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For its time, Xenon in its 16-bit incarnation was a bit of a revelation. It was heralded as "arcade quality" by many, and sure enough, that was its intention. There then appeared the Arcadia system, Mastertronic's first venture into the world of coin-ops. It was a game select system, not completely unlike Nintendo's Super Select System, and held, along with Xenon, a couple of extra Mastertronic titles, including Sidewinder. The console was fairly cheap, running completely off Amiga motherboards, which meant that the home software was identical to the arcade. It sold like hot cakes.

Not only was Xenon a revolution in home software, it was also the first product by 16-bit supremos, the Bitmap Bros. Now, you might have already noticed that the Bitmaps' 'other' game, Speedball has also been converted this month, and very well too. This might have given you heart toward the C64 capabilities. Xenon will bring them crashing down. Xenon is a truly dire game.

The scrolling is smooth enough, but what a shame about the action. The collision detection is awful, as is the sprite masking. Should you fire a bullet, and no doubt you will find cause to at some stage of the game, rather than fire a neat little ball, you fire a large black blob that moves spasmodically up the screen. Should it come to within two character blocks of an enemy sprite, they die. This might be good for you, but it also means that the same applies when you get fired upon. A hit from an enemy bullet means the loss of one of your shield points.

The interesting thing about the shield points, and this makes the game a little bit harder than it already is, is the fact that you only have half the shield points that you had in the Amiga version. The problem seems to lie in the way the converters have tried to make the game look similar to the Amiga version, to the point where they were prepared to cut down on the number of shield points so that the shield register could fit in the small box allocated.

The same idea of weapon expansion is here as in the Amiga version, but there seem to be a lot less available to you as in the 16-bit version.

At first glance, a conversion in the truest sense of the word, but at second glance, a steaming great mistake that should never have been allowed out of the Melbourne House stable. A joke, and no mistake guv.