Xeon
A Review by Paul Harrington
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I reviewed the original version of Xeon years ago on Castle Paradox, and was, to say the least, extremely let down. There was very little compelling to the game, but I know that even bad games can become great with time, so when I saw that The Dude had updated Xeon for 2007, I decided it would be worth checking out, if only because few people keep up work on a game for so long. I applaud him for this.

The first thing I noticed was that the game's title was spelled incorrectly when I was choosing it from the Game.EXE launcher. I thought that perhaps he had intentionally changed it to Xion, but the title screen told me otherwise, where it was spelled Xeon again. I also immediately noticed that "i" was only sometimes capitalized in the opening text, setting off alarms immediately.

Graphically, the game has improved, but only in certain areas. The maptiles seem to have improved from the previous version, but are still fairly average, while the walkabout graphics are still terrible. The first NPCs you meet are still palette swaps of your hero!

Minor spelling errors are easy to overlook, but this game is dripping with them. In your menu screen alone, you have some words capitalized and others not, inventory spelled "Invitory," and your character's name isn't even capitalized. On a good note, the old, Atari style sound effects made me smile.

The game began, and I was given my objective; Get some maple syrup. Will do, boss. You're automatically driven to the forest after leaving your house, and I ran into an unwinnable battle along the way. I faced three enemies who I could only do asingle point of damage to and who could drain my health two points at a time. Your character, in spite of having a "Heal" menu, has no spells and no recovery items, making this battle impossible. I can only assume I wasn't supposed to fight yet, and that the author forgot to disable battles during plot scenes. I ran away from the battle, talked to a robotic box, and the plot advanced in a poorly spelled mess of an explanation.

The robot takes you onto his ship, and again, the author forgot to use "suspend" commands, because you can screw things up by walking around between text boxes. On the ship, you are shown a treasure box and told how to open it, but are not allowed to do so. You are shown three panels and given explanations for what they do, but you are not allowed to use them. You are then forced into an incredibly slow, long battle where you have no option but holding the enter key until you win. The robot tells you to hold escape to run away if it gets tough, yet you are prevented from doing so if you try.

After this training session, I was warped back to the forest and instantly killed by an NPC who was wandering around during a scripted scene. Again, I cannot believe this game doesn't use any "suspend" commands. How was this not noticed in testing?

I normally would quit right here, but I wanted to give the game another chance. I returned to the robot, but this time did not talk to him. I wandered away in search of anything that could help me not instantly die, and found a "strange token" that has no use yet, an obscenely high encounter rate with enemies I have no chance of harming, and a single Herb. I also discovered that the crystal Fyona's mother gives her in the game's opening teaches you a healing spell, although from the description (magic curing power) I assumed it would recover MP. There is also a shop that sells healing supplies, which would be incredibly useful if you could access it BEFORE being forced into unwinnable battles. Also, the fact that only one of three buildings in the first village has a visible door confuses me deeply.

After fighting the robot's training battle for a second time, I was again instantly killed by the NPC who runs his ass off to catch you the second that cutscene ends. I really wanted to give this game a chance because I know a lot of time has been put into it, but I simply can't. Aside from some improved enemy and map graphics, the game hasn't become any better than it was two years ago. I don't see how its author could have played it before releasing it; the game's major problems are so immediate and easy to fix that they should have been solved years ago.

I've played a lot of amateur RPGs with unwinnable opening battles, and I simply don't understand. Have these people never played any RPG before? Did they have fun playing their own game? Was this all a joke to torture the player? If it's the later, The Dude has my respect. If not, I strongly, strongly recommend he recruit some playtesters next time and try using a spell checker. There is no excuse for this game's atrocious spelling and grammar, which is significantly worse than you see even in joke games.

If there is another release, I will still give it a try, because I never like to give up completely. I just hope that next time, I can progress beyond the opening scenes.