Linus Spacehead (Return to Linoleum) was a game only seen on the Quattro Adventure about a guy from another planet who crashed on Earth while joyriding through space and had to climb his way across the land and up through the atmosphere while collecting pieces of a radio so he could call for help to get back home. I came across a TAS of it on YouTube, and I was instantly drawn to the hero sprite that was probably the best on that cartridge. Just look at him! He stands there with that cute doughy face, he blinks, he looks at you, he shrugs, he yawns... When he crouches, he looks up nervously... He puts his arms out like wings when he jumps... And then he starts running, and he looks freakin DEVIOUS! And if you jump while running, he'll stay in his running animation during the jump like he's the Doki Doki Luigi or something!
It was somewhat notorious for its clumsy controls: Outside of the levels where you ride bubbles or balloons, you can't change Linus's speed or direction anytime during a jump, and Linus slides a lot, presumably so you have a small window of time during his acceleration or deceleration to pick a medium jump speed. In addition, the input detection was programmed badly, so if you're still holding the A button when Linus lands from a jump, he'll immediately jump again--and probably right into danger, since you won't have changed his speed yet. Not to mention like many Nintendo Hard platformers from novice developers, the jump height was just BARELY enough to clear gaps and enemies on the floor. Linus had no hit points, so some enemies would instantly kill him with the slightest touch, while others would merely knock him backwards with no harm done. (The manual actually recommended turning your back on your destination and letting such enemies knock you forward. It also recommended tiptoeing up to the edge of a platform, jumping in place, then holding the forward direction and A so that Linus would jump off at full speed. Uh... Easier than learning how to program nicer gameplay mechanics, I guess?) Quite an ordeal, but I've completed the game without the help of savestates more than once before!
A little later CodeMasters decided to come out with a standalone sequel to that game that was a little more involved. It was known as "Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade" in the USA, and it was supposed to combine point-and-click adventure gaming (where you guide Linus with a pointer arrow) with the original game's platforming (where you control Linus directly). Well, it was more like "Ya gotta do some of one to get to do more of the other." You could say it's a little like Simon's Quest where towns are separated by action zones, but the system is a little more like Guardian Legend where once you beat a platforming action section, you never have to beat it again, and instead of re-entering it when you backtrack you just see Linus run across a map of the world, so the platformers are like these one-time rites of passage.
The story is that Linus gets back to his home planet of
Linoleum, only to find that nobody believes his story of discovering another planet full of advanced life, so he's setting off to get a camera and a new spacecar to come back with proof and receive the accolades he deserves for his accidental discovery. (What, he couldn't even convince the person who gave him a ride home from the moon to go in for a closer look?) So, starting with nothing but his birth certificate, he eventually does that... But he gets caught up in a bunch of tangential quests, like crossing bodies of water, collecting missile parts to blast away a wall in another country, using teleporters with serious flaws, fighting off a robot revolution while visiting a factory planetoid, getting a driver's license so he can race bumper cars... (What, was the one he used to drive his old spacecar not good enough? Or did he lose it in the crash despite clinging to his birth certificate?) And so since this is set on an alien planet, the designers can just make up random monsters for Linus to face instead of the real animals in the first game. But the Linopeople are just like Earth people, only superhero costumes seem to be in fashion for them. The adventuring parts aren't too hard to work out, though a few solutions you may find unintuitive, like
giving a big monster a balloon to get rid of it,
using ICING sugar to turn a pool into ICE >_<, or
stealing a bus stop sign to pry a fire extinguisher out of a car wreck later to put out a giant robot's power source. Oh, and you have to press Select in Formica City to control a second character there. Whew!
So this is one of those games that has enough variety in its modes of play and possible routes that it could make a good speedrun, but before someone runs it, we should figure out which version is best. See, Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade was also released in Europe and ported to several other game systems as "Cosmic Spacehead", where the adventure zone graphics were given a total overhaul on the systems that could support it, and little Linus was given an even goonier-looking appearance. Personally I find the new art style with all the wild angles pretty garish, and the fact that even the "16-bit" ports like Genesis and Amiga couldn't change the proportions of anything in the action stages means that the use of the enormous Cosmic Spacehead sprite makes the enemies look smaller and less intimidating and causes a lot more
Hitbox Dissonance overall, so I tend to prefer the original NES version, which also has some very expressive music for the NES. But if people prefer the graphics and sound from one of the ports, then we could start a topic for Cosmic Spacehead for another system instead.
Now, so, even if we pick the NES version, we still have to decide which NES version, the US or the European. It turns out the European version made a
lot of changes throughout the game, possibly either to keep up with the changes made to other ports, or maybe it made the changes first to play better, and then the ports were based on that, I'm not sure of the order of everything. Some alterations are minor and just make things more convenient; some greatly change the difficulty; and some I'm just not sure the point of. I've made a long list of all the changes I've caught so far:
* Linus Spacehead's name has been changed to Cosmic Spacehead. No, that's not just the revised title of the game, that's the playable character's new
name. He introduces himself as Cosmic, signs letters with that name, it's on his birth certificate... I really don't understand why his name needed to be changed, since I thought the whole point of naming Spacehead's world after Linoleum was to match up with Linus's name. (Or they picked the name Linoleum because it's something you walk on, like earth, and then they picked Linus's name to match.) Maybe they suddenly decided they didn't want to remind people of the Quattro Adventure anymore? Oh, well, whatever, they can call him Stupendous Man for all that it matters now. The new appearance for Cosmic appears in the new opening credits, but the NES/SMS/GG versions still use the old Linus sprites all throughout the actual gameplay.
* There's a new option on the title menu called "2 Player Pie Slap", where the bumper cars from the racing mini-game try to shoot each other--oh I'm sorry, I mean they try to "splat" each other with "pies". Gee, CodeMasters, you look so silly trying to construe your little car shooting game as something non-violent. What a waste of delicious pie. Anyway, I think the 16-bit ports add new arenas and replace the cars with little dragons or maybe they're supposed to be robot dogs called "Splatdrones", but it's the same idea.
* When you type in a password, the US version will stop your cursor when it reaches the edge of the box of letters, but the Eur version lets the cursor wrap around to the other side. Convenience!
* How you receive passwords is completely different. At first I couldn't figure out how to get any passwords in Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade and thought maybe they'd forgotten to put in a way, but then I found the manual, which explains that you have to press Select+Start then Start again to unpause (or the other way around), and then the game will tell you your current password. And you can do this as many times as you want in any adventure area. (Button code for saving as an anti-piracy measure, perhaps? With this I discovered that the base password is BYPETERLEEWILLIAMSON, which gets more corrupted as you complete your quest. Now we know his middle name!) Cosmic Spacehead does it differently. The Select+Start combo no longer works, but now there are flashing P panels in most of the adventure areas which award the player a password, but only once--I think they now also save the fact that you've taken a password icon. This means the player has to budget out the number of times they get to save the game, withholding the use of the P icons until they've made enough progress without losing too many lives for it to be worthwhile.
* The physics of controlling Cosmic in the action areas are also
completely different. In the USA version, Linus still controlled almost exactly like in his first game, although about the only things that would stun him were certain robots on Detroitica. (No vertical scrolling or enemies that randomly spawn from the edges either, but you often get to go right-to-left!) But in the transition to Cosmic Spacehead, he became a legitimate platform hero for the masses! He's not so slippery anymore. He can start moving forward in the middle of a jump, he'll stop moving mid-jump if you let go of the direction pad, and he can even turn back in the other direction mid-jump if you see danger ahead! You can just jump over things and then fall straight down onto them! It's like such a revolution, man! So yeah, this is one of the most noticeable changes. It's so much easier to clear a platforming section in Cosmic Spacehead it's ridiculous. I noticed something else about the jumping when I tried to collect all the Cosmic Candies in the whole game, the ones that give you an extra life when you collect 10 (or 5 in Quattro Adventure, or 15 in certain ports of Cosmic Spacehead--1-up inflation going on, yikes!).
On the route from The Wilderness to The Very Cold Pool, there's one candy on a platform that's easy enough to jump down onto, but it seems to be impossible for Linus Spacehead to jump all the way back onto the next piece of solid ground. Since there's no point in throwing away 1 life for something worth 1/10th of a life, I figured this was nothing but
Schmuck Bait, until I played the European NES version and discovered that Cosmic Spacehead can just barely make the jump back over! This is when I started to realize that Cosmic's jump is a bit higher than Linus's, as I ran into another problem later on.
In the first Detroitica action area, there's a candy under a platform that Linus can jump to just fine, but I can't reach with Cosmic no matter how I try. It seems that Cosmic's higher jump causes him to snag on the next platform before he can fall through it, and if I do the jump from far enough back that that doesn't happen, Cosmic will be falling too fast when he clears the platform to get far enough to the left to reach the candy. If it weren't for either of those candy issues, I could have ended the game with 21 lives, but instead I had to settle for 20 lives + 9 leftover candies! Darn, does every version of the game have an inaccessible candy somewhere?
The funny thing is, I think the change in jump height was not just to make the game a little easier, but also to avoid Cosmic having to snag the middle of a platform and take a moment to zip up onto it so often, as Linus has to do that a lot for just average jumps, and if the player holds A and makes him jump continuously, then Linus won't get a chance to zip up and his next jump will be too low. Ah, yes, and Cosmic Spacehead fixed the "bouncing" issue... mostly. If you hold A during Cosmic's entire jump, he won't jump again once he's on the ground until you let go of the button and press it again. But if you let go of A and start holding it again in the middle of a jump, then Cosmic will jump again just one more time. But, I guess maybe it's nice to be able to jump continuously if you want to? Meh.
And, wow, I only just bothered to try PAL Emulation in FCEUX just now and noticed this: Cosmic moves a lot FASTER in the action areas in PAL mode, even faster than he ever did in NTSC. That's... weird. The enemies are still slow; Cosmic's still slower in the adventure areas, the Secret Tunnel, the car factory and its scrapyard; and this effect doesn't happen at all if you turn on PAL mode in the American version. Some kind of automatic PAL detection that changes all the platforming speed constants? Oh, and don't try to turn on PAL Emulation in a game that's already been running in NTSC mode, or you'll get freaky flickering and other bad effects.
* This green walking egg ("Headcase" I think is the official name) from the end of the route from Old Lino Town to Border Control seems to have gone missing from the European version.
I suppose they thought this enemy was unfair for walking in such a small area to make it hard to get past, but come on, Cosmic has his improved speed and jumping ability now! He could do it!
* The adventure areas also see some important changes in interface. In the American version, there are 5 choices of actions listed on the screen as Look, Pick Up, Talk, Give, and Use, which you can select with the A button, but you can also cycle through them in that same order by pressing the B button. In the European version, the 5 commands are displayed in that same order onscreen, but when you press the B button, the first one you get is Use, followed by Look At, Pick Up, Talk, and Give. I suppose the developers suddenly realized how often they required the player to use Use, huh? Not that it would make a huge difference for TASing; that's only another 12 frames to tap the B button to get to Use, or 9 frames when it's interchangeable with Give, which could be done while moving Linus or the cursor anyway.
What's odd is that the demo for Cosmic Spacehead on NES still pulls up Look At first, even though I can tell it was re-recorded for that version because the player makes some slightly different moves throughout the demo. Maybe it was recorded on an in-between build, and this is a revealing mistake like the full-power-down from the intro to Super Mario Bros. 3?
* In the USA version, if you've chosen an action command but then click A on any part of the screen that isn't an item hotspot (moving Linus in the process if you're in the top section), your action will disappear, and you'll have to choose an action all over again. In the Eur version, your action, along with the first object you've chosen if it's Give or Use, will stay ready to use no matter how many times you click on a blank area. This could be very helpful for speedrunning when you need Give or Use with an item from your inventory, as you can select that item and then keep guiding Cosmic to his destination before the thing you need to Give or Use the item on appears onscreen. Until I do any actual TASing, though, I don't know if Linus Spacehead will actually lose any time if I have to dip down to the inventory only after the target's already appeared.
* In both versions the pointer will speed up if you hold the same direction for a second, but the European version's top speed for the pointer seems to be higher.
* In Cosmic Spacehead, if you don't pick any actions for a while in Old Lino Town, an image of the NES controller will pop up, with a finger pointing to the B button to help you out. On other systems this will be whatever controllers they use.
* Cosmic runs across the world map significantly faster in the European version. Not much a speedrunner of the American version can do about this when there's forced backtracking.
* Some of the items in the adventure areas had their names modified.
"Gold Lino Dollars" -> "Lino Dollars"
"Old Lino Town Telekey" -> "Lino Town Telekey"
"Letter From Linograd" -> "Mail From Linograd"
"Formica City Telekey" -> "Formica Telekey"
"No.2 Hard To Get Thru" -> "No2 Hard To Get Thru"
"No.4 Where's The Floor?" -> "No.4 No Floor!"
When I first started seeing these changes I wondered if they decided the dollars weren't gold or if early players were confused into thinking that #4 involved puzzles with fake floors or invisible floors when it really just means that it has longer stretches of floorlessness than normal. But now I realize that all the names were made to fit into 20 characters or less. Why this revision
added a limitation that wasn't there before, I couldn't guess. It doesn't matter for speedrunning though, as the hotspots for inventory items extend all the way to the right side of the screen for whatever reason.
* I haven't done a full comparison of the other languages included in the games, but they have a few words changed too, usually to fit the 20-character limit again. Some languages still mention the dollars being gold or phrase #4 as a question in Cosmic Spacehead, so that's why I'm sure those weren't editorial changes. I played around in Spanish for a little while on one of my old password saves and noticed that "No Mans Causeway" was left in English for Linus Spacehead, but translated to "Arrecife De Nadie" for Cosmic Spacehead. "Deposito De Buses" became "Parada De Buses", and even the password entry text, "Ingresar Contrasena", was changed to "Formar Contrasena". So there have been new translations and re-translations, but I believe all specialty fonts for signage throughout the game had to be left in English in all versions.
* There's a humorous scene in Linoville, a bit of an Easter egg, that only happens in Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade. The first time you enter Linoville, you see a tower with a satellite dish mounted on it. The second time you enter, the dish is now spinning. The third time you enter, a UFO appears out of the sky and circles the tower, causing the dish to spin faster to try to follow it until it spins so fast that it explodes as the UFO flies away.
In the European NES version, the dish still spins on the second and third entrance, but the flying saucer thing never appears. The fourth time you enter Linoville, there's this weird glitchy-looking stuff on the tower, with the hooked thing on the bottom flashing the same colors as the cursor and passwords.
What happened here? Did some of the revisions to the code break the scene in some way?
* One drastic graphic change is at that Nearly Freezing Pool, where all the plants have been removed, and some of the smaller rocks lying around have changed shape slightly. I don't get the point of this one, unless maybe it's supposed to draw the player's attention more toward the pool or away from trying to cross it by examining the surrounding area.
* Some plants that went up to the very top of the screen in the Dodgey City area action zones don't go up quite as high in the Eur version. Not that it makes a difference, since you can't stand on the steps that would take you off the top of the screen anyway, but I found it funny that the PAL version had trouble using more scanlines.
* In Linoville's camera shop, the "camera supplies" sign is blanked out for Cosmic Spacehead. Huh? Why? Oh, hey, this is another place I checked out in the Spanish mode.
Yeah, a few of the Spanish-only characters showed up as garbage tiles in Linus Spacehead, but appeared all right in Cosmic Spacehead. Hmm, did the old camera store sign mistakenly rob tiles from the other language character sets, and that's why it was removed? Or was FCEUX on the blink? Maybe this has something to do with why the flying saucer's gone too.
* When you free the staff from the kitchen in Detroitica, their speech is right up against the left edge of the screen in Cosmic Spacehead, while for Linus Spacehead the speech got the usual left margin. Don't know why they would change that on purpose, since you want to leave room on the edges in case they get cut off on certain TVs. More broken code?
* Cosmic Spacehead also changes it so that when you free those workers but double back from the action stage, the button's hotspot is gone, so you can't free them again and read their little monologue all over again. Makes sense, unless you think they're so pathetic they'd get locked in the kitchen again right away.
* The post office workers originally blinked white pixels, but now they blink gold like the attendants at Cape Carnival and The Border. ...Okay, this is getting too pixel-nit-picky, enough already!
So you can see how one could be torn over which version of the game to speedrun. The European version may be faster in many places, enough to make up for the parts that weren't speed-corrected for PAL, but it's also easier in many places too. Picking the fastest version of a game is nice, but I thought we wanted to run the hardest settings possible. Maybe Cosmic can do better stunts with his improved jumping physics, but a run with Linus could show how to be nearly as fast despite the more challenging controls, and having to stick to one speed per jump can make it look more graceful anyway. I know in the rules there's a preference for United States versions, but is that just because they're United Statesian, or is it a preference for what is usually the first version released in English, such as in Linus Spacehead's case? I hope we can decide for sure soon.
I was going to end this post with a list of possible speed strategies for the game, but it's getting too late, and this post is already much too long, so it'll have to wait for another day.
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