 SEGA DRUNK On Tuesday, I looked at a 16-bit game that was canceled, yet completely finished, The Shadow for Super Nintendo, so today let's take a look at a 16-bit game that's figuratively been decades in the making, Xenocrisis for Sega Mega Drive. Yup, that's right, this is a homebrew from Bitmap Bureau released in 2019 that received an actual cartridge release for the Mega Drive in North American, PAL, and Japanese regions. Of course, that's not the only way to play it today. It's also available on Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it's even gotten releases on stuff like Neo Geo and Dreamcast. Seriously, this game is seemingly everywhere, and for good reason, because it's a great demonstration of a fantastic blend between style and substance. Xenocrisis is a top-down run-a-gun compatible with up to two players, and as you can see, this is a Smash TV-style game where you go from room to room just friggin' shooting everything that moves and collecting everything that drops, and you move on to the next room and do the same thing again. There's two playable characters, a man and a woman, and you control them as you would a typical twin-stick shooter, so of course, if you're playing this on the Genesis, you'll want to use the six-button controller, so you can use the D-pad to move and the A, B, X, and Y buttons to dictate which direction you'll shoot. Your character can also roll, which is a really handy mechanic that helps avoid gunfire. You get three lives and three continues to get through seven levels with plenty of opportunities to earn more lives, and you will need every single one of them because this game is hard. Fortunately, the game helps you out with 10 different gun power-ups you can pick up, everything from grenades, flamethrowers, homing bullets, and a spread gun. Be forewarned, though, because you can run out of ammo, which leaves you with only a knife to kill enemies. Also, in between levels you can increase skills, kinda like in Chaos Engine, or Soldiers of Fortune. By collecting dog tags on the ground, you can exchange them to increase health, power, speed, your ammo limit, grenades, and grenade power, as well as get items like immunity and even an extra continue. It would have been nice to have different characters with different capabilities like Chaos Engine did, but I'm not gonna nitpick this game for that. One thing I will nitpick, though, is that this is one of those games where it's possible to make yourself too fast, just like in a game like Gradius, where if you accidentally use the speed-up power-up one too many times, you'll be flailing out of control. The gameplay takes place in wider screen real estate than its predecessors, but it's not quite a full 16-9 ratio, but that's perfectly fine because the screen space here is structured in a very player-friendly way. There's no ammo, power-up or health stats cluttering the screen as you're playing the game. I mean, geez, there's enough going on as it is. I don't need that stuff right in my face. Instead, it's smartly placed off to the side, where you can just make a quick glance while keeping the gameplay area relatively clean. You do get a brief notification flash above your character when you pick something up, but it's gone in a split second, and it doesn't get in the way. That's definitely a good thing because, oh my god, look at these bosses. This is the first boss of the game that you run into after like two minutes of playing. I mean, it looks like some sort of Akira beef stroganoff served with extra teeth, but the boss fights don't rely purely on spectacle. This second-level boss is cleverly laid out in a way that you need to conserve your ammo to make sure your shots count. Then you get this Cthulhu-Lukin thing, who's apparently borrowing Kul'X's crystals before he grows into this monstrous thing straight out of R-type. And yeah, as you can probably see, this game is freaking hard as nails. Even on easy, this game is not easy. Don't let the word easy fool you, though, because when it comes to games like this, to me, there's zero shame in starting off on an easier difficulty level and ramping up to normal and hard on subsequent playthroughs. Like, for example, when I sit down to play Contra 3, I don't usually sit down and play just one run on normal. I start on easy, finish the game that way, then move on to normal, and then on to hard. Xenocrisis' structure just like that, except in my opinion this game is just a wee bit tougher than Contra 3, especially since every map is randomized on every playthrough. Yup, you can't even call this game a pick-up-and-die game because you're gonna run into different enemies in different places every playthrough, which adds to the difficulty big-time, but it also adds a ton of replay value. I definitely have to mention the music here as well, because, oh man, it's awesome, and it adds so much to the game. So yeah, if I haven't made it clear enough, Xenocrisis is freaking awesome, and it's even better with the second player, especially since you get grades and points at the end of each level so you can argue and brag about who's good and who needs to get good, am I right? God, I hate that phrase. Anyway, the best endorsement I can give Xenocrisis is that it's made by people who not just give a crap about games like this, but absolutely love games like Robotron 2084, Smash TV, Total Carnage, and the like. There's so many little touches here that add to the game, like when your second player partner dies and their body just lies there lifelessly while you keep playing, you gotta love that. I also think there's plenty of potential for a sequel here since you could add different characters with different skill thresholds or even a split-screen two-player mode where you can both explore different areas of the map at the same time or maybe a feature that allows you to combine weapon types like you can in Gunstar Heroes. I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud, but hey, that's what great games do. They inspire and they get your imagination going. And Xenocrisis will give you that feeling almost immediately. Definitely pick this game up. All right, I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.