Project X
Team 17 of the U.K. released Project X for the Amiga in March of 1992. Project X is a Gradius-like shooter notable for its fast sprite-shifting, number of sprites, smooth and fast parallax scrolling, digitized speech and hard-as-nails difficulty.
Project X is an arcade-quality shoot 'em up and super-scroller coded in ASM-One assembler on an Amiga 3000 by Andreas Tadic and Stefan Boberg of Sweden [1].
Project X consists of five shooter stages and three tunnel stages, both of which scroll horizontally. The shooter stages are 11,000 pixels in length whereas the tunnel stages are 16,000 pixels in length.
Project X scrolls at 50 FPS and displays in 32-color full PAL overscan mode. Thus, the screen scrolls vertically to a degree, giving more room for movement. The sprites move smoothly and shift about the viewport at extremely high speed. Almost every projectile-impact can be discretely heard. During boss fights the score panel drops away and boss music kicks in.
When you have upgraded guns, sideshot and homing missiles, no fewer than 12 projectiles glide smoothly over the screen at any given time. Now add attack waves, explosions and floating power-ups -- the screens are busy to say the least.
In 1992 Project X was awesome but extremely difficult; it is one of the few games that I would dread playing yet keep playing regardless. Project X will test the mettle of any shoot 'em up veteran.
Project X graphics were drawn by Rico Holmes; its 200K of music and sound effects were composed by Allister Brimble; its 400K of sampled speech was composed by Chris Brimble.
Project X also features a saveable High-score table. In addition, every single aspect of Project X was developed on Amigas.
Project X Weapons System (Pick-ups & Power-ups):
- Guns, Sideshot, Plasma, Homing Missile, Laser, Magma
- Speed Up, Build Up, Stealth
Project X requires an Amiga with 1 meg of RAM and was distributed on 4x 3.5" 880kB DD diskettes.
Project X Special Edition 93 is a much easier version of Project X. The Special Edition of Project X added a Rookie mode and removed some difficult enemy waves. Also, only one power-up level is lost on loss of life.
[1] ASM-One MC68000 Macro Assembler of 1990 by Rune-Gram Madsen aka Promax of Denmark.
Project X IBM PC MS-DOS 1994
East Point Software ported Team 17's Amiga Project X to IBM PC MS-DOS in 1994. The PC version of Project X displays in 256-color square-pixel VGA 320x240. PC Project X audio supports PC Internal Speaker, Sound Blaster, True AdLib and Gravis UltraSound.
Indexes:
- Amiga Games Reviews (Index to all Amiga game reviews)
- Computer Game Reviews (Index to all computer game reviews)
- The First REAL Amiga Game
- Best Amiga Games
- History of Computer Games 1976-2024
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