X-Out: Resurfaced

[BulletMagnet]

I never played the original myself, but in any event it's getting a remake.

[Bassa-Bassa]

What's been "remade"? The HUD?

[Lander]

My god that's a lot of bloom.

The refreshed Huelsbeck soundtrack should be good - one of the (many) audio juggernauts of the demoscene era.

[Jeneki]

Looks quite a bit zoomed out compared to the original, with no scrolling up/down anymore. Would like to tone down the fake CRT filters if there's an option to do so though; I've never been a fan of those.

[MJR]

That's not a remake, merely a touch up with filters.

Had they brought in the original pixel artist and redone the original graphics with larger resolution, then we could have called it a remake.

This being said, original was quite decent although I was put off by difficulty balancing, like with most amiga games. You either ended up with underpowered craft which lost all three lives fast, or overpowered craft with only one life, which you lost when you slammed a wall by accident.

Xenon 2 (which is much maligned in this board) had much, much better playability (and graphics too). Only thing X-out had going for itself was very smooth framerate with lot of colors which was very unusual for the amiga.

[Herr Schatten]

Had they brought in the original pixel artist and redone the original graphics with larger resolution, then we could have called it a remake.

The original artist is dead, sadly.

As for the game, the original wasn’t good at all. Production values were great, obviously, but little care went into the gameplay and level designs. The few interesting ideas, like buying ships and weapons with your score, got old fast.

I'd be perfectly happy to get Z-Out on modern devices, preferably with no 'enhancements' whatsoever, but this I’ll give a pass.

[MJR]

Had they brought in the original pixel artist and redone the original graphics with larger resolution, then we could have called it a remake.

The original artist is dead, sadly.

As for the game, the original wasn’t good at all. Production values were great, obviously, but little care went into the gameplay and level designs. The few interesting ideas, like buying ships and weapons with your score, got old fast.

I'd be perfectly happy to get Z-Out on modern devices, preferably with no 'enhancements' whatsoever, but this I’ll give a pass.

Oh, didnt know that


I agree that Z-out is far superior game. In fact, I still fire up my original from time to time.

[Daytime Waitress]

My god that's a lot of bloom.

The refreshed Huelsbeck soundtrack should be good - one of the (many) audio juggernauts of the demoscene era.

Thanks for finding the silver lining there: Huelsbeck is an absolute beast.

Also, who do I petition to have "bloom slapped on sprites" added to the Geneva Convention? I thought Squeenix was committing atrocities with some of their remakes but holy hell...

[MJR]

My god that's a lot of bloom.

The refreshed Huelsbeck soundtrack should be good - one of the (many) audio juggernauts of the demoscene era.

Thanks for finding the silver lining there: Huelsbeck is an absolute beast.

Also, who do I petition to have "bloom slapped on sprites" added to the Geneva Convention? I thought Squeenix was committing atrocities with some of their remakes but holy hell...

Oh, that's the traditional magpie syndrome with some game developers. I've witnessed it for few decades.
Basically, if you have no grasp of arts or graphic design, but you need to tart the visuals up somehow, what to do ?
You apply shine and glow and bloom of course. And BOOM! Everything is "better"

[PerishedFraud ឵឵]

New soundtrack eh? That should be good at least.

[Marc]

Don't think ever played it on Amiga, but it was fun on C64, in the day of course. And the soundtrack.....

[Lander]

I wonder if the OST will have such range as Turrican's rocking desert followed by a soothing bath

Oh, that's the traditional magpie syndrome with some game developers. I've witnessed it for few decades.
Basically, if you have no grasp of arts or graphic design, but you need to tart the visuals up somehow, what to do ?
You apply shine and glow and bloom of course. And BOOM! Everything is "better"

I recall a game show interview that went along the lines of "Why did you use a blur filter to upscale this port of an old game?" / "Because it wouldn't be high definition otherwise". A dubious gem from HD's early years

[Barba]

Call me a hater, but I fear I may have been able to live a long and happy life without this remake.

[Shatterhand]

I remember disliking this game so much back in the day. I've bought games in the past JUST because they had soundtrack by Huelsbeck.

And like has been said, a Z-Out remake would be a lot more welcomed.

[BuckoA51]

I really liked the C64 version when I was a kid, never beat it but got pretty far, apparently the Amiga version which this is based on wasn't as good though?

One thing I hoped they'd include is a way to try out your weapon configurations. X-Out's shop was kind of its selling point and while it was fun to a certain extent to mess with different weapon configurations, if you got it badly wrong you were ramping up the difficulty in an already kinda difficult euroshmup, so not much fun.

Just the chance to fly the craft with the weapon config on a blank screen would have been great... o well. I pre-ordered it anyway for the nostalgia, at least this time I won't have to contend with cassette loading times!

[repoman]

EDIT:

Annoyingly this game seems bugged. When I kill the final boss of Stage 2, the game doesn't move on. I'm just stuck in that area, able to move and shoot, but unable to progress.

[NAVVARR]

I'm put off by the price hike. They seem to have premium priced it. I have the original anyway.

[Dazzymank]

Just picked this up on PS5. Weirdly it wasn't on main store (UK) it was part of PSN exclusive discounts.

[BuckoA51]

My copy arrived today. I played on PS5 and didn't have any issues with the 2nd level boss.

So what to make of this one, well on the positive side the widescreen mode is nice and gives you quite a bit more room to maneuver. The remastered music is nice but I'd definitely recommend turning down the SFX to about 50% in the menu as they are kind of annoying and drown out the lovely music. You can totally have the original Amiga MOD music too if you like, complete with that hard left/right channel panning the Amiga always did, though not the C64 SID soundtrack which honestly is often better.

The graphics do have a lot of bloom on them, I didn't mind this, there's no graphics filters though, I should probably try it on the Morph sometime to get some nice scanlines in there it'd look pretty lush I think.

Is it a good game though? Well, honestly no.. I mean it's not awful or anything, and it has some excellent ideas but....

1) The most obnoxious thing about this game is that while your craft has shields, one tiny hit of the scenery will insta-kill you. So you can survive literal enemy bullets but graze the bottom of a stalactite and you're ended.

2) The bosses are terrible. The only difficult one is the first one and that's only because you're weak and his main attack is to literally ram you with his big head which moves faster than you can and moves in an unpredictable way. The final boss is a joke, with a decent weapon load out you can just sit in one place shooting the little mechs he launches and it's over.. there's no timer either so you don't even have to worry if you're only hitting him with a weaker sub weapon.

3) Going back to 1, the game quickly unlocks for you the option to turn off insta-death if you so much as graze any background scenery. This makes the game much more fun but also actually makes it very easy. I literally just finished it now, and I'm NOT a good shmupper, I'm probably one of the most casual shmup players on here having maybe 1ccd like 2 shmups in my life maybe (I was close on Deashsmiles but for that bastard dragon at the end lol)

So your basic choice is play the original game which is only challenging for stupid reasons, or the much more enjoyable modern game which can be easily completed by a casual player.

4) The shop... this was the games main gimmick originally, it's much better now there are descriptions for the weapons etc and what they do, but as I said in an earlier post, what you really need is a sandbox to try them all out in. Since you can only try out weapons in a level the best strategy is to stick with what works. It's like the game gives you all these toys to experiment with then basically punishes you for actually trying to experiment a lot of the time.

Did I enjoy my playthrough?, yes I absolutely did, but I can't recommend this one unless you have nostalgia for the original honestly. It's far from awful (and as someone who grew up with C64 and Amiga, I wasn't exactly spoiled with a lot of really good shmups as a kid) but if it launched now as an indie title rather than as a remake capitalising on nostalgia I don't think it'd score very highly, maybe a 5 or 6. It should be half the price they're asking for too really.

So yeah, TLDR, only folks nostalgic for the original need apply.

[Marc]

Does it include the C64 version as the trailer seems to suggest? If so, I'll cave at some point, but not at £16.00.

[BuckoA51]

Unless it's a hidden unlockable then no, no C64 version.

[Herr Schatten]

That’s a pity. In this case the C64 version is actually more enjoyable than the Amiga one. It also has really lovely SID renditions of the music.

You said the only boss that gave you trouble was the first one. In the original version, once the head detaches, you can just retreat to the upper left corner, and he can never reach you. If you have a downward firing weapon, you can then just sit there until he goes down. Did they fix this?

Also, do you still respawn in the middle of scenery if you're unkucky? I had many a spare ship insta-killed in the original this way.

[repoman]

My copy arrived today. I played on PS5 and didn't have any issues with the 2nd level boss.

They fixed this with the day one patch. I reported it to them a few days before and they were already aware of the issue.

(I got the game as a review code)

[NAVVARR]

I just don't get- you buy a physical game then it get patched- instantly negating the whole point of owning an up to date physical copy of a game.

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

That’s a pity. In this case the C64 version is actually more enjoyable than the Amiga one. It also has really lovely SID renditions of the music.

You said the only boss that gave you trouble was the first one. In the original version, once the head detaches, you can just retreat to the upper left corner, and he can never reach you. If you have a downward firing weapon, you can then just sit there until he goes down. Did they fix this?

You can select the SID soundtrack in the options menu. The game also has paralax scrolling, so everything good about the C64 version is included.

You are no longer safe in the top corner from the skull but the game has been made far easier in other areas. World 2 snakes can now be shot down and will no longer chase you indefinitely, level 6 boss had a safespot added. the one-hit attacks like the squid boss's fireballs do very little damage now.

The autofire rate has been capped (perhaps intentionally) so now the "Teuton Laser" is the most powerful option for your satellites. Autofire rate has not been capped for the dropable drones so you can mash out some extremely high damage. Teuton Laser does not equip your drones with the laser, despite saying it does so in the tooltip.

[MJR]

My copy arrived today. I played on PS5 and didn't have any issues with the 2nd level boss.

So what to make of this one, well on the positive side the widescreen mode is nice and gives you quite a bit more room to maneuver. The remastered music is nice but I'd definitely recommend turning down the SFX to about 50% in the menu as they are kind of annoying and drown out the lovely music. You can totally have the original Amiga MOD music too if you like, complete with that hard left/right channel panning the Amiga always did, though not the C64 SID soundtrack which honestly is often better.

The graphics do have a lot of bloom on them, I didn't mind this, there's no graphics filters though, I should probably try it on the Morph sometime to get some nice scanlines in there it'd look pretty lush I think.

Is it a good game though? Well, honestly no.. I mean it's not awful or anything, and it has some excellent ideas but....

1) The most obnoxious thing about this game is that while your craft has shields, one tiny hit of the scenery will insta-kill you. So you can survive literal enemy bullets but graze the bottom of a stalactite and you're ended.

2) The bosses are terrible. The only difficult one is the first one and that's only because you're weak and his main attack is to literally ram you with his big head which moves faster than you can and moves in an unpredictable way. The final boss is a joke, with a decent weapon load out you can just sit in one place shooting the little mechs he launches and it's over.. there's no timer either so you don't even have to worry if you're only hitting him with a weaker sub weapon.

3) Going back to 1, the game quickly unlocks for you the option to turn off insta-death if you so much as graze any background scenery. This makes the game much more fun but also actually makes it very easy. I literally just finished it now, and I'm NOT a good shmupper, I'm probably one of the most casual shmup players on here having maybe 1ccd like 2 shmups in my life maybe (I was close on Deashsmiles but for that bastard dragon at the end lol)

So your basic choice is play the original game which is only challenging for stupid reasons, or the much more enjoyable modern game which can be easily completed by a casual player.

4) The shop... this was the games main gimmick originally, it's much better now there are descriptions for the weapons etc and what they do, but as I said in an earlier post, what you really need is a sandbox to try them all out in. Since you can only try out weapons in a level the best strategy is to stick with what works. It's like the game gives you all these toys to experiment with then basically punishes you for actually trying to experiment a lot of the time.

Did I enjoy my playthrough?, yes I absolutely did, but I can't recommend this one unless you have nostalgia for the original honestly. It's far from awful (and as someone who grew up with C64 and Amiga, I wasn't exactly spoiled with a lot of really good shmups as a kid) but if it launched now as an indie title rather than as a remake capitalising on nostalgia I don't think it'd score very highly, maybe a 5 or 6. It should be half the price they're asking for too really.

So yeah, TLDR, only folks nostalgic for the original need apply.

This sounds very familiar. I was very persistent with many amiga games back in the day (I even completed all Shadow of the Beast games without cheats on original disks). But I never played X-out that much, because it was just so obnoxious on Amiga.

[crazydave22]

EDIT:

Annoyingly this game seems bugged. When I kill the final boss of Stage 2, the game doesn't move on. I'm just stuck in that area, able to move and shoot, but unable to progress.

Are you playing on Switch?

Does anyone know whether the physical Switch version has this bug?

[system11]

I'm really liking this but shocked there's no way to turn off the bloom, it's heavily overcooked. I always preferred this to Z-Out. Agreed on the SFX/music mix, they got it totally wrong and 50% is perfect. Definitely one for the nostalgic.

[system11]

I just don't get- you buy a physical game then it get patched- instantly negating the whole point of owning an up to date physical copy of a game.

Completely valid - it's not like this is a difficult game to test - I noticed the Amiga high score music is missing in jukebox too, it's just silent.

[Turrican]

not having played the game, I will say the worst part of the package is not having a digital PS4 edition. I even had an exchange with some ININ guy about this, but the excuses seemed half-baked.

Leaving a platform like PS4 in the cold for a niche project such as this put the devs in a really bad light.