 SEGA DRUNK! Here's a weird one, it's Cosmic Spacehead for Sega Genesis, a remake of an NES game Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade. And this one also came out for DOS, the Amiga, Game Gear, and Master System, and this game is just odd all around. It's made by Codemasters, so it got one of those weird cartridge shapes on Genesis and Mega Drive anyway, and in PAL regions it was later paired with another Codemasters game on the same cartridge, Fantastic Dizzy. Cosmic Spacehead starts out as one of those oddball point and click adventure games, and you just kind of figure stuff out on your own as you go. You use the D-pad to move the cursor around the screen, which is always kind of goofy on a console game, but it works well enough here. And there's five actions at a time to choose from, and you pick up items, talk to people, mess with your surroundings, and figure out what the hell is going on. You play as this little guy from the Planet Linolium, yes, Planet Linolium, who accidentally crashes into this new alien planet he's never heard of called Earth. He makes his way back home and nobody believes this crock about this crazy new planet he's found, so you gotta head back to Earth, this time with a camera ready to provide sufficient proof for your people back home. The problem is, you don't have a way of going back, you don't have a camera, and you don't have any money. You start out in this area on Linolium, select the pick up option, and pick up these two things lying here, a Lino Dollar and a Teleki. You proceed to the left, and suddenly you're in a platforming stage, yep that's right, you don't just magically end up in new areas, you have to earn your way there by platforming and dodging enemies, and I'll expand on that more a bit later. You make it to the new area, and hey here's a slot machine, might as well spend this dollar I found. Sweet, fifty more dollars. Talk to this guy over here who mentions a bumper car race, but you need a drivers license to compete and you don't have one. From there you head over to the post office, get some pictures taken, and get a passport which unlocks the next area. You give a balloon you found to this one eyed lizard thing, you freeze this lake with iced sugar, and yeah. This game is just a little weird, and slightly unintuitive, so you really gotta try anything and everything in order to proceed with the game. To add to the bizarre nature here, once you receive your drivers license, your name on it is Larry Flint? Larry Bleepin' Flint? Are you serious? What is with this game? That's something you'll be saying throughout Cosmic Spacehead, for better and for worse. For one thing, this may seem like a random mashup of two different genres, point and click adventure and platforming, but they fit together really well. So beyond the game's humor and style, this game is definitely unique in that sense as well. Unfortunately though, the platforming is seriously flawed because you can't kill enemies. One hit kills you, and the controls here are incredibly sluggish and slow. If you can't kill anything, that's fine, really. But if the game has such lousy platforming that it doesn't give you an adequate opportunity to avoid enemies, then that's a problem. You do at least have plenty of chances to earn extra lives by collecting 10 of these Cosmic Candy things, and they're pretty easy to get, so the game is at least forgiving in that sense, and there is a password system here as well. In addition, certain areas have teleport keys that allow you to bypass the platforming sections so you don't have to go through them every time to return to a previous area. Now this game may sound boring to some of you, but there are some things that make it worthwhile. For instance, the visual style is unlike any other game I've seen. It's like some kind of proto-invader-zim thing going on, just with the colors and how it's drawn. Also the dialogue here is so strange, it's this unironic 90s style humor, or maybe not, I can't even tell if certain lines are jokes or not, this whole game just has such a strange vibe to it, it almost reminds me of something like Earthbound in a way. There's also minigames that pop up here and there that help add to the confusion, like the bumper car race, and there's also a two-player minigame called Pie Slap, with the same overhead view with four different maps where you just go around trying to hit each other with pies. Sure, okay. Anyway, Cosmic Space Head is a tough one to review, and it's hard to know whether or not to recommend it, because it's like, I kinda wish everyone could play this at least once just to see how weird it is, but on the other hand there's a lot of sitting around waiting for enemies to get out of the way, a lot of confusion, and a lot of instances where you're just saying, what the hell? This is how games earn cult audiences, because this game certainly isn't for everyone, but are you part of that cult audience? There's only one way to find out, and that's to play this game for yourself. I think it's worth trying out at least once.