Cosmic Chasm

Cosmic Chasm holds an unusual place in gaming history: it's one of the few titles that first appeared on a home console and only later got an arcade version, exactly the reverse of what was customary at the time. The premise is dramatically catastrophic. The player descends into a huge fissure in a planet threatening to collapse, and must fight through a system of connected chambers to reach the core, which must be destroyed. The path isn't linear – tunnels connect the chambers, and the player chooses the direction, so every descent looks a little different and can't be memorized as a fixed sequence.

Gameplay alternates between two modes. In the chambers it's a fast-paced fight: the player moves, rotates, and shoots at glowing creatures that multiply quickly and try to surround them. Between chambers, the game switches to a corridor flythrough, which is mostly about precision and quick reactions. The deeper the player descends, the more aggressive the environment becomes and the less time there is to think. The vector graphics work superbly here, since the chamber walls are drawn as glowing outlines and the enemies appear against the black void as sharp shapes of light with no distracting visual clutter whatsoever.

The sound underscores the sense of descending into the depths: a low rumble, sharp beeps on firing, and a pronounced sting when transitioning between levels. At the time the game was seen as one of the technically most ambitious things released for the Vectrex, precisely because of its shifting pace and structure of interconnected rooms. Today it's worth trying not only for its gameplay but also as a curiosity: a game that made the journey from the living room to the arcade, and one that still demonstrates that a vector display could evoke an atmosphere raster systems of the day simply couldn't match. It plays fast and hard, individual attempts last a few minutes, and the urge to try the descent again and get one level deeper comes almost automatically. Anyone looking for a Vectrex title with real pace and a structure offering more than repeating a single screen should start right here.