''Project-X'' is a horizontally scrolling shooter for the Amiga released in 1992. It was developed and published by

Team17 Team17 Group plc is a British video game developer and publisher based in Wakefield, England. The venture was created in December 1990 through the merger of British publisher 17-Bit Software and Swedish developer Team 7. At the time, the two co ...

. The game resembles

Konami , is a Japanese multinational video game and entertainment company headquartered in Chūō, Tokyo, it also produces and distributes trading cards, anime, tokusatsu, pachinko machines, slot machines, and arcade cabinets. Konami has casino ...

's side-scrolling shooter games such as ''

Gradius is a series of shooter video games, introduced in 1985, developed and published by Konami for a variety of portable, console and arcade platforms. In many games in the series, the player controls a ship known as the Vic Viper. Games *''Scra ...

'', ''

Salamander Salamanders are a group of amphibians typically characterized by their lizard-like appearance, with slender bodies, blunt snouts, short limbs projecting at right angles to the body, and the presence of a tail in both larvae and adults. All t ...

'' and ''

Parodius is a series of cute 'em ups developed and published by Konami. The games are tongue-in-cheek parodies of ''Gradius'', and also feature characters from many other Konami franchises. Video games There are six games in the Parodius series. The last ...

''. It was ported to

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

Plot

Taking place many years in the future in colonized space, military scientists have disposed of countless, defective military droids on an un-colonized terrestrial planet called Ryxx. The droids eventually become sentient and, by way of revenge, start an attack against mankind, using a station to continually create more war machines. It is the player's mission to undergo Project X and eliminate the droid forces.

Gameplay

Players control a spacecraft of their choice, battling hundreds of alien ships. Various power-ups, numerous in the first level but increasingly rare afterwards, permit an exponential increase of the spacecraft's seven different weapons (Guns, Buildup, Side Shots, Homing Missiles, Plasma, Magma, and Laserbeam). The game is composed of five levels. Many players never completed the second one (which had a very difficult ending), and most of the rest never went past level three. When Team17 realized this, they released ''Project-X SE'' on

Amiga CD32 The Amiga CD32 (stylized as Amiga CD32, code-named "Spellbound") is a 32-bit home video game console developed by Commodore and released in Europe, Australia, Canada, and Brazil. It was first announced at the Science Museum in London on July 16, ...

, a special edition with the difficulty toned down. It was released as a budget game. A hack for the original game to enable the player to skip levels by holding down the fire button and pressing the escape key was also distributed on the coverdisks of several Amiga magazines.

Reception

According to '' Next Generation'', ''Project-X'' was immensely successful in Europe, but only sold in moderate numbers in the U.S. ''Amiga Computing'' called it one of the best shooter games for that platform at the time, both for its technical excellence in graphics and sounds, and for its difficult and interesting gameplay.

Legacy

The game was followed by a PlayStation-only sequel, titled '' X2''. The game was parodied in one level of Team17's own '' Superfrog'', as ''Project-F'' (with the 'F' presumably standing for "Frog"), even going as far as using a remixed version of the original game's theme tune.

References

{{Team17 1992 video games Amiga games Amiga CD32 games DOS games Horizontally scrolling shooters Team17 games Video games scored by Allister Brimble Video games developed in the United Kingdom Multiplayer and single-player video games Science fiction video games