Cosmic Smash

A group of veterans with credits on both Namco’s Ridge Racer and Sega AM3’s Sega Rally, the short-lived studio Sega Rosso plopped this into arcades at the turn of the millennium just after their back-to-back titles NASCAR Racing and Star Wars Racer Arcade. This side project, Cosmic Smash, is coolly minimalist in its series of abstract corridors and translucent blocks, all of which melt to black at the end of each level within the veneer of an interstellar subway tunnel. The equally minimal HUD contains only a timer in skewed perspective beside the player character. Each hallway area features a series of blocks at the opposite end from the player that they must hit with a ball and racket.¹ Upon destroying all colored blocks in an area, the player gains some bonus time and heads off to the next section, perhaps laid out in wireframe green, or seemingly floating in a white void.

Much like Sega’s sister series Virtua Tennis, the digital inputs don’t stop the game from creating nuanced shot angles. The game’s rich position-driven contextual actions allow the player to stretch for balls well above their head with the same inputs that allow shots from close to the chest or at a horizontal length apart from the player (this results in a satisfying dive). The flexibility here also solves the issue of the game’s behind-the-back perspective, as the character will subtly alter their input time in order to hit the ball accurately within a generous tolerance. For balls that reach beyond the player’s grasp, they can kick off of the walls on the side of each area, or they can magnetize the ball to them with a “trick smash” that penetrates multiple blocks in a single volley. Using these drains the in-game timer quicker, but they’re key to finishing most of the levels in as few shots as possible, and they provide score bonuses when they’re used as the final shot in the level. The sole alternative is the “cosmic drive,” which uses a horizontal charge input (hold one direction and then snap to the other direction at ball contact) to spin the ball with a curve, making it less precise than the trick shot but retaining the penetration capabilities without hastening the timer.

In the Tsukushi stage, a line of alternating garbage and normal blocks appear on each side of the playfield. The garbage begins cyclically receding and reappearing, and thus the player must try to knock out each line in a single shot. Getting a ball stuck between two of the garbage blocks can have it continually bouncing out of the player’s control, wasting precious seconds.

Every aspect of the game’s limited kit is tested, with aiming, timing, and ordering shots all tested in equal measure. The game’s first eight levels are the same on every attempt and set up the game nicely: you’re introduced to the different kinds of blocks (static, moving, stacked, phased, garbage, and a scale of softness/hardness) along with mechanics like multiball in gentle stages, which eventually culminate in a “final tutorial” of falling blocks in the background with a rectangular chain of moving garbage in front of them. Once you’re past these, the player can explore the map through a series of binary route choices that lead to one of eight endings. At its best, the levels will strategically use garbage blocks to narrow your access to others, such as by sandwiching normal blocks between cyclical garbage, triggering garbage movement as the player clears other blocks, and bringing the back of the playfield forward. When used dynamically, these can make “solving” each room most efficiently a fluid process rather than a rigid one. When the design lapses into stricter solutions, often where there’s only one particular angle that will hit a single block through garbage without any other features, the novelty of the nuance becomes less apparent. Still, there’s often multiple ways to crack these nuts regardless, but repeat plays may quickly end up repetitive, especially for stages that are common between many of the game’s routes.

Each of these elements play into the scoring system, which rewards playing fast with as many tricks as possible. While bonuses for time and keeping up a consistent rally are instantly intuitive, what requires some research and testing is the end-game “variety trick” bonus. Every stage gives a substantial bonus (potentially at the level of the other bonuses) for trick smashing on the closing shot, and ending each level in a run with one gives a huge endgame bonus.² However, ending every level with a unique trick smash doubles that bonus, and many of the alternate tricks give many more points on a level finish than the basic one. Getting these involve using all of the movement listed above and more: pressing directions, normal jumping, wall jumping, and even kicking off the ceiling with a triangle jump or crouching by holding the jump button, both things that would rarely be encountered in normal play. This gives score play a unique character: before the end of a level, you’ll weigh the tradeoff on the respective time-save and time-loss from using a trick smash, but you’ll want to order your approach to the blocks around setting up a comfortable angle and position to perform one of the many trick smashes to close out the round, especially if you can maximize use of the score-rich ceiling-kick/wall-jump ones. Once you move past those, there’s additional somersault and flip moves you can do during the trick smash to add more score on top, making the execution of the move itself just as important to score as finishing with one at all. It’s a surprising ceiling raiser on top of a game that’s otherwise not necessarily difficult to clear, and it very transparently suggests the kind of play that the developers intended when they designed the mechanics.

As the manual boasts: “A return to the essence of gaming produces… the perfect blend of skill and strategy.”