LISTEN here, puss faces. You thought you'd wiped me out two years ago. Don't deny it, I heard you. But while the scum ball group of soldiers that you call your army was celebrating its so-called victory, I rounded up what was left of my crack Xenite troops, slid past your unguarded ships and flew home. Ha-har.

In truth the victory was mine. Because since that fateful day not one moment has been wasted in rebuilding my mega fighting force. And now I'm back.
Some are calling me a bad loser. I don't care. There are no prizes for coming second. This time I will win. First place. Numero Uno. There is no doubt in my diseased mind. Let there be no doubt in yours.

I've planted five bombs through history. Yes, the very fabric of time is about to explode into a quintillion million tiny pieces. Nothing you can do can stop it. Nothing. I'm too strong, you see - too organised this time. Ha-har. This is no playground scrap. Go home kiddies. Shove off. You've got no chances.

It's no good coming at me in that thing you call a Megablaster, even if you have got five of them. Don't waste your time. I'll blow you away. Small but perfectly formed? Ha! It's pathetic. Pah! I spit on your Megablaster. Pah! A great, green gob. Now what you gonna do? Eh?

Don't bother buying equipment off Crispin the shopkeeper. Or selling it to him. Ha-har. He's a bigger thief than I am. Ha-har. Anyway, you've no money. To get cash you'll have to kill my agents and pick up the scraps they let fall. No chance. They don't die easily. And they won't listen to reason.

There are thousands and thousands of them. From the lowest form of life in pre-historic times through to metallic mayhem in the space ways of centuries yet to come. There is nothing, do you hear, nothing you can do.

But what's this? How long have you been able to reverse down my screen? My espionage network didn't inform me of this. B....r. This calls for a rethink...

I know - I'll put a large guardian the end of every stage. And on the last four levels I stick one half way through as well. Ha-har! You'll never get through all of them. And if just one bomb is left... When the fuse runs out... Kaboom! It's KYAG time.

I don't give a damn if your Zapper can eradicate everything on the screen in a blinding flash of light. No. What care I if your Side Shot causes bullets to emit from the left and right of your ship.

Pah! I spit on your Electroball, ha-har, which sticks to your ship until you hold down the fire button. I play lipball with your mines, (Xenites don't have feet - Ed), laugh at your Speed-up stripes, and spit my rotting stumps of teeth at your Super Nashwan Power. I say Pah! To the lot of them.

My Brachiopods will wiggle deep into your ears and suck out your brains. My crusty-skinned Trilobytes will shoot your paltry defences to pieces. The probing appendage of my Nautilus will launch indestructible mines into your path. The powerful radiation emitted by the time bombs has mutated these once harmless beings into crazed aggressors. They eat little boys like you for breakfast.

I can't lose. You see I'm too fast, too smooth, too evil. And this time I've brought with me the most awesome army of agents the Amiga computer has ever seen, coupled with sound effects to break your eardrums. Nothing can stop me. The universe will be mine. Mine, do you hear, all mine.
And all crammed on to two discs with music by Bomb the Bass.

There's only one thing wrong with gaining a reputation (dubious or otherwise), and that's having to live up to it.

The Bitmap Brothers certainly have a reputation to live up to: a very good one, after the high standards they set with their earlier releases Xenon and Speedball. These darlings of the press (have you every noticed how it's almost impossible to flick through a computer mag without seeing them in pop star pose at some bash or other?) have decided that gamers want a good ol' blast, and reckon they can deliver the goods with Xenon 2: Megablast.

'Megablast' is actually the name of your ship in this five stage vertically-scrolling shoot-em-up where it's just you against the Xenites. You remember the Xenies, don't you? Well they remember you, from the original Xenon game, and they haven't forgiven you either: which is why they've planted frive time bombs throughout history that need destroying. And yup, you're just the person for the job.

Your journey through the game follows the path of evolution with the aliens for each stage reflecting the period: from simple creatures dating back to prehistoric times up to and including metallic nasties from future space.

As you would expect, almost everything is aggressive so it's best to blast everything that moves and anything that doesn't, too. Initially you're armed with a front-firing gun, but extra weapons can be collected by shooting and collecting power-up symbols that occasionally appear on screen. By far the best method though is to collect the small bubbles that appear on screen after certain aliens or waves of aliens have been destroyed. Why? Because these bubbles are actually money that can be spent in the weapons shops that lie halfway through and at the end of each level.

There's an impressive array of weapons available, from things like side-shot and rear-firing cannon to missiles launchers and lasers. And, as you might expect, the more destructive the weapon, the more it costs: so keep going after those cash bubbles!

And those extra weapons are going to come in handy once you come across the end- (and, later in the game, mid- too) of-level guardians. But beware: you may find you've just splashed out on a porky rear cannon to find the next level crawling with aliens that cling to the sides of the scenery, so life can seem a little unfair at times.

There are a couple of things going for you, though. Every time you lose a life you restart with all the extra weapons you'd collected and there are a couple of 'continue game' options too. And to make a nice change, the scenery doesn't kill you no matter how often you bash into it.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND

Well, with the intro and in-game music written by Bomb The Bass, it should be, and is, good. The effects are fine too, though not as impressive. As you must have seen from the demo of the game on this month's Coverdisk, the graphics are terrific. Not only are they well-drawn and colourful, but everything in the game moves quickly and surprisingly smoothly.
A winner in the graphics department.

JUDGEMENT

The age-old problem: it's just another shoot-em-up, some would say, and there are plenty of them around already. So what makes this stand out? The gameplay. It's fast, furious, addictive, tough, playable and it sounds and looks fantastic. Xenon 2 has everything a shoot-em-up needs and more besides, making it arguably the best of its type to appear to date and a definite 'must purchase' for anyone who doesn't mind wasting the odd hour or two enjoying some mindless blasting. A word of advice though, make sure your joystick has very rapid auto fire; life can be hell otherwise.

If anyone approaches rock celebrity status in the software world, it has to be the Bitmaps. It's something they've managed to archieve effectively in the space of three games. Speedball is their most famous, but Xenon II revives their first, a shoot'em up which turned heads for its excellent sonics and graphics when it was released over eighteen months ago.

Xenon II pursues the relentless quest for an arcade quality schoot'em up on the Amiga, and it's probably the closest yet. Like its predecessor it's a vertically scrolling blast, with an array of nasties and a ship which, when you've bolted every available addition onto it, is awesomely destructive.

The element which strikes your senses first though is its sound. The promised mix of Tim Simenon's 'Megablast' is every bit as potent as the original cut, and, married to the sound effects, makes this game to play with the sound jacked right up.

You won't find much that's new in Xenon II. The elements that have gone into it are tried and tested. It's the execution that saves it. Progress through each of the five levels is hampered by the presence of a bewildering mass of enemy characters ranging from metallic droids, symbiotic spheres and prehistroic crustaceans. Weird ammonities and trilobites zoom in and out of the screen and attempt to ram the ship and occasionally the screen is dense with activity. To its credit you can still see what's going on though.

At the end of each level there's a large guardian waiting. Each needs to be approached and finished off in a specific way, but unlike some of the ones which dwelled in the original they can at least be tackled and overcome. Inspiration for some definitely comes from R-Type with hugh winding snakelike protectors which slide in and out of the guardian's tubes.

Every so often you'll be able to drop into a shop and buy and sell some weaponry. You can sell off items you've picked up on the way and use the cash to add to the credits you pick up as you destroy attack waves. There's at least twenty objects, side shots, power-ups, auto-fire electroball and nicest of all the 'dive' add-on, which allows you to flip underneath the parallax scrolling for ten seconds.

Graphically Xenon II is superb. The central sprite is clear, well-defined and large, as are the rest of the characters in the game. The guardians are huge and imaginitive, but it's the backgrounds and the colour which really make this game brilliant to watch. This is definitely arcade quality.

There are faults to be found with Xenon II. The necessity to have so much going on at one time means the game is slow. The scroll rate is just not fast enough and it can induce an element of tedium into the game. Also despite its impressive graphics and sound challenge somehow just isn't strong enough. Lack of variation might be the cause.

Despite these problems, there's little point denying that this isn't impressive stuff -it's what you bought an Amiga for. This is going to be a huge hit, and there's more.

Everybody knows who the Bitmap Brothers are. Everybody! If you don't, you either have been in solitary confinement or living in Hemel Hempstead for the last three years. They're three geezers who've been allocated their own shelf in the library of computer gaming history, because of titles like Xenon and Speedball - two of the hottest games ever. Now they're back (back back), and likely to earn not just another shelf, but an entire bookcase with their extraordinary new release on the Imageworks label - Xenon II - Megablast.

The scenario is as loopy as ever. Several evil blighters from the future have decided to take up a new terrorist YTS scheme. They've planed several bombs in five crucial periods in Earth's history, hoping to upset evolution and give Darwin something to think about. AND kill the entire human race to boot. You have been picked (being courageous, intelligent, gullible etc.) as the one-man crusader who's got to travel across the five time zones defusing the bombs in an attempt to save the world (again).

Xenon II is basically a standard (but I use this word loosely) vertically shoot 'em up with three levels of parallax scrolling (i.e. there's a real feeling of depth), in which you fly about in a spaceship. The creatures and scenery change with every time zone.

The first level is set in Palaeozoic times, atmospherically daubed with centipede-oranges, snail-yellows and granite-greys. The setting is a rocky catacomb, infested with over-sized creepy crawlies and bugs. The walls of the caverns are lined with deadly polyps, hydras and outgrowths which spit mines at you. Swirls of single-celled nasties continuously swoop down into the screen. The further you progress into the level, the higher the nasties seem to come on the evolutionary scale. Towards the end, trilobites and jellyfish make an appearance, followed by the ultimate confrontation with a massive Nautilus Shellfish, a very deadly crustacean with a cunning mine-spitting tendril - one to be avoided!

Level two is fraught with beetles and insects and earwigs; level three takes a leaf out of FisherMan Fred's Angling Almanac, being literally stuffed with eels and piranha. The next level is populated with dinosaurs; and then after a huge evolutional leap, we're in the future, characterised by the Bitmap's favourite metallic style graphics and spaceships.

Despite having primitive brains, most of the creatures over the levels are actually quite clever (some of them might even be distant ancestors of Bamber Gasgoine). Gone are the simple slowly-descend-down-the-screen beasties, or sedately-slide-infrom-the-side nasties - the Megablast aliens seem to have minds of their own. The flight paths are frighteningly complex and lead on from one another. Just when you're congratulating yourself on escaping wave number one, wave number two tumbles right into you.

LET'S GO SHOPPING
Shooting an entire attack-wave (or a particularly obnoxious end of level shellfish) eaves a bubble on screen. These bubbles serve as dosh, and are needed to buy weapons from the local corner shop, which you get to half way through and at the end of a level.

There's a whole armoury of sixteen add-ons available for the very rich Megablast player, but the poor scumbags (who have only collected three or four bubbles) have to make do with a meagre selection of outdated hardware. However, to whet your appetite, you can buy a 'taster' of the ship equipped with every weapon available - but this only lasts ten seconds, after which you revert to whatever weapons you had before buying it. The shops aren't the only way of obtaining weapons though - occasionally canisters drift across the screen - these must be shot and collected to provide vital upgrades.

Not only are there creatures to fight, there's inertia to grapple with too. When you want to stop moving left or right your ship still drifts. Although the affect is slight, it gives a good 'feel' to playing. Luckily, collision with walls and the various rocky outcrops is not fatal - you just bounce off, pinball style (or get stuck, if you've got a lorry load of add-ons protruding from your side). Another original feature is the retro-rockets option which in an emergency allows you to scroll the screen down to slip under an alien wave.

If points were only to be scored for originality here, then Xenon II might not fare so well - but that isn't really the case. It's implementation that's the name of the game, and what we have here, implementationally speaking (I can't find that one in my dictionary. Ed.), is a game that delivers a technical knockout to all the other contenders in the shoot 'em up genre. With its fab graphics, parallax scrolling, slick power-ups routines and instant addictiveness, it's basically the bees knees. 'Bees knees' - now there's a stupid expression - but you know what I mean.

Macca: A game of Megablast is a great spectator sport. It simply has the best graphics this side of the arcades. They are flawless, incredibly detailed, stylish, technicoloured (and all the over-used bum-licking superlative you can think of). Games like Blood Money spring to mind when you mention good graphics, but where Blood Money's sprites were slightly caricatured, Megablast's are realistic and seriously hateable...

While playing this game, for the first time ever, I actually hated a sprite. In one section I went completely crazy trying to kill the veined orange fungus balls that were attacking me. I loathed them. I despised them. I wanted to rip out their entrails and cook them in a white wine sauce. I wanted to kill them. And I did. Very satisfying it was too.

Speed always seems to be a problem when you're dealing with hyper-detailed, hyper-kinetic graphics. But Bros have settles this problem by having slow scrolling backgrounds and (very) fast nasties. What surprised me was that everything was animated, even the weapons. The laser turret's nozzle rotates, the retro-cannon pumps out bullets, even the extra-energy heart throbs. The attention to detail is superb.

The Amiga soundtrack is nothing short of awesome. Bros have enlisted the services of the maestro, David Whittaker, who has spliced the original record, and squeezed all of it into the Amiga. The entire game is worth buying just for the intro. I sat there and listened to the Bomb The Bass track at least three times before I could bring myself to even begin playing the game.

You can opt either for a funky scaled-down version of the tune to keep your pinkies tapping while you're playing, or the in-game sound effects. Every weapon has its own 'voice': the lasers frazzle, the missiles woosh and the guns bang (That's enough onomatopoeia. Ed). These voices become a cacophony when you try the "Super Nashwan Power" taster.

On the gameplay side, Xenon II is geared more towards playability. Instead of throwing you back to the beginning of the level on dying, you start from roughly where you died; you don't spontaneously combust if you collide into the scenery; instead of being ceremoniously stripped of your weaponry, you keep it. Plus there's the credit and energy bar system to prolong your game whilst increasing its lasting appeal and addictiveness.

After Xenon and Speedball Bros simply could do no wrong in my eyes. But now, after Xenon II, I want to have their babies.

Dunc: The Bitmap Brothers, eh? What a clever little trio of lads they are: Speedball was brill to the power two and Xenon was brill to the power three. The burning question was whether Xenon II would be brill to the power four. And, by cracky, it is. Everything about the game is, well... sheer class! "Slick" is one word that springs to mind. "Stunning" is another. As is "Sellotape" - but as seeing as sellotape's got nothing to do with the review we'll pass on that.

Anyway, as you all know, this game is a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up. The point is, however, what a totally brilliant, amazing, unbelievable (that's enough superlatives - Ed) vertically scrolling shoot 'em up it actually is. It's the crème de la crème. The battle between technical excellence and graphical excellence has resulted in a draw: the artwork is as good as anyone could hope for - and so is the animation.

This sequel takes all the bits out of the original Xenon and er, goes to the toilet on them. Colour is abundant, the three level parallax scrolling gives real depth to the backgrounds - which are a bit of a computer graphic masterpiece all by themselves. The nasties are designed and animated with sheer genius (and, no doubt, a hell of a lot of hard work) and the add-on weapons system is awesome: enabling you to build up from pea-shooter to 'super Nashwan power' (i.e. blast power so extreme that you fry everything before it even gets the chance to scroll down onto the screen).

The Bros seem to have learnt a little bit about addictiveness and playability since the first Xenon as well: most probably from the arcades - and in particular from R-Type. 'Out' is the "Oh brilliant, I've nearly got to the end of level two. Bang. Dead. Oh dear, I've got to start from the beginning of level one again.

Actually I think I'll watch Prisoner Cell Block H instead". 'In' is the staggered restart position system: you only go back to the last 'trigger point' of which there are several per level. 'Out' is the "Lost Three Lives - End Of Game". 'In' is the "Lost Three Lives - Do You Want To Continue Where You Left Off?". This transforms the learning curve from 'too hard too quickly for all but the highly skilled gamesplayer' into one that's tailormade for everybody. Even Ali from EastEnders could make progress, given a few months (Are you sure about that? Ed).

Now we get onto the music: a sampled Bomb The Bass track (.i.e Megablast) on the boot disk which becomes a computer generated mix of said track by David Whittaker in the main game. As all ST owners know, the Amiga has got a better sound chip, and the actual sampled soundtrack is what you get throughout the game. That's the only difference between the versions, but the way I see it is that you can always stick a Bomb The Bass 12 inch on your record deck and just select sound effects (which are rather good, incidentally) when playing. (I personally like to play the game to the wonderful Bermuda Triangle as sung by Barry Manilow, but that's just the sort of person I am).

An 'ironic' little footnote is, however, that Tim Semenon (of Bomb The Bass) actually writes his music with the aid of an ST - so if it wasn't for this wonderful machine the Amiga soundtrack wouldn't be as good as it is. Erm, so there. (Or something).

This bit is especially for those of you who only read the last paragraph of reviews to see the summing up. Firstly, you're a lazy sod. Secondly, Xenon II - Megablast IS as brilliant as you were expecting it to be. Maybe it's even better. Read the review properly.

The first Galactic Conflict broke out a thousand years ago on the US West Coast with the Amiga-based coin op Xenon. A single pilot saved the Federation then by defeating the Xenites and rescuing Captain Xod. The Xenites aren't ones to forgive and forget though, so with aid of the megahip Bitmap Brothers (who made lots of dosh converting the original war) they've kicked off the Second Galactic Conflict in revenge. Five Time Bombs have been planted in the Process of Evolution, a surreal dimension made up of five evolutionary phases.

Life started in the sea of course, so the first level is filled with sea anemones, tadpoles and a massive Nautilus Shellfish which resides at the end of the stage. Maddened by radiation from the Time bomb planted beside it, this horrendous crustacean is mega-dangerous! Level two sees the rise of the insects with beetles, flies and a massive, revolting spider gnashing its mandibles at you. As on all the levels but the first, this level has two massive creatures to be defeated so it's as well there's Crispin's Swop Shop.

The Real Cash deposited by blasted aliens can be collected and spent here.

You enter the shop automatically when you get so far in the game, and once Crispin turns off his Walkman trade begins. Firstly you can sell off any add-on weapons you've picked up or bought previously, typically Crispin will pay half what it costs to buy an item. Next you can choose what to bolt on your ship from a range of 24 hardware items. Many of the items, such as the vital speed-ups, shot power increase, energy recharge and cannon pod, can be picked up from debris of destroyed aliens. The hardcore, magablasting stuff has to be bought though. And prices are steep. 6000 for homing missiles, 4500 for mines, 5000 for a flamethrower.

What's more these awesome weapons can be built up together, and even duplicated. A taste of the possibilities is offered by the Super Nashwan Power, 600 for ten seconds of mega-blasting with a full kit of bolt-on weapons.

One of the most remarkable add-ons however, is 'Dive' which allows you to swoop down to the uninhabitated lower level scrolling beneath the main action. You can keep your head down here for up to ten seconds at a time, but while your're hiding the aliens multiply making it that much harder when you pop up.