1133 reviews from "Pelit"-books

1990 SyksyRainbow Arts' shoot-'em-up experts are clearly grovelling in the dust and kissing Irem's toes. Denaris imitated R-Type, and X-Out is apparently a case of riding on X-multiply's reputation. The role model is at least the best there is, since Irem is something of a pioneer in the field of extra weaponry tuned to the limit, surreal landscapes and giant monsters that get destroyed piece by piece.

Set in underwater landscapes, X-Out treads well-worn paths and throws in a Xenon 2-style weapons boutique as extra seasoning. On offer are twenty-four products, covering bullets, missiles and super-weapons in many flavours, plus something original too, such as freely positionable satellites that can be assigned various movement patterns.

Besides the weapons, four ship types are on sale, and the pricier the craft, the more brutal the killing machinery you can gather around it. You're free to decide the number of ships, so a tricky decision awaits: do you knock together a few scantily equipped scrawny runts, or pour all your funds into one deluxe model? Testing the countless combinations of weapon systems adds hugely to the game's appeal.

On top of the good weapon system, X-Out's feel also beats its predecessors. Every element, from the handling to the flow of the bullet storm, is in exemplary balance, and the screen and its objects move smoothly, apart from a few passing fits of the shakes. It also helps that the horizontally advancing landscape has been extended with a little vertical scrolling.

In true coin-op style, the game has a full eight long and varied levels. I'm not entirely convinced by the quality of the design, since after a fantastic start the game tends to flatten out into frustrating obstacle-dodging. The third level in particular is almost repulsive in its sadism.

The graphics aren't as finely polished as in Xenon 2. The game still has a great atmosphere, especially in the first couple of levels, where the scenery is a murky, algae-green seabed. The sound effects are beefy and there's plenty of music, its quality ranging from good to middling.

So that's how it goes: first Xenon 2 showed what the ST-Amiga can do, and now X-Out shows what Xenon 2 couldn't. The coin-op feel has been captured better than ever, which is the best praise you can give a shoot-'em-up.

1988Who still remembers a company called Melbourne House? Back in the day it released such immortal classics as The Way of the Exploding Fist and... well, The Way of the Exploding Fist. After that it was nothing but downhill for the firm, until the budget-game outfit Mastertronic bought it to publish 16-bit games (and to put out Fist as a budget title).

Mastertronic also owns a company called Arcadia, which makes arcade machines. These arcade machines contain a lightly tweaked Amiga, so they're easy to convert to the Amiga. The destroy-everything-you-see-style Xenon is the first of these. And I must say, Melbourne House is on its way back to the top, and fast.

Xenon's graphics and playability are top class. You could quite easily throw an arcade cabinet around the Amiga's monitor and nobody would notice anything odd. The sound side is another matter altogether, though. Dave Whittaker's tune thumps away quite nicely in the background until an utterly horrible electric guitar sound joins in. The sound effects are naturally digitised and excellent.

The only snag with the game is that it's really hard. Getting through the first level has proved too difficult for everyone who's tried. The mothership at the end of the level seems impossible to destroy. Otherwise, the game is the best shoot'em-up on the 16-bit machines, Star Wars excepted.

1990 KevätImageworks is a pretty young firm for its age, one that has become known for its few but high-quality efforts. A while ago Imageworks released, among other things, the hit games Bombuzal and Phobia. And now...

...yip yip yee! The Xenites, those lard-brained aliens who were driven out of the known universe in Xenon I, are back! Every man who can still stand, on deck, and fire at their balls!

The Bitmap Brothers have dutifully carried on from where Xenon I left off: the second part is also a pure-blooded vertically scrolling shoot-'em-up, so enough said about the game idea. The execution of the idea, on the other hand, deserves a word or two.

The blasting is divided into five levels, each of which is split into two parts. Halfway through every level the player gets to buy more firepower at the shop with the credits collected. Credits float about in the air whenever an attack wave has been destroyed. This is exactly where the extra title Megablast comes from: as the credits pile up, the number of slugs flying through the air rises exponentially, and so does the alien death rate.

The graphics aren't half bad. In fact I'd claim that Megablast is the slickest shoot-'em-up on the Amiga. The enemies are big and brilliantly animated. The backdrops are splendidly drawn natural phenomena, metal and organic matter. At the end of each level there's a bigger end-of-level monster, and every one of them dazzles the eye. To top it all off, the shop has a finely done shopkeeper who mumbles instructions in the alien tongue. The quality also shows in the ST version, which is identical apart from slower scrolling and a soundtrack that is good but nowhere near the Amiga's equal.

The title music is an original composition by Bomb The Bass, realised outstandingly brilliantly by David Whittaker. The music also plays during the game, but luckily you can turn it off, since the rather run-of-the-mill sound effects make a nasty mess of it.

All in all, Xenon II is an absolute must-buy for all fans of shooting games. Five long levels guarantee that your interest will last. The only minus that falls to the Amiga Xenon is a poorly done disk loader: depending on your disk drive, getting the game loaded into the machine takes 1-20 attempts.

1990 KevätThe opening stretch of the earthly journey of Microstyle, the company founded by MicroProse, has been a real struggle just to scrape by. The firm is battling commercial difficulties, and no real hit games are making it into the shops. RVF Honda and Stunt Car Racer will presumably bring some devoutly awaited markkas into the till, but a couple of good games are hardly enough. So something else of quality has to be got on sale, and quickly.

Unfortunately the words "quickly" and "quality" don't usually go hand in hand. And sure enough, Xenophobe leaves the nasty aftertaste of a rushed product in your mouth. The game is based on the coin-op of the same name, unknown in Finland, in which two players, together or separately, can whack space blobs lifted straight from the Alien film aboard a space station. The screen is split horizontally in two, so that both players' antics can be shown at the same time. When all is said and done, and at bottom, Xenophobe is therefore a normal and simple shoot-'em-up.

The players plod along the station's corridors, destroying as they go the eggs lying about on the floor, from which little bloblets will hatch in due course. Some of the eggs have already hatched, and every now and then the action gets distressing when you don't know which way to tear yourself. Graphically the game is so muddled that in all the bustle you can't always tell who is who. The music and sound effects, at least, have been handled with professional skill. As for the playability, it's, shall I say, from you-know-where. Learning the idiotic control system takes so long that you've time to get fed up with the game first. Picking some item up off the floor quickly, in particular, is downright impossible. While the player wrestles with the joystick, the hero standing about on screen watches the blobs make breakfast, dinner, lunch and supper of him, and the brutes even find time to enjoy their afternoon coffee in between.

Even the dimmest of readers must realise by now that I, for one, do not like Xenophobe. There is professional skill behind the code, sure, but the finishing touches have been forgotten. Xenophobe is Microstyle's, and at the same time MicroProse's, first coin-op conversion, and there's nothing to do but wish them better luck in future.

1987The Earth has been conquered. Only you and your Solvalou fighter can sow death and destruction by bombing buildings and destroying everything that moves, until the Andor Genesis mothership looms up ahead. Destroy it and the Earth is still conquered.

The first thing that strikes you about Xevious is its originality. How come nobody ever came up with an idea as ingenious as a landscape scrolling from top to bottom, oncoming enemies and the one-man-can-save-the-world concept before? Besides, one man can't save the world: you have to unite, found the Earth Back Party and vote in the elections, after which a committee set up for the purpose will open negotiations with the aliens.

Down to business: Xevious is a prize specimen of its genre. As everyone is surely aware, Xevious is based on the arcade game of the same name.

Sure, we've seen earlier attempts (Flak, Ollo I, Xavious), but you can safely forget those. Xevious, on the other hand, you shouldn't. All the tasty details that charmed in the arcade are in there. The tanks, the exotic buildings, the indestructible spinning shields and the other little rascals of the airspace are all present.

The graphics are spot on, except for the bullets, which vanish into the background better than a Baltic herring into a shoal of herring. Xevious is more varied than many other shoot-'em-ups, thanks to the different types of enemy and the bombing of ground targets. The music and sound effects, on the other hand, don't really manage to fire you up.

I loved the arcade version of Xevious. And this one too. Full stop.

1991 KevätThe Xiphos civilisation's age of greatness came to an abrupt end when its leading superintelligence decided to retire and hid itself away somewhere in the depths of the innermost universe. The Xiphos, you see, had built six universes nested one inside another, connected to each other by gates. All that is left of the civilisation, as a degenerate remnant, are two factions, Pio and Qon, who are fighting bloodily for control of the remaining space stations.

Slightly odd though it is, Xiphos's background story provides the framework for a fascinating space adventure. The player is an adventurer standing outside the war, whose task is to destroy the unhinged Xiphos superintelligence. Because of the universe's peculiar structure, your most important asset is energy - or should that be potential energy, since you lose it moving towards a gate and get it back when you travel back the other way.

To get energy, in turn, you need money, which you earn by destroying either Pio or Qon ships. Destroying both sides even-handedly mostly just gets you barred from most of the stations. It never pays to hand over the asking price for energy or the other goods on sale, since the trading cleverly includes haggling. Information is on offer too, if only you could read the texts, which flash past insanely fast and are shown only once.

The technical execution of the vector-graphics cosmos is fairly competent. The screen updates quickly, and some objects have a surprising amount of detail when viewed up close. The drawn planets add visual punch, but putting a star field moving in three dimensions on top of them is mostly just comical.

Where the game has gone most badly out of joint is the weaponry. The Pios and Qons batter each other with proper lasers, while the player has to make do with missiles that can hardly hit anything. The basic model is a boomerang-like disc that always flies in the direction of the sights. In other words, after launch you have to keep the sights on the target, which is next to impossible in practice, since the ships are tiny blobs, they move at a ridiculous speed, and on top of that the mouse control is disproportionately sensitive. Other weapon models are on offer, but using them is every bit as miserable. Usually you run out of missiles, and that is the end of the game too, since without them you can't earn money.

A promising idea has been ruined by completely needless and stupid blunders. Perhaps the game hides fascinating adventures, but the basics ought to be under control before anyone could be bothered to waste their time on it.

1989 SyksyBack in its day Gauntlet was a real gold mine for Atari, so the same basic idea had to be hastily recycled for consumption all over again. And the result is Xybots, in which a Command Centre overrun by robots (this is not a political statement) has to be liberated.

Major Rock Hardy and Captain Ace Gunn go scurrying along three-dimensional corridors, blasting robots and collecting both money for extra features and keys for doors.

Unlike in Gauntlet, each player is shown in their own window, so they can adventure wherever they like without being tied to the other's snug warmth. The screen does, sadly, update one cube at a time instead of scrolling smoothly, which shows that time has sunk its teeth in. Otherwise, too, the graphics aren't much to write home about, but they imitate the original well.

The control method, for its part, will reduce a less dexterous person to tears. Fire held down/stick sideways makes the commando turn 90 degrees, usually in the middle of a firefight and just when it does the most harm. A jerk of the stick with the button held down produces a zap, which besides everything living also destroys your own energy. On the other hand, this emulation of the controls is the only one possible with home computer controllers.

As you might guess, Xybots is at its most fun as a two-player game, since as a one-player game it gets too monotonous in the long run. An accurate coin-op conversion Xybots certainly is, in any case, and different enough, too, that it stands out favourably from the grey shoot'em-up mass.