Xenophobe (Nintendo Entertainment System) Review
~by tankMage (January 2024)
Score: 5.3/10 (Bad)
Play this game and you’ll develop a phobia alright.
Imagine it’s the late 1980s or early 90s and you open up a brand new Nintendo cart for Christmas or your birthday. There’s a cool looking alien on the box and the name begins with an X, so it has to be cool right? If you’re lucky, you’re really young and/or haven’t played many games, because you’re in for disappointment if you have something to compare Xenophobe against. So you pop the game in the NES and a nice tune plays. You press Start and (of course) select Dr. Kwack. The music starts up again for a moment before stopping and you realize half the screen is blank. You do not have time to worry about blank screens, because a Snotterpillar attacks Dr. Kwack and you have to run away.
After escaping the snotterpillar you wander around shooting things with your pathetic gun and picking up mysterious junk only to be teleported off the stage to a mothership while you watch points get tallied up very slowly. You play the game some more, realize that’s all there is to Xenophobe, then grab another game or go outside, cause this is a waste of time.
Well, I guess I just summed up Xenophobe. It’s not fun and it’s not good. In fact, Xenophobe isn’t even bad in an entertaining way, it’s just dull. For a while I thought I missed some vital component of the game loop, like maybe there were special stages or a hidden ending, but it’s really just a lame port that does not do the arcade game it was based on justice.
It’s ok to like Xenophobe.
I always feel like a jerk when I give a game a bad review, because I know there’s always someone who loves it. But I have to be honest about my feelings or I would be a dishonest old man who complains on the internet instead of an honest old man who complains on the internet. There’s enough dishonest old men online and I don’t want to be one of them. It really is ok to like or even love this game, at the end of the day it’s all just a matter of opinion. I’ll also add that I have a general love of all video games, no matter how awful they may be, so part of me enjoyed this game in a weird way. It still sucks though.
A bad arcade Port.
Xenophobe was originally an arcade game that looks cool, but I have yet to play it. That said, after watching footage of the arcade game I’m sure it’s way better than what came out for the Nintendo. To be fair, porting an arcade title to the NES was probably not a great proposition for most devs, because arcade cabinets were often light years ahead of home consoles in the 80s and 90s. To be fair some arcade games ported very well.
Sadly, Xenophobe isn’t the type of game that would port well. The object of the game was to compete with several other players simultaneously in a sort race to score points. If you imagine a game with nice graphics and a bunch of sweaty nerds competing for high scores in an arcade, Xenophobe’s hallways, random monsters, and loot drops suddenly make sense. I can even imagine people spectating as they wait for a turn at the joystick. The NES wasn’t that type of system, so Xenophobe had the scales tipped against from the start. Add in the fact that the NES just couldn’t produce the sort of graphical experience or handle the number of players as an arcade machine and you have a preordained failure.
You’re a bounty hunter or something.
Xenophobe doesn’t have much in the way of story aside from a message informing players that the space station they are tasked with clearing of vicious aliens is about to self-destruct at the start of each stage. The manual does not give us much more to work with either. This is fine, not every game needs an elaborate story.
The three playable characters, Dr. Kwack, Mr. Fogg, and Dr. ZORDIR2 are one of the few things with any personality, but they lack any type of backstory.* The game doesn’t make me curious about the universe these characters live in, so I suppose it’s a moot point.
*I’m not sure if I spelled Dr. ZORDIR2 correctly, the manual does not give names and it is hard to make out his name on the game screen. At any rate, it looks like the annoying l33t speak my generation used to use online. To be fair to Xenophobe, the joke may have been funny in 1987.
Everything is ugly.
This is not the worst looking NES game out there, but it’s pretty bad. The screen is split in two with a big empty space on the bottom that basically just displays the title and Sunsoft. If you are playing a two player game the blank area will become the gameplay area for your friend. Good luck getting someone to play this with you by the way.
Now the NES isn’t exactly known for it’s varied color pallet, but somehow the devs chose combinations of colors that make everything look washed out. I guess it’s commendable that Xenophobe stands out, but it’s not good when everything looks like different variations of puke. It’s also difficult to tell what you are looking at sometimes. Aliens drop skulls every so often, but they look like rocks. Speaking of the aliens, they all look like they were copied from movies. That’s ok, games do that all the time, but these aliens look like a kid drew them. If you are going to steal ideas at least do a good job of it.
One thing I will say in Xenophobe’s defense is there was at least an attempt to add some variety to the stages. Some areas are just generic space stations, while others are on icy worlds, and others still look like they are alien nests filled with gooey xeno eggs. If you actually bother to explore you’ll even see that there was some attempt at making the chambers of the space stations interesting.
Shoot alien, pick up object, repeat.
There is not much to this game at all. You enter a space station, shoot the critters inside, pick up the stuff they drop, get beamed off the station before it explodes, and repeat the process for all eternity or until you get bored enough play something else. Granted, players will find different guns, some of which are very powerful, and bombs to chuck at the aliens, but whether or not they drop is random.
The aliens themselves present little in the way of challenge once you figure out how to duck and jump over them. Even the Snotterpiller, which is the toughest of the aliens, is easy to defeat once you figure it out. And yes, I think Snotterpiller is a funny name and that’s why I found two excuses to use it in this review.
If anything, the most challenge you’re going to get from this title is figuring out the controls. The alien hunters handle like wet noodles with the sort of sloppy, delayed movement that is a hallmark of bad 8-bit games. Simple actions like ducking require the player to hold the A Button and press Down instead of just pressing Down for some reason and I am not exactly sure how to throw bombs even after playing for hours.
Then there’s the weapons, oh the weapons. Each bounty hunter starts with a basic gun that does next to zero damage. He can’t aim up or at angles and can only shoot low slung aliens by crouching. Like I said, none of the enemies are that hard to deal with, so it doesn’t really add any challenge, it just makes fighting more tedious. If you are lucky an alien may randomly drop a better gun…or they might drop the same crappy gun you start with. The latter happened to me a lot.
The upgraded guns have some variety to them. One gun shoots rapidly, but the game only allows you to have three or four shots on screen so don’t get carried away there, cowboy. Another has less range, but shoots powerful lightning bolts, which are the most cliche lightning bolts I’ve seen. The final gun shoots fire or a cloud, I don’t know, and has really short range. Luckily it’s super powerful.
All in all the weapons help the game out, but the fact that they are totally random sucks. There’s no strategy to getting a new gun, you just have to shoot boring aliens until one drops. If you are unlucky, the weak gun will drop and if you are clumsy you may accidentally pick it up, which is undesirable if you have a better weapon. To add insult to injury, the game will take your upgraded gun at the end of the stage, because it hates you.
The alien hunters can also find bombs, which look like the old cartoon bombs with the fuse except they are white for some reason. At first I thought the bombs were more trash loot, but you can throw them to deal mega-damage. On top of that, you have to aim them carefully because they travel in a very slow and awkward arc. So the whole operation is clunky and you’re probably better off not using them.
Better clear those xenos bro!
The entire point of the game is to clear each space station of aliens before it blows up then do it again forever. There’s no ending and the score maxes out at 9,999,990 or something. Things get confusing, because one of two things can happen in a stage: you run the clock down and have to teleport out or you win a shiny ball for killing enough aliens. If you kill enough aliens to get the ball, you get bonus points and some extra health. It’s cool if you don’t get the ball, you just don’t get extra points or health. I almost wish they would have made failing to kill all the aliens a Game Over scenario, because it would have at least made maxing out the score kind of meaningful. Just to make the game more tedious, all the things you pick up are very slowly tallied up at the end of each stage. It’s like they were punishing players for succeeding.
At least there’s Dr. Kwack.
If there’s one thing I love about this game it’s Dr. Kwack. He’s a humanoid duck with a gun, enough said.
The music could have been good.
There’s no music in this game aside from a few brief jingles that play on the title screen and before the start of each stage. It’s a shame, because I kind of liked the jingles. They sound a bit like something Rush would do if they composed game soundtracks. Of course, having some nice music would have made the game more enjoyable and we can’t have that. There’s also sound effects, but they are the super generic out of the box ones that you hear in all of the low quality NES games.
For shame Sunsoft, fooooor shaaaame!
One of the things that kills me is this is a Sunsoft game. They made some good stuff like Batman and Blaster Master. Well they also made Xenophobe, Platoon, Fester’s Quest, and other bad games, so I guess they have a spotty track record. At the end of the day, there’s not much reason to play this one unless you’re trying out all of the NES games or something. However, there is a certain sense of nostalgia for the early days of the console that comes with firing this puppy up. But that’s another strange thing about this title: it resembles some of the games that were made much earlier in the console’s life span rather than 1988, which was when the NES was really hitting its stride. That’s all I have to say, don’t say I didn’t warn you should you decide to play Xenophobe.
Thanks for reading my review of Xenophobe for the NES!
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