic Kamikaze (Rainbow 1981-12)
KOSMIC KAMIKAZE has one of the best spaceship graphics we have seen in non-machine language hires graphics. It also has an interesting format, a good signature and is pretty challenging to play.
Available from Illustrated Memory Banks (IMB. P.O. Box 289, Williamstown. MA 01267 for $18.95), it has plenty of option. that require a quick finger on the old joystick.
The game pits your spaceship in an uncharted area of the universe amid a whole raft of alien-type pirate ships. Each of the ships looks different, and that is part of the charm of the game. Depending on the difficulty level you select, you get seven, four or two shots to wipe out the pirate vessel before it zaps into hyperspace and shows up in a new location. To make things somewhat easier for you, the pirates warn you before they shoot back, but you need to be extremely quick to activate a defensive shield in time. You start out with five shields, but can earn more.
There's also a comet that can't be defended against by shields. It moves very fast, but you get a big bonus for hitting it.
COSMIC KAMAKAZE takes a little getting used to. You have to hit the pirates (and the comet) just right in order to destroy them.
IMB has employed the now-famous POKE command to speed up the action. However, on some versions of the Color Computer, that will hang things up when the PLAY command is used. This caused us a few problems until we eliminated the POKE and, frankly, the action is fast enough without it.
Yet, these are but minor annoyances in a game that is fun to play and requires some real skill to score well, even at the beginner's level. It's more than a plain old shoot-em-up and it certainly demonstrates what a little patient programming can do in creating non-machine language graphics.
Links
See this article as it appeared in the Rainbow Magazine 1981-12 Pag 11, in archive.org