X-Out

Entry posted by Cybergoth July 11, 2008

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Hi there!

Move over Katakis, here comes:

X-Out (1990):

Program: Jörg Prenzing

Graphics: Andreas Escher

Musician: Michael Hendriks

Ratings:

Zzap! Rating: 82%

Lemon64 Rating: 8.2

At first glance a sequel to Katakis or yet another R-Type clone if you prefer, still the story of this one is a little different. As far as I remember, did Rainbow Arts try to create an Arcade machine at the time. When at some point this got shelved, the graphics and probably other things got salvaged into X-Out (=> "Crossout", I'm sure you guessed it ).

Since the main Rainbow Arts staff was busy with Turrican I/II at the time, it can be considered a production of their B-Team I guess. At least the Miggy version had music from Chris Hülsbeck and the C64 version graphics from Andreas Escher once again.

I decided to feature the C64 version here. No special preference here, but besides the Turrican games was this the last "big" C64 production from Rainbow Arts, so I went with it.

All in all it's reasonably good. Basically it's to Katakis, what Hard'n'Heavy was to Giana Sisters. So you get music that does the job but is nothing special and okay graphics, when actually you'd assume two years later they should've outdone their predecessors.

At least the game starts with a very cool animated intro sequence. Another novelty is the shop. There you can not only buy the usual range of extra weapons (double/triple/special shots, bombs, satellites, etc), but also four different types of extra ships. An interesting idea is the ability to freely place the satellites somewhere around your ship. You can even choose some simple flight patterns for them.

That's it already for innovations. The game is divded into 8 levels. At first I was wondering why they were numbered 1.1/1.2/2.1/2.2/... but then I figured that they're pairs recycling the same tile graphics and enemies. Each level ends with (surprise, surprise... ) a boss battle and that's it.

Fun in 2008:

A bit too generic a shooter for my taste, especially comparerd to the marvellous Katakis. There was nothing really surprising in here nor anything grabbing my attention for longer. Okay cannonfodder if you just want to spend an evening happily blasting, but the moment you've beaten it, you've probably already forgotten it again.

Greetings,

Manuel