#53: Xardion

XARDION! (What does that mean?!?)

Xardion is a game I'd never heard of before, and the game actually opened with a bit of an intro before the title screen which game me a bit of an idea about what was going on. There are three planets under attack by another galaxy or something, and they decide to band together to fight off the invaders. Each planet sends a champion in a ship which makes me think this game is going to be a side scrolling shooter with three different characters to choose from, like UN Squadron. Yay. I sure haven't played enough of that genre thus far!

Panthera, I choose you!

It turns out the game is actually a platformer with three different characters to choose from. You can swap between characters by hitting select which actually reminds me a lot of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game on the NES. Each of the three characters is significantly different which is more like The Lost Vikings. Both of those games are awesome. Unfortunately this game is not.

Tongue attack, go!

It turns out the game only seems to use two of the six buttons which makes me very sad. The three characters are different, but not in good ways. One guy can aim his gun up which makes him the best. One guy is a cat so he can crawl into tunnels which makes him situationally useful. The third guy just seemed terrible.

Interestingly the game has experience bars so your guys can level up by killing dudes. Unfortunately experience isn't shared, so Triton (who could shoot up) ended up gaining some levels while everyone else kept sucking.

I made it to one boss fight and made good use of character swapping to keep fighting as long as I could. But then I died. It restarted me at the start of the level with full health on the guy who died and old health of the other two... Which really made me never want to use those guys again.

There were lots of item pickups I could get, and I think they were incrementing my numbers on the select menu, but I never found a way to actually use any of them for any purpose. Which made me sad. Maybe that stuff was used after beating the first boss. Maybe some arcane sequence of button presses would work it out. But I couldn't find a way.

Infinite continues and a level system means I'm pretty confident I eventually could have won. I just didn't want to. The controls were sluggish too. But I feel like if I'd played this game as a kid I would have liked it a fair bit and definitely would have played it a lot.

Rating: C+

#26: D-Force

It's begging for a D rating right in the name!

Even before the start menu the game started with a brick wall and a terrible choppy sound. I thought something was wrong with my headphones. But then a helicopter shot through the brick wall and it became clear that there was nothing wrong with my hardware. No, that was the way they thought a helicopter sounded. Man, I sure hope that doesn't carry over into the actual game...

What are those balls?!?

The game turned out to be a shooter. A really, really bad one. The sound did carry over into the game. The music was mediocre on top of it, but the sound was really, really terrible. This game had all of my least favourite aspects of games so far. Shooting my starting weapon, with no enemies on the screen, caused lag. The game used one button. Shoot. All these other buttons on the controller and none of them did anything. To be fair start did pause the game... But even paused the background would keep pulsing this weird flowy animation. I bet they thought it looked cool. Or the intern they brought in thought it looked cool. I think it looks terrible.

THANK GOODNESS!

I made it to the boss of the first stage. One good thing is dying only knocked you down one power-up tier instead of all the way to the bottom. One bad thing is the boss moved faster than any other enemy and coupled with the lag from shooting I couldn't survive. And didn't care enough to keep trying.

Then I uploaded the images here and saw the title screen had different options. So I went back to try exploration mode, which was in a dinosaur world without power-ups and with an added button! L or R would zoom in. It sucked.

I don't think I played this game back in the day. And I'm never going to play it again.

Rating: F