Lost Games: Comix Zone (Megadrive)

System: Megadrive

Publisher: Sega

Year: 1995

There’s a phrase in gaming – ‘breaking the fourth wall’ – which is a way of describing actions that attempt to connect the game world with reality. When a game character realises he’s in a game or talks directly to ‘the player’, that’s it. Sega’s Comix Zone took a very different approach to this by creating a virtual world within the game, and allowing the properties of that world to influence the gameplay.

The storyline is a straightforward staple of sci-fi – a comic artist, Sketch Turner, is working on his latest superhero comic when lightning strikes his apartment block. This has the effect of bringing his supervillain to life and out of the comic, and the ensuing struggle somehow results in Sketch himself getting trapped within the pages. Sketch has to try to fight his way out thorugh the comic story he created, while his supervillain enemy stands over the pages with Sketch’s own pen drawing in obstacles to make his life difficult.

Comix Zone is a scrolling beat em up with very light puzzle elements, and takes full advantage of a comicbook appearance to provide a unique game environment. As Sketch progresses through the story, he’ll climb between the frames on the page and even send enemies flying through borders and crashing into the next story panel, and the encounters are all illustrated with comic style speech bubbles to reinforce the effect. Sketch seems to have picked up some superheroic scrapping abilities as a result of landing in the comic world, but as the enemies are plentiful and tough he can often use a bit of help. This comes in the form of a bizarre little trick that definitely breaks the fourth wall within Sketch’s world – if you hold down the punch button, Sketch will rip a piece of paper out of the page, turn it into a paper plane, and fling it across the screen which causes a lot of damage to anything in the way. Unfortunately damaging the world in this way will hurt Sketch because he’s now a part of the paper, so it’s up to the player to balance this health loss against the potential benefits.

Your arch enemy can be relied upon to reach over and draw in a plentiful supply of enemies as you make your way through the story panels, which feels bizarre - it’s a strange experience to have the main protagonist in a game not actually starring in it as such (well, until the end anyway) but hovering over it and chucking in roadblocks at regular intervals. At one point he goes even further and sets fire to the page, requiring Sketch to make a very fast exit. It’s a gimmick but it reinforces the bizarre setting and provides a bit of extra silliness to the game, just to make sure the player never takes it too seriously.

Comix World isn’t a particularly long game but it makes up for it by providing a decent and sometimes slightly frustrating challenge. Unfortunately as it arrived towards the end of the Megadrive’s working life it wasn’t spotted by gamers who’d moved on, and so remains relatively obscure. It’s quite a unique approach to the genre, which was becoming a bit tired by that point, and is definitely worth a look even if just for the unique styling and presentation. It’s now up for grabs on the Wii’s Virtual Console and via Xbox Live Arcade.