[A-Z Games] X: Xenon 2: Megablast

I have not played this for more than twenty years and a little reading around suggests that it has not aged well at all - but that does not stop it being memorable.

In all honesty, I cannot remember much of playing Xenon 2, it was a top-down scrolling vertical shooter.^[1] on the Commodore Amiga. The main draw, it seemed, were the graphics and the sound - the game looked great and had a Bomb The Bass song as the soundtrack!

Games of this era were, in hindsight, tiny and coded efficiently to the point where you did not have much memory to play with. I would guess that in many cases, remakes on mobile phones of certain games will have icons that take up more space than the original game did. When I was younger, Street Fighter 2 on the SNES was famously on a massive cartridge and that took up a huge 16Mbits - which is 2MBytes. These games were smaller still so the music and graphics used many repeating elements. As a result, music was meant to be relatively simple and would effectively be coded and played (rather like having sheet music) rather than recorded. This was "chiptune" and meant that hardware had its own sound signature. Even now, there is a quite sizable following for different chipsets of that era and debates over which was better. The Amiga version had, to all intents and purposes, a version of a song that was what you would actually hear on the radio due to the quality of the sound chip (called Paula) and this was a ground-breaking moment. Soundtracks and scores (in both senses or the word) are really important for games as they set the tone of a piece and can add a lot more to games - especially in eras where the graphics were not as immersive. Dance music can sit very well with games (especially in the electronica themed worlds of Wipeout) but it is likely that the sounds of videogames inform the world of dance music quite heavily. I think some still think of "game music" having a distinctive sound but modern equipment, since the 32-bit era, have allowed sound quality indistinguishable from CDs. Music publishers also see the amazing marketing potential of putting music in games and the soundtrack of the latest FIFA games will be heard, constantly, by millions of people all the time.^[2].

It was not just the sound that seemed very advanced, the graphics were also very nice with huge levels of destruction shown on screen and a metallic aesthetic that seemed pretty futuristic and classy (and quite different from the Japanese and US videogame aesthetic). With a shop system used to buy weapon upgrades, you could eventually get to the point where the width was basically just your weaponry. The screen filled with enemies and destruction as you powered up, more and more, but, in hindsight, it was not quite the bullet hell which would later take the scene by storm. These kinds of screen filling battles continue to be the draw of shoot em ups today and the classics of the genre fill the screen with bullets and explosions that the player must navigate through.

Xenon 2, as the name suggests, was a sequel and the original Xenon was something I later got on the ZX Spectrum. It was interesting as your "ship" could convert between a ground tank and an air based 'ship. As I got it after Xenon 2 was released, I compared it with games that seemed similar and so it reminded me a lot of Silkworm and its pseudo sequel SWIV. In these games, two players would control two different vehicles - a tank and helicopter - to progress with the pair needing to work together. Silkworm was a great idea and I played it a fair bit with my cousins - co-op games were always fun. I am surprised at how the idea of two different craft has not really come back, not on a single screen anyway. I guess squad based shooters have taken the idea on a little. Convertible ships have kind of fallen out of fashion now too so the game does seem a bit dated. Although maybe that can now be rebranded as retro-appeal.

3 other X titles that might be interesting:
Xenogears - Exemplar of the JRPG in its maddening, and maddeningly brilliant, form. 
X-Wing - I think of this as the start of the Star Wars rebirth from the mid-90s. 
Xevious - Lush green backdrops instead of space made this shooter stand out in 1983.

^{1. The shoot em up genre, as I consider it, is basically not inclusive of first-person games or the similar "third-person shooters" like Gears of War. At the time, you had vertical or horizontal shooters which were either single screen or scrolling. Xevious, I think, had introduced the third dimension by having air and ground targets and enemies, but many games eschewed it for simplicity. Some games do also scroll in all directions now but the classics usually choose a direction and stick with it.↩}

^{2. I actually have, as I am now a little older and live in a bubble, no idea about what music is popular in the wider world but when I was more into both games and music, I heard of a few bands and acts on the more "niche" side through games - Adam Freeland in Rez, or Mondo Grosso in Lumines for example. In earlier games, licensed music was pretty rare but it now seems more and more common and I was recommended "Temper Trap" without realising I had heard them on Pro Evo. A colleague of mine told me about an Imagine Dragons song at her own wedding which I thought was also in a videogame. She said it didn't sound like it was from a videogame. It was. Not something she wanted to hear about such a special song for her for reasons that I will leave to your imagination.↩}