Hi there!

Here comes Xenon, the debut game of the legendary Bitmap Brothers!

The origin of this game is more complex than its gameplay. As far as I know, the first version was an Arcade game from Arcadia, powered by Amiga hardware. A little later Amiga and Atari ST home versions were released by Melbourne House and significantly later a company called Lothlorien converted it to the C64 where it was released by Mastertronic. I think Mastertronic owned both Arcadia and Melbourne House at the time, so it somehow all fits together.

I was looking forward to play this game, since I've always been a big fan of the Bitmap Brothers games and this was the only one besides Magic Pockets that I never played before.

As it turned out, their debut was a plain average product though, nowhere hinting towards all the great games they'd deliver later in their career (Chaos Engine! ). The graphics of the C64 version are much too busy, as you can see above. Really bad are the blocky bullets, which were rendered with the charset and have a tendency to become invisible occasionally, causing many unfair deaths.

The music is tolerable and the gameplay is very basic. Fly upward, shoot everything that moves, collect standard extra weapons. The game has only 4 stages and 4 different bosses, each of which you have to beat twice, once in the middle and once at the end of a stage.

Then happens absolutely nothing, it just loops back to the first stage

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see another Bitmap Brothers game in the form of "Speedball", but first it'll continue with something else.

Greetings,

Manuel