Around 2020 or so I started doing a series of video reviews of forgotten games that hadn’t seen official US distribution. That channel is gone, but the spirit lives on. I’m going to adapt these into text reviews as a series here, in a roughly chronological order. Arcade titles are going to be a little tricky as regions weren’t rigidly defined, so consider inclusion of these games as a “to the best of my knowledge” kind of thing.
1979 saw more than a few Space Invaders clones. Our first arcade title Cosmo is closer to Taito’s Galaxian, released the same year in Japan by the company TDS. There’s enough variety here that it’s worth examining on its own.
As expected of the year of release, the enemy sprites are simple and single-colored. Unlike many late 70s games the sprites are individually colored, not relying on a screen overlay as in Space Invaders. The action is fast and frantic, forcing the player to keep moving to avoid destruction. However, the enemy ship patterns are simple enough once you’ve seen them.
This overlooked arcade title definitely doesn’t look as “nice” as Galaxian. There’s more variety in each wave. Enemy sprites have a lot of variation. Their attack patterns are very different, though in general they fall into the category of “fly around the screen until they decide to take a dive at you.”
One nice touch is that after every wave you get a little trophy in the corner to track your progress.
Minibosses
It’s generally accepted that the first real Boss in video games comes in 1980’s Phoenix. In Cosmo every fifth enemy waves that serve the role of mini-boss, presenting you with a single tougher enemy. That, too, was an unexpected element in a relatively unknown and simple game.
Unfortunately what you see here is an imperfect emulation. I’ve seen the real game, and it features multiple hardware improvements like moving starfields in the background instead of a blank void. As I can’t really judge the game’s visuals based on what I’ve played, I’ll leave that out of my evaluation.
I’ll be ranking each game against its contemporaries released the same year. In Cosmo’s case, that’s Galaxian and Asteroids. The game isn’t really up to their level, but it’s a fun hidden arcade gem with some unexpected â and fun â complexity. I’ll give Cosmo a B ranking.
