C64 X-Force longplay

A longplay of this recent horizontal shooter. Gameplay starts at 5:00. While OK to play, aesthetically pleasant, and with nice dance-orientated music, the game does have some faults: The movement of the main sprite is a bit too fast and rigid, making navigation in the tight scenery tricky. The enemies and their patterns remain the same throughout the game. Once you learn them, it's actually easier to just avoid rather than shoot them. The end-of-level guardian is the same in all 16 levels as well. It's just the same enemy spaceship in every single level. The power-ups are useless. You get the maximum weapon upgrade quite soon, and from that point onward there's no point in collecting any bonuses. In fact you have to avoid them cause they downgrade your weapon. The speed power-up (the yellow pod) is nice, but lasts no more than a few seconds. The same goes for the invincibility shield (the blue pod). -Speaking of the invincibility shield, there's no way to be sure how long you can use it, seeing as it doesn't change the appearance of your spaceship in any manner. A password system would have been welcome. Starting from scratch is annoying. The collision detection is a bit loose. This can be both good (you don't die by scraping the scenery) and bad (you need to be in a pixel-perfect position to shoot the enemies). These complaints apart, it's not a bad little game. For anybody interested in buying it, it's commercially available from Psytronik Software in disk and tape format. http://psytronik.net/newsite/index.ph...