Review: Xenon 2 - MegaBlast

Back in ‘99 I was hooked on the mindless blast’em’up simplicity of the Bitmap brothers‘ Xenon 2. This was one of the first PC games to exploit the 256 colour mode of the IBM VGA, however like all games of that era it does not support anything more than the standard PC Beeper.

Xenon 2 is a traditional Japanise style vertical scrolling 2d shooter. The object of the game is to navigate from to to bottom through six levels of natural history, obliterating the delicate life-forms and collecting awesome powerups. Winning the game requires three things:

• Twitch reflexes, in order to avoid the thousands of spinning gobs of space-goo that threaten to burst your cabin and give you a lung-full of outer-space.
• The manual stamina of a hammer-action powerdrill, for in order to make progress you must blast everything in sight. This game is not for the tactical sharpshooter. Infact its safer to just keep firing no-stop.
• The memory of a professional dancer as your ship performs an delecate death-ballet avoiding the spheres of hot glowing evil hurled by giant trilobites or and tadpoles.

Burst a life-form in outer-space and just like in the real-world it turns into a tranclusent cash-bubble. Collect enough of these and you can buy power-ups from the mid-level shop run by a tentacle-headed alien called ‘Blaaaarg’ or ‘Aaarraaaagh’.

As with all foreign emporia, be careful what you buy… all of Blaaargs’s ‘top-shelf’ products are tourist-rubbish, like the over-hyped “Super Nashwan Power” which gives you use of twin lasers and canonns for a useless 10 seconds.

Worse still, some items cancel each other out - for example adding side-shooters to your spacecraft will destroy your rear-shooters; thats substantially less than the 360 degree protection you might expect from a normal British starship outfitter. Remember, foreign shops are not obliged to honour the Consumer Credit Act.

And why, why must I travel through two dimensional time in a tiny starship to blast barely-evolved life-forms?

I’m hypothesising because I never bothered to ask the question when I actually did get to meet one of the programmers from the Bitmaps; but I expect it was because space-criminals went back in time and corrupted the genetic material of primordial life. The only way to restore the goodness of life is to beat the shit out of it. Should you fail the modern-day will turn into something so evil, that it makes communist russia seem like Butlins.