Xaptron
IMPETUS
I wrote this game for several reasons, among them the following:
- There are too many bad EGA/VGA games out there on the BBS's. Come to think of it, there are too many bad games, period, on BBS's.
- Nels Anderson and Richard Tom shouldn't be the only ones writing good high-resolution EGA/VGA games. (I must in good conscience include the writers of
Bass Tour,Vampyr,andCaptain Comic,even though I don't have their names handy.) If you find your name conspicuously absent from the list (explicitly or implicitly), and you've written an EGA/VGA shareware game, get a clue. (If you haven't seenSuperFlyby N.A., you've missed something.)- I'd just finished downloading 3 ridiculously large and bad games from a local BBS. Imagine my dismay when I find that they: a) don't make full use of the EGA/VGA potential, or b) aren't really that interesting as games, or c) all of the above. No, I'm not going to tell you which games they were—explicit character assassination isn't my style. Implicit character assassination is much less actionable.
- I've always been put out by the fact that the bad game writers always want you to register their bad game for $19.95 or more, rationalizing it by a chain of spurious logic that concludes:
…if you send me money I'll become a better programmer and game designer.Right. Apparently there are some people out there who have highly overestimated their own talents AND movitation. Hell, even XAPTRON isn't worth $19.95.Whether or not XAPTRON, a simple shoot-em-up, can compete with the likes of EGATrek, SuperFly, Mille Borne, and the other truly excellent EGA/VGA offerings out there remains to be seen. Still, it's better than that digital tripe I waded through yesterday, and that's what counts. Like I said, there's a lot of bad games out on BBS's. Could be this is another one.
HOW TO PLAY THE GAME
XAPTRON is mind-bogglingly simple. Stuff shoots at you. You shoot back. It's hard to get simpler than that. If I was in the right kind of mood, I'd write some sort of science-fiction flak whereby the little things that shoot at you are called
dronesorseekersor something (Srones?Deekers?) and you're in a warp-drive spaceship bound for Planet Xandar to depose the evil Star Emperor Mungle the Snootful, but that's not the kind of mood I'm in. Never mind. I've always felt that games which required that much background material to set the mood weren't worth the trouble it took to start 'em up. How much purple prose do you need before you're in a mood to shoot something? I'm in that mood right now.On the left hand side of the screen is your energy meter. It goes down as you use energy. At the bottom right of your screen is your shield meter. It goes down as your shields are destroyed. Both your energy and your shields are replenished at regular intervals, but you won't be able to just coast. You'll need to eliminate some of the bombardment in order to stay alive.
At the bottom right and right side of the screen are some buttons/lights/bezels/gizmos which change color every time you shoot. Aren't they pretty?
The left mouse button fires your weapon (lasers, phasers, disruptors, neutron beams, *yawn*), and the right button stops the game. The mouse cursor won't leave the shooting area, just in case you were wondering. You don't have all day to get to the things, either. After a certain interval they'll disappear, and another will show up somewhere else. If you don't hit them in time, they're gone.
When the drones/seekers/shooters/little-pixel-things shoot at you and hit, your energy and shields are depleted. The energy drops faster when you have no shields. When the energy is completely gone, you're dead—world destroyed, game over. No, the little buggers don't take over your planet, stealing your resources, ruining your ecosystem and ravishing your women. Something much more mundane happens—you go back to the DOS prompt. I'd put in a scoring mechanism and a
The some of the little xapper/drones/seekers/etc. are more accurate than others. This has nothing to do with what they look like. When they're created they get accuracy percentages. The ones that are more accurate get longer on-screen lifetimes than those which are less accurate.Best Xappersfile, but I figure that you're shooting things because that's what you want to do. Only wimps needhighest scoresfiles.
Arcade shooter games aren't my thing, I got interested because it is the only other game by the author of Satori. As you may have gathered from the text above, it is far more a parody of an arcade game than a game proper; and the enemy graphics are really admirable.
