 Ssssss... that's drunk. Developer Kemko decided to get in on the fun of the Super Scope, developing Xzone back in 1992, and yep, this is another game that only works with the Super Scope, no controller or mouse support here. And once again, the story here involves you playing as some kind of super soldier definitely not made up to look like Samus or Iron Man or anything, nope, no sirree. And you're taking out all sorts of out-of-control robots and stuff. I mean, you gotta give Super Scope Games credit when it comes to story. They didn't mess around, it's just shoot anything and everything, and it's almost always out of control robots of some kind. There's no wacky misunderstanding straight out of a Frasier episode where it's all a dream, but wait, you're actually in an alternate dimension and Robert Eurick is there, but he's playing Goaltender for the Minnesota North Stars! Ah, that's actually my fan fiction, sorry. If it seems like I'm avoiding talking about X-Zone, it's because I am. Well, this game has four levels split into two areas each, and you get one health bar with three continues to finish the whole game. And as an added bonus, your health does not reset between levels. That is a substantial problem because this game is ridiculously hard. Now, I appreciate a light gun game that isn't afraid to use the entire screen, but in this case, we've got both enemies and projectiles appearing from any and all spots, sometimes seven or eight things appearing all at once. How the hell are you supposed to deal with that? I mean, look at this crap. This would be cool if this were a two-player game, but you're out here fending for yourself, on your own. You just gotta pick your spots here and go into defensive mode. You can't possibly shoot everything, so shoot at missiles and projectiles coming at you instead. If you happen to hit an enemy, so be it. This is the kind of game that's pure survival. You'll be mashing all the buttons on your superscope so much that you'll have to swap out batteries between levels. Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit, but only a bit. X-Zone does at least get off to a good start. The first level here has you taking a bird's-eye view as you presumably parachute down outside an enemy base with all sorts of crap flying at you. Hey, at least the viewing angle is something different. It's better than the, uh, horizontal scrolling levels that slowly crawl by, which is what the next two levels are. First you're in a desert, then you're fighting to get inside the enemy base, then you're in the base itself for level four, and whoa, this would be seriously awesome if the background weren't so freaking choppy. I admire what they tried here, but take a look at a game like Accelabrid. This isn't a superscope game, but it might as well be. It's a Super Famicom game that never came out in the U.S., but it's got a similar style of gameplay, and the approach here is to use an extremely low-res loop for the background. Yeah, it's not the greatest looking, but on a CRT-TV, it's actually pretty cool, especially, you know, if you're squinting or if you're just really stoned. I much prefer this approach than, say, this here. I mean, come on, Kemko, you developed top gear. You should be able to put together something better than this, right? Oh, no? Well, okay then. So yeah, X-Zone is about on the same level as Bazooka Blitzkrieg, which I looked at last week, just kind of a dull run-of-the-mill light gun game with only a few highlights and not much else. For me, the highlights here are the music, which is pretty good throughout the game, plus the fact that you can cause damage to pretty much everything on screen, and some of the bosses look kind of neat. Plus, like I said, that first level is at least something different. Other than that, though, there's just not a lot here that X-Zone has to offer. The game is just brutally difficult, even on the easiest difficulty, so it's easy to just throw up your hands and ask, what's the point? Especially when there's other light gun stuff you can play like Metal Combat and Yoshi Safari. I admit, I did get pretty bored and frustrated playing this one to the point that I wondered if developer and publisher Kemko ever thought of tying this game in with phalanx, so they could make this infamous old dude the main character. So you could imagine yourself as him in the not-samus suit, causing all sorts of chaos and destruction. Now that would be cool. But yeah, as it is, X-Zone just isn't worth the aggravation. All right, I wanna thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.