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GAMES_REVIEWS
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XR-35.rvw
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1988-05-28
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XR-35 FIGHTER MISSION REVIEW
----------------------------
by David Barr
XR-35 Fighter Mission is a new "shoot-em-up" game from Anco which
will push your reflexes to the limits.
XR-35 is a multiplane horizontal scrolling game, with a far
background of stars, a decorative "middle" background, and a foreground
which, when touched, will destroy your ship. The foreground moves at a
constant rate to the left, while your ship can move anywhere on the
screen using the joystick. Now this game does not require any great
intelligence, all you do is to blow away anything that moves. The
aliens appear on the right hand side of the screen and whiz towards
you at great speed or hang around shooting masses of bullets at you.
There is occasionally a "S" in a circle which comes bouncing onto the
screen, hitting this with a bullet destroys all aliens and their
bullets on the screen. But care has to be taken because contact of
this "S" with your ship yields your destruction - an ego deflating
experience.
The back of the game container states that XR-35 consists of 12
sectors. The first sector starts with a background/foreground scene
looking like an alien city, construction site, or something. The
mother ship then zooms on the screen, then zooms off after releasing
you to fight alone. The first few waves of aliens are metallic
spaceships which fire small rotating cubes and spears at you, followed
by indestructible snake things, and other things which fire masses of
exploding bullets at you. You then battle with three large ships
before going onto the next sector. Now passing the first sector is no
easy task, it took me many games to do this. The foreground at the
top and bottom of the screen severely limits how much vertical space
in which you have to move, and your ship moves VERY fast meaning that
short pushes of the joystick are required. Also the exploding bullets
and recently destroyed aliens hang-around for a second or so meaning
that you can dodge something only to hit an explosion of a bullet
which you thought had passed by. Also there is one VERY annoying bug
in this game (fortunately it happens very infrequently) that your
bullet sometimes stays on the screen after you lose a ship. Most the
time this does not mean much, because an alien might hit it and make
it disappear. BUT if you are unlucky enough to have it in the middle
of the screen, your next ship appears on top of it destroying you
instantly! It does not stop there either, it happens for the next
ship, and the next, and so on until it is game over - very annoying, I
had 10 ships left once and they were all executed one after another.
The second sector puts you in a cavern with more (different) aliens
which fire even more bullets at you. I would like to tell you more,
but this is as far as I have got! There is a point in the second
sector where these purple square dough-nuts (I know dough-nuts are not
purple and square, but I could not think of any other way of
describing them) whiz around the screen leaving bullets everywhere. I
know this is not impossible, but it requires fast reflexes - in fact I
will be purchasing a more responsive joystick (I have an old Atari
2600 joystick at the moment) to help. You start with 3 ships and gain
an extra every 1000 points. (The game WOULD be impossible if it did
not have this feature!)
The graphics are very colourful and well drawn and the scrolling is
smooth. The interesting (strange!) aliens are drawn and move well.
The sound effects are sufficient, but can sometimes be annoying. (The
loud explosion of you being destroyed makes you feel like breaking
something!)
The game is by Anco which is an English software house, so it is
a full PAL version (ie it takes up the whole screen) which increases the
play area. The disk is copy-protected (what's new?) in a way which
may allow GOOD copying programs to make backups of it, but booting the
backup disk only results in infinite disk churning - very sneaky.
The game runs on a 512K Amiga and has no problems with expansion
memory.
Even though I have many grumbles about the difficulty of this
game, the same feature makes it VERY challenging to even the fastest game
player. This will make you keep coming back to this game to obtain
the ultimate goal of completing another sector. This game is not a
classic and will not amaze you but the price is reasonable at $39.
(maybe lower at some places, because it is actually 9.95 pounds -
someone is making a big profit!) If you do not like "shoot-em-up"
games, or do not feel that your reflexes are fast, you should give
this game a miss, but to the arcade player who wants a challenge I
recommend XR-35 highly.
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