Reviews

Comercio Cosmico
ZX-SOFT Brasil Ltda

A Brazilian BASIC game originally released in 1987, translated into English with minor updates in 2015.

This is a respectable Space Trader game set in our own solar system. You travel between Mercury and Neptune (stopping before the block of ice that is Pluto) buying and selling as you go. Each planet has a niche – for example Uranus is a prison and Mercury, with a surface temperature of over 400oC, is an agricultural centre (obviously). So you can buy goods cheaply on one planet and sell more expensively on another. The largest profits can be made on food while products like Androids are less lucrative, Uranium is costly but stable, so seems to be the interplanetary equivalent of gold. The cost of travel, arrangement of planetary niches and availability of certain goods is well thought out and the player has to work hard to maintain even a small profit.

All the play happens on the same GUI which is not the prettiest, but far from the ugliest. The intro screen gives the latter a run for its money but is so deliciously naff you would still take it home to play snugglebunnies. And if you can think of a better way to display a planet hoving into view other than using the CIRCLE command I’d like to hear it.

The game is unfinished with a lot of intended backstory & features not implemented, which might explain the slight lack of personality, but if I wasn’t aware of this fact I would file Cosmic Commerce under competent, simple and playable.

In 1987 the young coders clearly envisioned a relatively bright and technologically advanced future, though expecting every planet of the solar system to be colonised before star date 2001 might have been a tad optimistic.

Rating: 3/5, an honest bowl of porridge, undersalted.