Xecutor

Sinclair User

Overall 92%

Chris Jenkins 92%

Label: Micro Selection Author: Cybadyne Price: £2.99 Memory: 48K/128K Joystick: various Reviewer: Chris Jenkins Re-released incredibly quickly after its full-price launch, Xecutor was described in its original SU review as, "A blinding technical achievement... looks good and plays even better." Although basically it's a straightforward vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-up, it has a couple of features which make it stand out from the crowd. For start there's a two-player simultaneous option. As the wonderfully-detailed backgrounds scroll past you, you just zap the waves of enemy fighters, and knock out laser bases. These leave behind weapons pods which you can pick up to add multiple lasers, smart bombs and shields to your arsenal. In two-player mode, you can either play co-operatively or competitively, destroying the weapons you don't need so your partner can't pick them up. At the end of each level you get a lovely multi-weapon mothership to destroy, and on later levels dodging through the ironmongery becomes as challenging as seeing off the fighters. Excellent buy.

ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment)

Visual Effects 5/7

Audio 3/7

IQ Factor 3/7

Fun Factor 4/7

Ace Rating 757/1000

Andy Wilton 757/1000

Have a blast on The Edge. Another vertically scrolling shoot-em-up? Another load of blasting, collecting weapons, and blasting some more? Well, yes - but don't write Xecutor off immediately. It's colourful for one thing, in a field which is (on the Spectrum at any rate) mostly drab or just plain monochrome. It's also got a tremendous combo option that has both players on screen at once, competing (unwise) or cooperating (much better). The object of the game is to blast the aliens, without getting blasted yourself or crashing into the scenery. Attacking nasties descend in waves, four at a time, firing vertically down at you while defensive gun emplacements cling to the scenery and fire horizontally. Destroy an emplacement or a wave of bad guys, and a customising token appears in the debris. When a token appears you have a choice - shoot it, or pick it up. Shooting tokens stores them away to earn you bigger, more impressive features while picking one up cashes in any you've stored and adds the appropriate feature to your ship. Increased speed, withering firepower and a handy protective shield can all be yours. So far so good, but your initial firepower and speed are very puny indeed and this makes the game rather tough to get into. Worse still, the gameplay has senseless flaws in it: in particular, if you lose a life your craft may well reappear in an instantly lethal position. This can cut games extremely short and could easily have been avoided. Not tremendous stuff then for a single player, but switching to two-player mode transforms the game. You can play a combo game competitively, but with the aforementioned problems you wont get too far that way. Cooperate instead, and you'll soon get the firepower to really trash those aliens - and have a lot of fun along the way. Reviewer: Andy Wilton RELEASE BOX C64/128, £8.99cs, £12.99dk, December Spectrum, £7.99cs, Reviewed Predicted Interest Curve 1 min: 77/10 1 hour: 80/10 1 day: 77/10 1 week: 60/10 1 month: 40/10 1 year: 20/10

A wave of aliens dives towards you. Shoot them all, collect a token from the debris and you'll increase your rate of fire.

Your SinclairYour Sinclair Megagame

Graphics 9/10

Playability 9/10

Value For Money 8/10

Addictiveness 9/10

Overall 9/10

Phil South 9/10

Ace £7.99 Reviewer: Phil South When it comes right down to it, there'll always be a market for a good nippy shoot 'em up. If you can make one with a two player option, so that two players can play at the same time, then you're going to laugh all the way to the bank. In that case, Ace, a new arcade label from The Edge, is going to be spending a lot of time chortling up the high street. Xecutor, its first game, is a one or two player scrolling shoot 'em up, with a brainsquishing variety of weapons and death-dealing baddies to choose from. The major drawback of shoot 'em ups these days is they tend to be a bit on the easy-peasy side. Oh sure, there's plenty of thrills, spills and about eight billion baddies to shoot, but as you've usually got unlimited firepower, and all the time in the world, you just spray the baddies with bullets and hope for the best. That's the trend, so where does Xecutor's trousers hang? Well, it's nice to see that somebody's writing hard games (and don't say oo-er). Xecutor is just that. You, and a buddy in a twin ship, if you play two player, are flying up through a vertically scrolling landscape. Coming down towards you are a handful of heavily armed space bozos in their custom-built ships. Okay? Now what makes this different is that there's only a few aliens shooting at you, and you've only got a smallish cannon to hit 'em with, so you've got to be economical with your shots, and accurate if you want to kill any of them. So that's quite hard to start with, but as you progress through the game, you can pick up new weapons and shields, which make it slightly easier to hit things. So you have to use all your arcade skills if you want to stay in the game. Having sweated your way through each wave of fiendishly weaving death-dribblers, you're faced with a massive ship about six times as big as your own! Having blasted that to golden shred, you would expect to be let through into the next level, right? Wrong! The ship compacts and starts blasting at you and you've got to fight it before you can get through. Phew! I must say that this is the hardest shoot 'em up I've seen for a while, and as such is great value for money. If you like torturing yourself with tough games, then shell out (peeoww! zip! ka-boom!) for Xecutor.

Flying through the airborne spacejunk on your way to certain doom is more fun with two players. Best played with a friend to back you up, it's the skill needed to hit anything and avoid being hit that makes Xecutor a game for hardened spacers only.

Read it at Your Sinclair Rock'n'Roll Years

Crash

Presentation 86%

Graphics 87%

Playability 82%

Addictive Qualities 80%

Overall 84%

Ben Stone 86%

Mike Dunn 80%

Paul Sumner 87%

Producer: ACE Retail Price: £7.99 Author: Cybadyne Faced with the unenviable prospect of a Sunday afternoon sitting in front of the TV, you decide to take to the space waves and blast a few alien bad boys into oblivion. As you venture through a vertically-scrolling corridor, waves of attacking alien craft appear wielding deadly laser blasters. So it's 'do as you would be done by' as you try to take out these entities with a series of forward-firing weapons. Equipped at first with just a low-level gun, you can enhance your arsenal by destroying certain alien craft; this reveals weapons that can either be collected or themselves destroyed to take you on to a more powerful system. At the end of each corridor section is a large ominous craft: accurate fire knocks out vital components, but the ship is then transformed into an even more formidable opponent ready for blasting. A measly three lives, fast manoeuvring and expert fighting are the only things that can get you home tonight... COMMENTS Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair Graphics: excellent, colourful and detailed with smooth scrolling Options: two-player mode, definable keys

Hordes of marauding foes and other alien cliches…

Prepare to meet your doom, you hulking great mother ship!

Shooting 'em up starts with the weapon option shown in that box on the right of the screen.

Sinclair UserSinclair User Classic

Overall 10/10

Graham Taylor 10/10

Label: Ace Author: Cybadyne Price: £7.99 Memory: 48K/128K Joystick: various Reviewer: Graham Taylor Want to know one sign of a really brilliant game? The reviewer has to be dragged away from it to write the review. And Xecutor is one such magnetic game. It's a shoot-'em up from Ace, a new label which is basically The Edge doing arcade games. Xecutor is also about the only thing that is going to give Zynaps any sort of competition. There is no plot worth discussing in the game. It's about firing fast and dodging faster, about precision control of your space fighter and instant reflexes. That's the basic requirements of any arcade game but, like Zynaps before it, Xecutor is also a blinding technical achievement. It looks great and plays even better. Comparisons with Zynaps are inevitable though unfair in some respects since Xecutor has plenty of features which are uniquely its own. It scrolls from top to bottom - like Lightforce - and features a variant on what is rapidly becoming this season's big trend - namely firepower bonuses. This is where your ship begins the game armed with only a rickety old laser which splutters fairly uselessly at the bad guys, but where collecting bonus points can win you more serious weaponry. In Xecutor you can graduate from intermittent laser beam to double speed to double barrel to torpedoes to spray-fire, 360° blasts and so on. You can get to be pretty mean. To begin with the aliens sweep moderately slowly across the screen - the problem is not so much avoiding them or the bullets they occasionally drop, but actually killing them all. It is only by wiping out a complete wave of aliens that you get a bonus symbol and this is the only way you have of surviving later waves Basically if you don't wipe out all the first wave of aliens you might as well just forget it... The bonus system works in an interesting way. If the bonus star comes up on screen you can either collect it - by flying over it - or shoot it. Collecting it gives you the current level of firepower - as indicated by an icon on the right-hand side of the screen - and sets the icon back to zero. On the other hand you can simply shoot the bonus star - this doesn't change your firepower but instead advances the weapon select icon. Thus in Xecutor you have to constantly decide whether to take the weapons on offer or to take a chance on getting something more dangerous the next time you clear a wave. One thing is certain, if you want to acquire meaningful points in this game you are going to need, at the very least, photon torpedoes because at the end of the level you get The Big Alien. The Big Alien which reappears in many guises throughout the game spits out bullets and needs to be hit dozens of times before it turns into a fighter and chases you around the screen. H you manage to blast it then, and only then, do you get to Stage 2. The destruction of the big alien is pretty spectacular. Bits of metal come spinning off at all directions as it disintegrates only to reform as a fighter Fabulous stuff. Graphically Xecutor is more than you could hope for. Large coloured sprites, smooth scrolling, inventive details, the lot. Whatever happened to attribute clash? Xecutor has never heard of it. If the quality of Spectrum software gets any higher people will start trading in their STs!

PROGRAMMERS Xecutor is the work of Cybadyne which is Mike Smith (right) and Christian Urquhart (left). Christian Urquhart did the coding. Christian is well known for a number of previous games, mostly for his work for Ocean. Softography: Daley Thompson's Decathlon (Ocean, 1984), Hunchback (Ocean, 1984), Robot Messiah (Alphabatim, 1985), Gunrunner (Hewson, 1987) Mike Smith contributed the excellent graphics.

TWO-PLAYER OPTION Xecutor also features an unusual two-player option. When selected this allows two people to play at once controlling two space fighters on screen at the same time. Although essentially you are both fighting the computer you can decide to play either in consort or in competition. For example you could both try to help clear the screen of aliens for extra bonuses and share bonus weaponry evenly or you can try to 'steal' bonuses and generally try to get each other killed. Virtually every joystick and keyboard permutation you can imagine is offered on the move control screen to make it as easy as possible for two people to control two ships without ending up in a jumble of fingers and joysticks leads.