Being one of the latest releases for the console, its designers managed to take clever advantage of previous accumulated experience and push the hardware of the Mega Drive to its limits. The videogame distinguishes itself for its visual settings. The inclusion of multilinear paths and minor puzzle tasks is not, however, what distinguishes Comix Zone from other videogames. Screenshots of Comix Zone (Sega Technical Institute, 1995). Admittedly, these puzzles are not very complex and they may sometimes become repetitive, but they do succeed in enriching the gaming experience by adding something more than just (virtually) kicking and punching enemies.įig. These puzzles commonly consist in using switches, moving objects from one point to another, or using an item from the inventory (see Fig. Second, while keeping the focus on hand-to-hand combat, Comix Zone also involves some minor puzzle tasks. This clearly increases the replayability of the videogame, since if players want to discover all the screens of the videogame they must play it more than once while following different paths on each occasion. First, though it’s not an open-world videogame, there are occasions when players can choose among different paths, resulting in different scenarios and enemies in each case (see Fig. Though sticking to the classic beat ‘em up formula, Comix Zone presents two peculiarities in its gaming mechanics that succeed in enriching the gaming experience it offers. Thus, its gaming mechanics primarily consists in moving the videogame playable character from right to left (and left to right) while punching and kicking all the enemies they come across (see Fig. Regarding its gaming mechanics, Comix Zone follows the beat ‘em up formula which was extremely popular in the late eighties and early nineties in both home consoles and arcades. Comix Zone was also one of the forty-two built-in videogames included in the dedicated console Sega Mega Drive Mini (Sega Genesis Mini in North America), released worldwide in September 2019.
#Strigle comix zone portable
Thus, Comix Zone is included in the following compilations: Sega Mega Drive Collection (Sega, 2006 known as Sega Genesis Collection in North America), for the PlayStation 2 and the PlayStation Portable Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection (Sega, 2009 known as Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection in North America), for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 and Sega Mega Drive Classics (Sega, 2018 known as Sega Genesis Classics in North America), for the PlayStation 4, the Xbox One and the Nintendo Switch. Besides the possibility of playing it on modern personal computers via emulation software, the videogame has been released for almost all the major home consoles since the early 2000’s. This claim on the nature of fictional characters was seriously argued for, and put it into literary practice, by the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936).īefore proceeding further, it is worth mentioning that Comix Zone is still easily accessible to most players worldwide, even if they do not own a Sega Mega Drive. First, Comix Zone imitates the aesthetics and visual settings peculiar to comic books, the aim of which is to join the experience of playing a videogame with that of reading a comic and second, Comix Zone is ultimately grounded on the philosophical claim that fictional characters are actually existing entities, distinct from, and even colliding with, their creator(s). These peculiarities are two, and as we will see they are interrelated. Nonetheless, Comix Zone has some peculiarities which makes it even today an easily distinguishable videogame. Though the Sega Mega Drive was still popular in 1995, players’ attention at that time was almost exclusively focused on the upcoming generation of 32Bit home consoles and their capability of displaying three-dimensional polygonal graphics. This was not due to any inherent deficiency in the videogame but just because of its late release date. Despite being well-received by both players and critics on its release and nowadays considered one of the most iconic videogames of the Sega Mega Drive, the truth is that Comix Zone did not enjoy huge popularity in its time, at least not as much as other beat ‘em up videogames for the Sega Mega Drive such as Golden Axe (Sega, 1989) and Streets of Rage (Sega, 1991). The concept, design and art direction of the videogame is credited to Peter Morawiec. Sega’s Comix Zone and Miguel de Unamuno On the Ontological Status of Fictional CharactersĬomix Zone (Sega Technical Institute, 1995) is a two-dimensional scrolling beat ‘em up videogame released in 1995 for the Sega Mega Drive (known as Sega Genesis in North America).
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