seymour butz @seymour

Sensible Soccer: European Champions - 92/93 Edition (DOS)

One flaw ruins this port.

The Good
Sensible Soccer is a classic football game. The visuals are simple, the players are tiny, the sound is simple, and the gameplay is just perfect. Two player Amiga Sensi is a beautiful thing, mainly due to all the finetuning Sensible did. The IBM port is fairly good technically, making use of Mode-X and hardware scrolling, delivering a much smoother game than many other IBM football games at the time.

The Bad
The guys who did the IBM conversion took all the routines designed for 50hz, and ran them at 70hz. This means that the game runs too fast, and all the gameplay finetuning Sensible did on the Amiga is wasted, ruining the game. This is a shame, as otherwise the IBM version is a very good port. The other bad point is that the original Captain Sensible theme tune is absent, replaced by some godawful Adlib tune.

The Bottom Line
A classic on virtually any other platform than the IBM. I would recommend the Amiga, ST and Archimedes versions, as they all play well.

By seymour butz on February 10, 2006

Xenon (DOS)

Bad port of an ST classic

The Good
Xenon is a simple overhead shooter with some nice ideas - it's possible to turn into a flying ship to fly above most enemies and destroy those on hills. Presentation-wise it's quite good as well - there's sampled speech before every level, and things like the status panel appear to be quite well thought out.

The Bad
There's no plot to speak of (make up your own!). The game seems to have suffered somewhat in the conversion from the ST. The colour palette is somewhat cut down (which is odd - I'm sure the original palette would fit in 64 colours). The music is totally absent, and the sound effects are even worse than the original.

The game just doesn't feel right, moving too fast, and just not really playing very well, which is a shame, since the original is brilliant.

Thankfully the PC version appears to be obscure, whereas the ST one is very widespread.

The Bottom Line
Go play the ST version. It's brilliant.

By seymour butz on September 26, 2002