Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure

Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure is a homebrew port on the Nintendo 64 released on 28 Sep 2021 by Ryzee119 of the game of the same name for DOS by 3D Realms. It’s a 2D platformer where you play as the titular crashlanded character who has to explore and repair his ship.

You can download the ROM for Episode 1 and the patches for Episode 2 & 3 on the game’s download page by using the password cosmodoc. The first episode is shareware so I can share the full ROM freely, but the other two are paid so I made patches of them to make it easier to share (compiling them was a pain in the butt). To patch them, buy the game and use xDelta to apply the patch on its corresponding VOL file:

• cosmo64_ep2.xdelta -> COSMO2.VOL
• cosmo64_ep3.xdelta -> COSMO3.VOL

About Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure

Cosmo was the archetypal PC DOS platforming game of the time. It’s in the same vein as Commander Keen or Crystal Caves (both also by Apogee, but different developers). You play as Cosmo who crashlands on planet Zonk on his way to Disney World with his family. It’s up to him to get the ship repaired, rescue his parents and get off the planet.

The gameplay is kind of Mario-esque. The stages are mostly linear either horizontally or vertically where the objective is to reach the end of the stage while collecting as many items as possible and avoiding enemies. You kill enemies by jumping on their heads which gives you a strong vertical ‘bounce’ that you can combo off of.

Cosmo’s signature move is that he can use his suction cup hands to grip onto walls and jump off of them. This lets you save near-misses when you fall into a pit, or it lets you climb up long cliffs.

This version by Ryzee119 is a direct port that uses the code from Cosmo Engine, an engine used to run CCA on modern systems plus the assets from the original game. They are then combined with Libdragon’s N64 rendering engine to package it all into a cheeky ROM that you can play on your Nintendo 64.

Review and conclusion

I feel like PC games of this era are always plagued with the same issues – low frame rate (10fps), wonky hit detection and keyboard-centric controls. On top of that, Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure suffers from several issue with game design like unclear graphics, useless collectables, unpredictable enemies and a level design that relies on memorisation.

But that’s really just a criticism of the original game. The problems that affect this port are the same than those that affect the DOS version of this game. The port itself is immaculate. It has the same feel playing it on my modern PC and on the N64 so you can happily play through all episodes on the console.

If you’ve never played through this game before, I do recommend you give the shareware Episode 1 a go. If you really like it, then go ahead and buy the full game. It’s not long, you’ll take maybe 1-2 hours per episode but it’s worth a look even if just for the sake of taking you back to an era of 2D PC platformers. Just note that you might be wishing to play a console platformer the whole time instead.