Xenon
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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In this game the player assumes the role of a space pilot named Darrian. One day, he receives a report from a nebula space station, from which he learns that nearby human colonies have been attacked by mysterious aliens known as Xenites. Darrian wastes no time, and sets off to protect the humans and stop the aliens.

Xenon is an overhead shooter, in which the player controls a vehicle that is able to transform into a tank or a plane. The transformation can be usually performed by player at any time, to combat particular enemies; however, during some sequences the player is forced to use a specific type of vehicle. During the tank gameplay, the player controls the movement of the playfield (up or down) by simply moving the tank in the direction of choice. 

The game features a 3D playfield (some enemies, for example, will be mounted on hills of sort, where the tank can't shoot them). To combat these, the player needs to transform its tank into a plane. The game then switches to the more familiar gameplay style as seen in other vertically scrolling shooters. The plane has to transform back into a tank again to combat most ground units. Upgrades can be taken from destroyed enemies.




Trivia

The PC version of the game suffered from having no music, since neither the Adlib (late 1988) nor Sound Blaster (1989) cards had been released at the time the game was finished. And until the Sound Blaster came out a year later there was no way of getting decent sound effects on the PC other than through the speaker beeps. The "Sector One" voice playback that it did have had to occur when nothing else was moving onscreen since it took a lot of fiddling with the 1-bit speaker output and couldn't afford any more time spent elsewhere. It was also stuck with the standard 16-colour EGA palette, which is why the colours looked off. VGA had been released a year earlier, but only on the original IBM machines and clone cards weren't yet widely available.


The first game by The Bitmap Brothers, released in January 1988, Xenon was the first product that effectively showed how the 16 bit computers were capable of offering the game player a more challenging gaming experience. Through its combination of excellent graphics and a great sound track, Xenon set the standard for 16 bit games. After extensive coverage on ITV’s ‘Get Fresh’ it made history as the first ever Amiga game to enter the UK Top 40.


The digitized face that exclaimed "Level One" at the beginning of the game (stunning for its time) was non other than Bitmap Brother Eric Matthews. (He later confessed that he altered the video manually to give himself a better haircut!)


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Description from the packaging:

A fast moving, vertically scrolling strategic shoot-em-up that never lets you catch your breath! Pilot your ground based hovercraft or fighter jet through four sectors and 16 zones of obstacles, rewards and intelligent aliens.
The thinking mans shoot-em-up. Highly addictive.




http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/xenon/trivia
