Fixeight
released on May 01, 1992
Fixeight is a run-and-gun arcade game made by Toaplan in 1992. It is the Spiritual Sequel to "Out Zone." The plot is rather simple: Your character is sent to the alien planet Fortune to destroy it, and with it the Gozzu invasion of our universe. As a follow-up to Out Zone, Fixeight fixes many of the problems that its predecessor had. The main gimmick of the game are the eight unique characters, each of which have different weapons in their arsenal.
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A few main flaws hold this game back in a pretty big way:
1) The character balance is absolutely awful. A free-aiming shot, especially one that is narrow, needs to be extremely high damage to make up for its shortcomings and the amount of difficulty and danger necessary just to aim it at popcorn enemies.
2) The powerups are not only just random, but you can't even see what they are before picking them up. This might not be nearly as annoying if they were just objective upgrades, but one of the most common drops is a """special""" weapon that is a completely worthless penalty weapon for vast majority of characters, that you can't swap out of until you get to a weapon change panel.
3. While Out Zone (another similar Toaplan game) has an intuitive and transparent energy system that you replenish through pickups to encourage you to keep moving forward at a brisk pace, FixEight has a completely invisible energy system with no energy pickups. You just have to maintain an extremely fast pace, because if you slow down even briefly, you may run out of invisible energy. If the "Go Ahead!" text appears, you are basically already screwed even if you sprint forward with wreckless abandon, and the game will spawn two giant spike balls that will mean almost certain death.
The game has decent level design and bosses, a good scoring system, and the characters are varied with interesting and unique playstyles (even if they could definitely use some rebalancing), but these flaws just really hold the game back from reaching the same quality of Out Zone for example.
1) The character balance is absolutely awful. A free-aiming shot, especially one that is narrow, needs to be extremely high damage to make up for its shortcomings and the amount of difficulty and danger necessary just to aim it at popcorn enemies.
2) The powerups are not only just random, but you can't even see what they are before picking them up. This might not be nearly as annoying if they were just objective upgrades, but one of the most common drops is a """special""" weapon that is a completely worthless penalty weapon for vast majority of characters, that you can't swap out of until you get to a weapon change panel.
3. While Out Zone (another similar Toaplan game) has an intuitive and transparent energy system that you replenish through pickups to encourage you to keep moving forward at a brisk pace, FixEight has a completely invisible energy system with no energy pickups. You just have to maintain an extremely fast pace, because if you slow down even briefly, you may run out of invisible energy. If the "Go Ahead!" text appears, you are basically already screwed even if you sprint forward with wreckless abandon, and the game will spawn two giant spike balls that will mean almost certain death.
The game has decent level design and bosses, a good scoring system, and the characters are varied with interesting and unique playstyles (even if they could definitely use some rebalancing), but these flaws just really hold the game back from reaching the same quality of Out Zone for example.