Xenophobe

"This game is just plain putrid."

Rarely do games come along that capture the interest and attention of gamers like Xenophobe did. Colorful graphics, a variety of cool weapons, and awesome looking, goo spitting alien creatures provide both challenge and fun that never seems to get old. At least that can be said of the original arcade classic. I think when they folks at Sunsoft decided to put together a Xenophobe for the NES, the object was to remove everything that was fun from the arcade original and crank out a game where the drooling comes not from slimy aliens, but players, bored to tears, reduced to a state of comatose vegetation. I expected more from the folks who brought us the outstanding Blaster Master. Here’s my take on what this so-called game is all about:

Story 8/10

The original story behind this game, while not quite so original, was always fun. Aliens invade a variety of planet-based installations or space vessels, and it’s up to the player to turn the slimy invaders into puddles of green goo, using a variety of high tech weapons. That’s supposedly the premise of this game, though players of the original most likely wouldn’t make the connection between this game and the arcade original if they just walked in on someone playing it. Still, as much as it pains me, I must award a decent rating for the story, if for no other reason than because I liked it in the original. That’s pretty much the only thing that this mess and its arcade namesake share in common.

Gameplay 1/10

I’m tempted to think that whoever put this gem together never played, or even saw for that matter, the arcade game that inspired this monstrosity. This game, which in the arcade was a life or death battle for survival, is more like a walk through the park – a very boring park at that. First of all, there is no music in this game. I don’t believe there was in the original either, but that didn’t matter. Here, it just contributes to the dull, boring, lifeless atmosphere of the game. Basically, you walk from room to room, blasting aliens that appear out of nowhere, and collecting a variety of objects they leave behind to boost your score. I use the term “blasting” very loosely here. Instead of being able to fire a rapid stream of bullets to fend off alien enemies, in this game you fire one large, slow moving bullet, and can’t fire another one until the first one leaves the screen or hits it’s mark. This is especially annoying when taking on more than one enemy at a time, which in this game, rarely happens. In the original, rooms could be chock full of aliens of all different shapes and sizes, but here, it seems like the aliens follow a “no more than two aliens per room” rule to avoid such a challenge. In the arcade version, the aliens entered the room through the doors, or were visible already when as soon as you came through the door. Here, they teleport out of nowhere, often in very inconvenient places. Also, where the arcade version featured a wide variety of alien nasties in various forms of evolution, this one offers us only three or four different types of enemies, which range from super easy to annoyingly hard. The arcade offered us a range of cool, devastating weapons to fry the aliens with, which could be found lying around various spots in the levels. Those weapons exist in this game too, but good luck finding them, pal! They are randomly dropped by defeated enemies, and very rarely at that…usually about the time that you’re already done with the level. If you do pick them up, it manages to make an already easy (but annoying) job easier, almost too easy. One of the most tragic losses in this game is the loss of the available characters to play as. There used to be nine, three unique ones for each different player. Now, they’ve been cut down to 3 total, and they managed to pick the least interesting ones from each set. Not that it matters. All of the facial expressions and visible emotions the characters in the arcade displayed are totally lost here as you wander around like a stiff robot who can’t even figure out how to shoot upward. The game is easy enough to control, but that’s small comfort given the other limitations of this mess. All the action has been sucked dry from this game, leaving a cart that’s boring at best, and difficult, if not impossible, to get into.

Graphics 2/10

When I started playing this game, I thought I’d been sucked into a different world…the world of Colecovison graphics and sounds! You might think that sounds harsh, but if you’ve played this game, you’d understand. The graphics look like something produced for the console systems of the 80’s, and not even that impressive. The programmers appear to have opted for a palette of three or four different colors, and that’s it. You’ll see oranges, blues, whites, and shades of gray, and that’s about it. This is only made worse when one thinks back to the rich colors and graphics of the arcade version that definitely gave life to the gameplay experience. Even this might not have been the kiss of death for this game if they’d put some effort into the look of the characters and the backgrounds, but you won’t find any of that here. The characters look stiff and boring and barely resemble the characters they are meant to portray. The aliens look okay, I’ll give them that much, but there are only three different types of creature, and them looking okay hardly makes the game worth playing. You’ll find that as you wander from room to room and level-to-level it looks like you’re seeing the exact same boring backgrounds in every locale, which is true, because you are. Exploring strange new worlds just doesn’t seem as exciting when they’re all composed of the same boring four-colored unimpressive backgrounds. You might as well stay in the room you start the level in, because you could just as easily win from there as you could anywhere else in the level, and it all looks the same.

Sound 1/10

Horrible. The sounds, only through the most monumental effort, can be called sounds at all. You won’t hear the slimy sounds of aliens oozing toward your, or the echo of searing laser blasts blazing down the hallway. Just pings and boings and dull thuds that could just as easily be the sounds from Pong as for this game. The theme song from the original is rendered not too badly, but big whoop te do!…you get to hear it for like five seconds at the start and end of every level and that’s it. That barely makes up for the deafening silence that usually is present throughout most of this game. You’re best off shutting the sound off entirely and giving your ears a break.

All I can say about this game is “if you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all!” Xenophobe was a fantastic, fun arcade shoot em’ up. This game is a boring piece of crap with little to no resemblance to the original. It’s just a shame they didn’t wait until the SNES was popular to give this game the treatment it deserved. Instead, they took this game, cranked out a miserable, substandard, sorry excuse for a cartridge, and left it to suffer in infamy and obscurity as just another loser on the long list of NES “must not play” video games. If you haven’t played Xenophobe before, definitely track it down in the arcade version only. Whatever you do, don’t let this skunk version invade your home.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 05/27/03, Updated 05/27/03