Xenon Amiga 1988 The Bitmap Brothers Steve Kelly

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Xenon Amiga 1988

The Bitmap Brothers of the U.K. released Xenon for Amiga in 1988. Xenon is a Xevious-like.

The successor to 1988 Xenon is Xenon 2 Megablast 1989.

Xenon was designed and programmed by Steve Kelly, drawn by Mike Montgomery and composed by David Whittaker. The digitized video of Captain Xod that announces the current sector is Eric Matthews of the Bitmap Brothers.

The ST version of Xenon has much weaker sound than the Amiga version, but looks and plays almost identically.

In Xenon players assume the role of Federation fighter, Darrian, as he battles the Xenites by ground and by air over four sectors consisting of four zones each. Via spacebar or joystick players can seemlessly transform between battletank and fighter jet.

Xenon Weapons System acquired via Power Pills:

• Cannon, Twin-cannons, Homing Missile, Laser, Side Lasers, Side Cannons
• Armor, Fuel, Zapper, Movement Rate, Weapon Range, Rotating Balls (max 3)
• Spacebar or joystick "waggle" shifts between jet and tank

Weapons do not carry over from sector to sector. Thus, in each sector you have to build up your weapons system from scratch. Against the bosses three rotating balls is always superior to twin-cannons (because rotating balls can be positioned for concentrated fire).

There are only four bosses each of which are battled twice. Xenon bosses:

The scrolling playfield dimensions for each sector are 208x4608 pixels. Due to thick screen-borders and a sidepanel the active drawspace is only 208x192.

Note that Xenon does not even begin to tap the Amiga's chipset. Still, there wasn't much to choose from in 1988. Hybris of 1988 leaves both Xenon of 1988 and Xenon 2 of 1989 in the dust, however.

Xenon manual: 14 pages.

Xenon IBM PC 1988

Lothlorien ported Xenon to IBM PC MS-DOS 2.0 in 1988. Xenon was one of the first great vertically-scrolling shoot 'em ups on IBM PC.

PC Xenon was programmed by Ste Cork, drawn by Lee Cawley and composed by Paul Tonge and Tony Williams.

PC Xenon requires an i808x CPU and 384K of RAM. PC Xenon displays in 16-color EGA 320x200. However, it clearly does not take advantage of the EGA palette range.

PC Xenon was distributed on 1x 3.5" 720kB DD diskettes or 2x 5.25" 360kB DS DD floppy disks. Xenon installs to hard disk drive via "copy *.* c:\". The install size is 700 kbytes and consists of 28 files.

Xenon Commodore 64 1989

Melbourne House released Xenon for the Commodore 64 in 1989. Developed by Lothlorien, C64 Xenon was programmed by CMC, drawn by Bomber Anderson and composed by Paul Tonge.

C64 Xenon is only a low-res 8-bit port of ST/Amiga Xenon. And while C64 Xenon constitutes a passable port, it is nowhere near as good as native C64 shooters. Indeed, there are two dozen native C64 shooters that are better than even ST/Amiga Xenon and Xenon 2.

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