Usually with these things I wind up fudging the X entry because there's so little that actually goes with it. But thankfully this year I have not one but 2 Atari 7800 games that start with X!
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| Game over, man, game over! |
Xenophobe was kind of a forerunner to the first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. The basic premise of the game was kind of like Doom, where you have to go around a station and kill monsters, only there are various ships and stations you explore. The other difference is the monsters were more like cut-rate versions of those in Aliens. Along the way you find different weapons. Like Wolfenstein and Doom, you start with a puny pistol. There's also a laser gun, a rifle that shoots lightning, and a thing that shoots puffs of poison or something and you also get grenades that you can chuck at the monsters.
The game was side-scrolling and what was neat was you could have two-players working together to explore the map. The top half of the screen would show Player 1 and the bottom would show Player 2. Like I said, you could split up to explore different parts of the level and find stuff easier. So my brother and I would do that sometimes. To finish the level you have to clear all the aliens or after a certain amount of time it will self-destruct and you beam out.
It was a pretty neat game for its time. I'm not sure if they made it for the NES or not; I haven't seen it on my knockoff Gameboy or console.
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The other X game is Xevious. It was more of a front-scrolling game. Or top-scrolling? Basically you pilot a little ship and fly from the bottom of the screen towards the top and shoot bad guys and find power-ups and all that. You have to try to shoot enemy fighters and bomb targets and if you take even one hit, you die. Meanwhile the screen keeps moving forward the whole time, so you can't double back if you miss something. I think the screen will freeze if you get to a boss fight though.
Like a lot of early video games there wasn't really an ending to it; you would basically keep going until you die. I think once or twice me or my brother got pretty far in it, though I'm sure not as far as some players got.
This one I think was in arcades and there's a version on my knockoff Gameboy so it was for the NES as well as the 7800. Hooray!
1 comment:
I was sad about Xenophobe...there's a compilation with it and a bunch of other old Atari games on it for Xbox (and probably PS) and I bought the game and played some of the games and the magic just wasn't the same...maybe it was playing alone or something that made it feel really boring, IDK. Rampage and Joust were also on the disc and they both got boring fast :(
I used to love Xevious back in the day...that was a fun game. Kinda sad it never got a remake or a sequel or anything and just consigned to the dustbin of memory these days
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