Xenon

The Good
Xenon is just not really a very good game. It's wasn't even close in popularity to its magnificent successor, and is quite terrible in comparison.

Being a typical overhead shooter Xenon is quite fun at first, but it dwindles soon enough. Only genuinely good thing about it is its decent controls (if not terribly good).

The Bad
However, Xenon fails when it comes to both graphics and sound. Visually the game is, to say the least, less than appealing. It's blue all over, and the enemies do not contrast well with the background. It's so lacking in colour that you won't really realize you're moving through the game - everything just looks the same.

Musically it's not really better - plain and simple sound effects don't add a great deal to the atmosphere, and the complete lack of background music is annoying as hell. Xenon's level design isn't terribly good either, for that matter.

The Bottom Line
This game just goes to show that a sequel is not always inferiour.

The Good
When Xenon was first released, it was billed as a coin-op for your home. Of course, that home had to have an Amiga (or worst case: an ST) installed. It had nice graphics, one of Dave Whittaker's better soundtracks and some 16-bit gimmicks such as sampled sound and video.

The concept of transforming between plane and tank is also inventive, and something I've not seen even in real arcade games.

The Bad
The MSX could handle a game like this. It couldn't handle all the bells and whistles of the 16-bit versions, but look at a game like Zanac to see how arcade-like gameplay can be implemented even on the MSX1 if only the programmer cares enough.

What the buyer is presented with, is instead another Spectrum port. Only slower. The Speccy has much faster access to video memory than the MSX, but lacks sprites. Here is another game with slow monochrome graphics where you lose track of your monochrome ship (why didn't they use sprites?) in all the black and white "action". It is not worth the loading time, and it is an insult towards the hardware it is running on. The only saving grace is the soundtrack, which is just as good as on the Amiga and ST.

The Bottom Line
Xenon is an obscure game, dwarfed by its famous follow-up. It has not aged very well, but it is nevertheless an interesting piece of Amiga history. On the MSX1, it is an interesting piece in the long history of bad conversions.

The Good
Xenon is a simple overhead shooter with some nice ideas - it's possible to turn into a flying ship to fly above most enemies and destroy those on hills. Presentation-wise it's quite good as well - there's sampled speech before every level, and things like the status panel appear to be quite well thought out.

The Bad
There's no plot to speak of (make up your own!). The game seems to have suffered somewhat in the conversion from the ST. The colour palette is somewhat cut down (which is odd - I'm sure the original palette would fit in 64 colours). The music is totally absent, and the sound effects are even worse than the original.

The game just doesn't feel right, moving too fast, and just not really playing very well, which is a shame, since the original is brilliant.

Thankfully the PC version appears to be obscure, whereas the ST one is very widespread.

The Bottom Line
Go play the ST version. It's brilliant.