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PUBLISHER: Imagic RELEASED: 1982 PROGRAM: Rob Fulop FORMAT: Cartridge

Cosmic Ark is the sequel to Atlantis. In fact it's the one and only sequel in the entire Imagic game library. At the end of Atlantis, you could see the scout ship take off from the rubble of Atlantis and disappear off into outer space. That scout ship would take the remaining survivors of Atlantis back to the giant ship known as the Cosmic Ark. In order to restore Atlantis and their way of life, the scout ships have to descend down to each planet's surface in order to pick up two of each type of Beastie. The first screen of Cosmic Ark gives you full control of the Ark itself. You must fire the ship's cannons at the meteors that are hurling towards the ship. To fire the cannons you just press the joystick in the direction you wish to fire. Once you've successfully destroyed all of the meteors, you will then leave the Cosmic Ark via one of the scout ships and head down to the planet's surface. There you'll use your tractor beam to capture and beam up the two Beasties that are roaming around. You press and hold the fire button in order to deploy the tractor beam. The control is extremely intuitive, but the action soon becomes very intense and requires split second relfexes in order to destroy the onslaught of meteors in later levels. Rob Fulop (Designer of Cosmic Ark) - "Cosmic Ark started with a bug discovered during Demon Attack that filled the screen with stars!  To this day, nobody has ever explained to me WHY the player/missile register in the chipset goes crazy if diddled with the wrong way, but the effect blew me away and I wrote down how to recreate it.  So then I started fooling around with trying to make Space Zap – a game I adored and thought perfect for the VCS.  I added the star field trick, and then I turned the cannon into a big space ship.  At that point the game could have shipped, but it didn’t feel done; it felt sort of boring, so the secondary game of flying to the planets took up about 6 months of trying different stuff."

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