C-Smash VRS Review: A Cosmic Revival in ReVRie

Past works are lost when they stop conversing with the present. Honoring old games requires us to continue engaging with them, of course, but the onus is also on them to reciprocate. To enrich their legacy, revivals and follow-ups must do more than pander to us old fucks who were already there for them. They must also find relevance with new generations of players and creators who may be inspired to shepherd their ideas into the future. Or else let them die. Celebrating those experiences can mean reinterpreting and recontextualizing them, if not reinventing them altogether.

In this essay, I will—

And so it goes for Cosmic Smash, Sega Rosso’s modest game of intergalactic, block-breaking racquetball. The NAOMI title saw limited distribution in Japanese and European arcades in 2001, plus a stint on Japanese Dreamcasts. Following an initial run in obscurity, it has since rallied a cult following – that is, assuming the Junkyard community’s Top 200 rankings weren’t fraudulent.

At #64 overall, Cosmic Smash was voted the #5 ranked Japanese exclusive and the #1 game about swatting balls around a shipping container.

For many fans – including the creative teams at RapidEyeMovers and Wolf & Wood – Cosmic Smash’s resonance endures. Unearthing the license from under the sofa cushions at Sega’s IP lawyers’ offices (I imagine), they have developed C-Smash VRS, an unlikely reimagining of Rosso’s space station sportsball.

I’ve long respected Cosmic Smash for its melding of Rez-ish vibes and Virtua Tennish feel, but I’ve always felt detached from its primary hook. In virtual reality, though? Immersing players in the kineticism of physically swinging paddles at balls at walls in space makes immediate sense. Titles like Sparc, Holoball, and Proton Pulse have also poked at the edges of this concept in VR, albeit with mixed success. At the very least, they’ve helped buoy cyber squash as an accredited genre.

Meanwhile, the recent wave of Sega-inspired remakes/sequels/homages has set ample precedent on the nostalgic front. Yet, in the rising sea of Sega-likes, it’s easy to float adrift. Many rehash the most superficial aspects of their inspirations but fundamentally misunderstand — or fail to coherently capture — the core of why folks love them in the first place. This keeps them from fully evoking or advancing those concepts, or replicating their magic in any meaningful way.

Refreshingly, C-Smash VRS is deliberate and confident in its homage, and it wastes little time laying a foundation of its own.

VRS shares Cosmic Smash’s premise in all its minimalist glory. It has you rally a ball against a wall of blocks/panels to clear them within a time limit. As you progress, the configurations grow more layered and complex, and glimpses of puzzle elements begin to emerge. Some panels will move in patterns. Unbreakable panels will obstruct portions of the field. Special panels will clear adjacent rows, freeze panels in motion, or extend your time limit. Over time, successful hits will recharge your Power Smash ability, which can clear stacks of panels in a single shot.

The racket work feels remarkably natural. Its nuanced tracking and physics afford a wide gamut of shots, shanks, and whiffs. If you’re experienced at real-life racket sports, a few of the principles you’ve learned – like squaring yourself for forehands and backhands, anticipating timing and trajectories, etc. – will certainly help you here. If you suck at such sports in real life, though, then the learning curve will be a bit steeper. Either way, it is innately intuitive and rewarding to learn.

For their part, the PSVR2’s Sense controllers never struggle to keep up. In the game and real life, I flail in parity. And whenever I fuck up, it’s just about always my fault. The technology – or VRS’s exceptional implementation of it – simply works. That I never have to think about it is probably the best compliment I could give.

There are drawbacks, however. VRS binds several actions to the other controller, with limited options for button mapping. A Force-pull gesture serves the ball towards you, crouching helps reach low-bouncing balls, and the analog stick moves you horizontally along the baseline. It would be great to be able to remap all of these actions as needed, especially to a single controller.

Interestingly, VRS also helps me appreciate aspects of Cosmic Smash I had taken for granted. In its shift to first-person, it loses the flair of its wireframe avatar and all the cool shit they could do: The leaping volleys. The wall jumps. The aerial flips. The unlimited trick shots. The stylish replays. The celebratory flexing. They’re necessary omissions, but I underestimated their collective contribution to the original’s vibrancy and charm. Realistically, C-Smash VRS is feasible because it eschews those verbs, and players prone to motion sickness will be thankful for their absence. In that sense, VRS helps celebrate Cosmic Smash by contrast of its own sacrifices.

As with the original game, VRS’s style is integral to its substance. It preserves its clean, minimalist aesthetics and adds new flourishes of its own. It depicts a similarly optimistic future where humankind has channeled its ambitions into interstellar sports courts. VRS then expands on its setting with livelier and less claustrophobic arenas. Windows have now been installed, unveiling orbiting planets, little space guys, and other nuggets of world(s)building.

In its scope, C-Smash VRS is laser-focused on the minimum viable product, for better or worse. It practically flaunts its simplicity in its pair of solo modes. Among them is Challenge, where you progress through dozens of stages under a strict, continuous time limit to clear as many as you can as quickly as you can (i.e. Cosmic Smash). Alternatively, Zen mode works the same except failing stages doesn’t end your run and you can replay them as desired to improve your times and rankings. If that motivates you, you’ll get substantially more out of VRS’ solo-play. If not, you may be done with it after a run or two.

Hands on with C-Smash VRS

You may recall a recent post here at the Junkyard in which I was somewhat apathetic towards Cosmic Smash, the painfully stylish retro-futuristic squash-cum-Breakout NAOMI port that graced the Dreamcast during its final days as a living, breathing platform. The point of that post wasn't to bash Cosmic Smash though; it was to point out that a reimagining of Sega Rosso's quirky, super-niche bat-and-ball 'em up was being worked on for the impending Sony PlayStation VR2. Since then I have been lucky enough to be invited to sample this title - C-Smash VRS - for myself. 

While my lukewarm opinion of the inspiration for C-Smash VRS hasn't really changed (indeed even contemporary reviews - of which there are precious few - weren't overly gushing), I would now like to explain why this pseudo sequel to Cosmic Smash is probably about as close to a next-gen Dreamcast game as we're likely to see for some time.

The fridge had backup.

In order to sample C-Smash VRS, I travelled to the fair city of London and to a rather nice venue called Icetank in the trendy Covent Garden district. In retrospect, the venue couldn't have been more appropriate, with its minimalist whitewashed rooms and open spaces plastered with the familiar lurid orange concentric 'C' motif. 

If a venue was ever going to be perfect for showing off a game like C-Smash VRS, Icetank is surely it. Well, unless there's a retro-futuristic space station available for hire somewhere. The open plan nature of the venue lent itself well the multiple PS VR2 systems set up; I can only imagine the carnage which could have ensued if there had been tables full of drinks and food dotted about the place as idiots like me jumped and waved their arms and hands around while wearing a VR headset. 

Her Converse are better than mine.

Fittingly, an original Cosmic Smash arcade cabinet was positioned out of harm's way in a corner - a cabinet I naturally had to play on and which belongs to C-Smash VRS game director Jörg Tittel. I understand this particular cabinet was originally housed at Sega World in London's long lost Trocadero entertainment centre, and the story goes that if you listen closely to the speaker grill at night you can still hear the frantic pulse rifle fire and screams of the colonial marines from Alien War, trapped forever like tormented, ethereal echos of the past. Actually, I just made that up. Hudson, run a bypass. What? Where am I?

A Cosmic Smash arcade cabinet sat quietly in the corner, minding its own business...

So I played on it. Note my inferior Converse.

Props must go the PR agency 4media group for their running of the C-Smash VRS preview event, and also to Lost in Cult for their production of the rather nice Cosmic Smash themed press kits that were handed to attendees. Full disclosure here though - I was invited to the event by my Dreamcast Junkyard colleague Andrew Dickinson, who also heads up the gaming periodical [Lock-On]...which is produced by Lost in Cult. So yeah, now that little disclaimer is out of the way, let's get down to business: C-Smash VRS is a fucking disaster of a game. What were they thinking?! Of course, I jest.

I can't believe Edge is £6.50 now. It was 75p last time I bought it. Inflation in action, folks.

No, from the small snippet I played of RapidEyeMovers and Wolf & Wood's reimagining of Toshiaki Miida et al's original vision, I can honestly say I was left thoroughly impressed by the experience. This is in no small part due to the fact that the Sony PlayStation VR2 is undoubtedly one of the most impressive pieces of consumer hardware I've ever had the pleasure of sampling; but then that's probably to be expected considering the price of the thing. I've already moaned about that though, so I'll spare you the sob story again here.

Why won't they...play with me?

As this was a preview event, only two modes (three if you count the two player versus mode) were available from the C-Smash VRS main menu - a tutorial and a practice mode. Both in theory make sense in the modern era, especially since VR controls do take a bit of getting used to if you're unfamiliar with how they generally work. After a fairly intuitive calibration (where you're invited to reach out and grasp a small cuboid doodad), you get into the game.