So, two weeks ago we took a look at Xenon. Now it's time to take a look at Xenon II, a game that may be effected by rose tinted glasses than many others out there.
So much stuff looking back is effected with rose-tinted classes IMO. In 89 this was a fab looking and sounding shooter and also played good too. I'm amazed at how good the Master System version looks and yes I like the music in that, more than the MD.
Shame you didn't cover the Amiga CDTV/CD32 version. I loved the remix in that and yes music can really add to a game.
Fammydodd does a wonderful rendition of Bomb Da Bass on the paper comb. He was third place in a talent competition at his local community center a few years back,
I always thought Xenon 2 was over-rated. The art is good of course, especially as it's designed around the Atari ST's limitations (4-bit/16 colours, palette of 512), but the game never impressed me. It was of course, like all Bitmap games all on the CPU and designed to be cross platform, meaning 30fps and the Amiga's custom chips unused.
I even hated the music!
Back in the day I saw Japanese shooters in the arcades and they were what I wanted. 60fps, lots of colour, very high speed, and tons of parallax. It wasn't until I got a MegaDrive that I finally got my wish.
It's like a demo of what should have been a much broader complete game. There should have been proper variety between the levels and different music tracks to enjoy. That's the way Japanese devs approached shoot 'em up design -- even when they had only 8mb(1 megabyte) or less of storage space. It's like The Bitmap Bros created a reasonably fancy first level, bunged an impressive(but maybe not really suited to a shooter) piece of music in the mix, then rushed the rest of the game. It just doesn't stand up at all next to how expertly designed the best Japanese shoot 'em ups are.
When I look at Xenon II, I see lots of potential for its art style to form a much more satisfying overall game. It also needed to take more advantage of the Amiga's strong points to deliver something a bit richer graphically and pacier.
Seeing I didn't like the actual gameplay of Xenon II -- I wish I could have just bought a PD demo with the Bomb the Bass music and some fancy graphics to watch. It's not a finished product in my book; more like a very rushed creation that falls way short of satisfying shoot 'em up enthusiasts who have certain expectations for the genre that weren't delivered.
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Times Line
00:23 - Amiga
02:34 - Amiga CD32
04:04 - Acorn Archenemies
05:15 - Atari ST
06:31 - MS DOS
07:56 - Mega Drive
09:55 - Super Famicom / SNES
11:16 - Master System
12:37 - Game Gear
13:54 - Game Boy
15:19 - All versions side by side
Zool's extremely nauseating genericness might kill Sonic. A technically decent game with a severe lack of inventiveness. I've always disliked it, even if I can sort of understand why people bought it.
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