Crossbow Reviews
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Gameplay: Unlike some other 7800 games I find this area to be the greatest aspect about Xenophobe. The basic gameplay involves you running around the stations and eliminating the alien baddies onboard. You have a health meter by which your life in the game is determined. As aliens hit you, your health will decrease. Also stupid moves like jumping into doors do not feel too good and so will take ten points off your meter as well (Fair cost for being an idiot I suppose). You basically end a level by one of three ways. You either find all the aliens and toast em, which is the best way to do it as you get more points and bonuses. Or you could dilly dally around all day, which lets the aliens overrun the station where you escape with your life to the mothership garnishing very little points. There is still the ultimate happy medium where you pull a Ripley (Alien term). This involves finding the station's self destruct code scattered about and then pressing the magic red button on one of the stations screens. You then have about ten seconds or so to wipe out what you can before being sent back to the mothership. This method will give you some bonuses but nothing like the bonuses you get for wiping them out. The controls seem responsive and very easy to learn and use. You basically use the joystick to control left/right movement, up for jump, down to crouch. To pick up object all you do is crouch over them. To use the grenade you crouch and press the right fire button. The controls are really easy but do require both separate fire buttons on the 7800 controller. So no use of that old 2600 stick on this game. Also, most of the gameplay elements from the arcade have been brought over. For instance the arcade had one really great feature in that 3 people could play at once. The 7800 doesn't allow for 3 people at once…but you can do two! Also unlike some other conversions of this game, cough…2600…cough, you actually can play two players at once covering different sections of the stations. Splitting the screen in the middle horizontally so that player one is the upper half and player two is the lower half makes this possible. All the alien types were brought over also including that irritating crawler and those pesky tentacles that hang down from above. The arcade does include tentacles that come through the floor but those are missing in the 7800 port. Also nice is that each weapon type does differing amounts of damage to the aliens. Although I have a hard time believing that the Poofer gun is the most destructive over say the Electric zapper. Still, it does add some strategy in that all the weapons have limited shot distance also. So while the Poofer may be more powerful than say the Laser rifle, the rifle can travel the whole distance of the screen while the Poofer is limited to much closer attacks.
