Captain Comic II - Fractured Reality

1990, evening, parents asleep. I'm sitting in front of a monitor flickering with an EGA palette in the most garish shades any engineer ever approved. Captain Comic II: Fractured Reality loads from a floppy disk, and I don't yet know what awaits me.

Color Dreams, a studio otherwise notorious for unlicensed NES cartridges, released this DOS sequel to a modestly successful platforming action title. Captain Comic is a space hero whose story can be summed up on a beer coaster — new crisis, new mission, save, run, shoot. The genre was oversaturated back then, and the writers' ambitions were clearly modest.

The game plays as a side-scrolling platformer with an emphasis on movement and item collection. You jump, shoot at enemies, and progress through levels made up of mismatched environments. The controls are functional, though a bit slippery — the character stops with a slight delay you don't quite expect, and the first pit fall that came from that wasn't the last. Enemies move along predictable paths, which is both a blessing and a curse: experienced players soon ignore them, while beginners constantly trip over them.

What keeps the game afloat is its visual style. The EGA graphics are colorful to the point of eye strain, but there's a certain straightforward energy to them that feels authentically of its time. Sound Blaster music — if you had one, and not everyone did — added atmosphere; without it, the game fell into silent clicking and jumping. Today that sounds like a museum description, but back then it was standard. Fractured Reality didn't introduce anything revolutionary; it was solid, middle-of-the-road PC gaming that came out at the right time for the right audience.

Today the game has aged in a way typical for this type of title — the mechanics are bare-bones, the length is short, the difficulty more frustrating than challenging. There are no checkpoints in the modern sense, and level design isn't always readable on first glance. Those who grew up with it will find a flash of nostalgia that lasts maybe twenty minutes. Those unfamiliar with it will probably wonder why they clicked here at all.

In a browser via DOSBox emulation, I'd recommend it mainly as a historical document — a snapshot of what average PC action games looked like around 1990, before Commander Keen and then Apogee raised the bar so high that such titles stopped being viewed kindly. Ten minutes is enough. More than that, probably not.