Description
Xenon is the obscure and mysterious prequel to the much better known
Xenon 2: Megablast. The game is actually nothing like its successor, with completely different control scheme and gameplay. The plot overlaps however, with the Xenites making their first attempt to control the galaxy.
Xenon is essentially an overhead shooter, where you control the ship and move around the screen. However, the difference between Xenon and its sequel is that here you actually control the movement of the playfield (up or down) by simply moving the ship in the direction of your choice. To do this in the sequel, you need to slam your ship against the bottom of the screen and pull back on the stick in order to reverse-scroll the playfield.
It also features a 3D playfield (some enemies, for example, will be mounted on hills of sort, where you can't shoot them). To combat these the player can 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.
In Xenon, upgrades are taken from destroyed enemies.
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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.
