Xenon 2: Megablast

Xenon 2 is a piece of my childhood on the Atari ST. Back then we didn’t have a term for “vertical scrolling shoot ’em up” — we just called it “the game where you shoot everything” — and this one had something extra the others didn’t.

The ship you build between levels

The big idea in Xenon 2 is the Megablast shop between each level: with the money earned in-game, you buy weapons, shields, and modules that literally attach themselves to your ship. No two runs play out with the same loadout, giving a genuine sense of progression, well before that word became a marketing buzzword for every game.

The ship can even transform into a ground-rolling tank on certain sections of the level — a fairly bold gameplay choice for the time, which breaks the classic vertical-shooter rhythm without ever feeling gimmicky.

A one-of-a-kind sound and visual identity

You can’t talk about Xenon 2 without mentioning its music, composed by Bomb the Bass — one of the very first video game soundtracks to actually sound like an electronic club track rather than an 8-bit jingle. On the Atari ST, running through the YM2149 sound chip, the result had a character you won’t find anywhere else.

Visually, the parallax backgrounds and the roster of biomechanical bosses clearly bear the Bitmap Brothers’ signature — an English studio with a sense of style that would show up again later in Speedball and The Chaos Engine.

I never actually finished Xenon 2 back then — the difficulty was merciless and continues were limited. But it’s one of the games I think back to most often, and I still fire it up under emulation from time to time, if only for the music.