Cacoma Knight in Bizyland (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Seta's 1993 action-puzzle game for the Super Nintendo, Cacoma Knight in Bizyland.

This video shows three playthroughs, one for each character:
Jean (Hard) 1:38
Jack (Normal) 15:25
RB93 (Easy) 32:50

Cacoma Knight in Bizyland is a game patterned off of the blueprint established by the classic Taito arcade game Qix and its sequel Volfied (   • Volfied (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete   ).

Bizyland has been taken over by an evil queen, the princess has been kidnapped, and the king has summoned three potential heroes - a boy, a girl, and a robot. Using "magic chalk," it's up to the player to recapture each area by condoning off sections of the screen, and the stage is cleared once the "qualify" percentage has been met.

As you run around leaving your own personal brand of sidewalk graffiti across Bizyland, Queen Wagamama (whose name amusingly translates to English as "self-centered" or "selfish") will send her minions to stop you. Some enemies circle the perimeter of the active part of the playfield and will kill you on contact. Others will fly about the room flinging projectiles, and if any of these unanchored hazards hit your chalk line before you've connected it to the outer wall, you'll likewise be killed.

Your drawing speed and ability to absorb enemy hits depends on which of the three characters you're playing as, and you can temporarily boost your abilities by revealing treasure chests hidden in the background.

The premise is interesting and the concept is sound, and Cacoma Knight is a fun curiosity. Unfortunately, the execution is just not up to par with the Taito games it blatantly plagiarizes its gameplay from.

The controls are solid, the sound is appropriately fantasy-themed, and the goofy plot and dialogue are fun, so what's the problem?

In a word, the graphics.

The game usually looks really nice - everything is bursting with color and anime flair, and the cutscenes are great. However, the in-game playfield becomes a quickly becomes a muddle. The bright background images, the cover layer, the fast-moving enemies and their projectiles, and your own character sprite all tend to blur together into an indecipherable mess of color that gets in the way of gameplay. It's hard to avoid what you can't see, and I found it frustrating that I wasn't able to tell what killed me in the later stages. It feels cheap and unfair, but the game is at least short and easy enough that you'll have enough continues at the end to absorb those hits and still make it through.

I like Cacoma Knight. It's a fun clone of a classic arcade game with a lot of personality, but it's a bit too flawed to ever be considered a classic on its own.

Pretty much the same I'd say about Nolan Ryan's Baseball and Kendo Rage, both of which were also developed by Affect.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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