RETURN SMASH
Edge UK|April 2023
How a filmmaker and his dream team of musicians and designers are resurrecting a cult Dreamcast classic for PSVR2
SIMON PARKIN
RETURN SMASH

Few people played Cosmic Smash, a futuristic, intergalactic sports game that arrived in 2001 during the twilight months of Sega’s tragi-glorious Dreamcast saga. But for those who did, the memories have lingered. You played as a translucent man, his crunching, stretching wireframe skeleton visible while you chased a molten-red rubber ball around a space-age court, racquet in hand. The rules were enviably succinct: squash meets Breakout. The far wall was constructed from Atari-issue blocks, which vanish on impact. Destroy all blocks before the timer runs out. Ten matches. Final boss (maybe). Welcome to Cosmic Smash.

Rez’s lithe, athletic cousin, Cosmic Smash launched a few weeks ahead of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s trance masterpiece. Both games matched their laser-beam aesthetics with the sort of treble-heavy electronica that could pierce a cloud of cigarette smoke. Of the pair, Cosmic Smash was the more basic proposition, but it also showed a world bewitched by lavishly textured 3D games that gaming’s arcade heritage remained as urgent and legitimate as any high-production open world.

At the time, Jörg Tittel was a theatre student studying in New York, freelancing as a game journalist when he learned about Cosmic Smash via screenshots published in Famitsu DC, a Japanese magazine to which he occasionally contributed. He ordered a copy from Japan, the only territory in which Sega released the game (it had debuted in Japanese arcades a few months before the Dreamcast release). The disc arrived several weeks later, tucked snugly inside a semi-transparent milky DVD case that, when placed on a bookshelf, stood tall and awkward above the rest of the Japanese Dreamcast’s uniformly sized CD boxes.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 2023 من Edge UK.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 2023 من Edge UK.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.