Review: Comix Zone – Genesis/Megadrive
This colorful beat-em-up was released near the end of the life of the Sega Genesis (and came in those cruddy cardboard boxes). Instead of featuring a hero that simply walked down a city street and beat people up, Comix Zone had the game’s hero sucked into his own comic book creation and battle his own villainous creations within actual panels of comic book pages.
Graphics/Presentation – 9
Comix Zone can’t be faulted in the graphics department. The comic book panel construction has been expertly crafted. The designers seem to be heaviliy experience in how a graphic novel is constructed in order to produce an authentic look and feel. Being a late Genesis title, Comix Zone uses the full visual capabilities of the Genny in order to provide a rich and dynamic experience. But as I mentioned in my feature, “10 Games That Actually NEED A Sequelâ€, Comix Zone would be absolutely stunning if re-done on newer hardware – even a 32X version would be a sight to see (I think there was one in development before the addon was killed off).
Sound -6
Unfortunately, the audio of Comix Zone is not that great. It did have a lot of ambition when it came to the soundtrack, but it seems like it was just limited by the Genesis’ audio capabilities. I’m sure if a Sega CD version were made, it would be top-notch.
Story – 7
You won’t find the story rivaling any of your favorite Marvel or DC comics, but back in 1995, this had a unique premise for a game. I thought was especially interesting, that Mortus, the primary baddie who has escaped the artist-hero’s pages and is existing in the “reality” dimension, draws a bunch of enemies for Sketch as he progresses through the book.
Gameplay – 8
In all actuality though, Comix Zone does little to stretch past the standard beat-em-up formula that so many of these kinds of games come wrapped up in. Essentially, you can sum up the gameplay as: you jump into a frame and start punching and kicking everything in sight. Comix Zone has more fighting style than most of the Konami arcade brawlers like the Ninja Turtles games. However, since this came out after the Street Fighter 2 craze, it would have been nicer to see some more complex moves and combos, but they visual style of the game allows you to be a bit more forgiving.
Affordability – 10
Comix Zone was a fairly common game on a common system, so you can easily find an original cart for 2 or 3 dollars. It is also available as a bonus game on the Sega Mega Collection (which can be found for $10-15). A Gameboy Advance port is also available, but I’ve never actually seen it in person. And finally, PC port can be found on eBay for next to nothing.
Overall Score: 8
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The gameboy advance port was only released in europe. I need to try the rom one of these days to see if it’s better or worse.
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Wow, ok after trying it, I gatta say it’s horrible.
The graphics are worse in every possible way. The resolution was lowered obviously, but they made no attempt to redesign any of the graphics for this. They just let everything get improperly resized down, so now everything looks really jagged.
The color counts are much lower too. And the overall speed of the game is awful.
The music is just nasty now. And the sound effects often fall out of sync, if they even play at all. I was just fighting one enemy, and the blow from my kick to him took about a full second to playback over the speakers.
There seems to be some sort of multiplayer mode, but it requires the GBA link cable. I assume it’s coop play, but it might be just a versus mode.
Still this game is just nearly unplayable in every sense. Stick with the genesis version.