Is Xyphoes Fantasy a good game?

[MartinJSUK]

On a technical level, Xyphoes Fantasy is surely one of the most impressive commercial-era Amstrad games. Superb sprites, smooth scrolling, music and sound effects together, both really good. It's clearly inspired by Shadow of the Beast from the Amiga, though with more gameplay features - multiple vertical levels with actual action happening, lasting weapon upgrades - and arguably even better enemy sprites. No other standard 8-bit can match all this. There's a few reasons why it might be relatively obscure - disk-only, the one game by a French ex-demo team, published by a company who did few CPC games, not converted to anything else, and seemingly never released in the UK. Is it as amazing as a quick glance suggest, or is the gameplay flawed?

[andycadley]

It's certainly technically impressive, but I can't say I was ever actually that enamoured with it as a game. Like Shadow of the Beast it just feels rather shallow.

And, perhaps more controversially, I wasn't ever that taken with the graphics. They look nice enough in static screenshots but the animation is a bit weird. The main character walks like he's just soiled himself and the bit with the horse feels completely disconnected from the scroll, given the impression it's gliding around waving it's legs frantically. Now horse animation is definitely not easy, but if you look at BTTF3, it's possible to do without quite such a strong disconnect.

[Gryzor]

To be honest I'm a bit weary of this discussion - SotB and the rest.

I mean, I can definitely see the point in criticising this kind of titles, but, come on! When we first saw SotB and our jaws collectively dropped, we *did* have fun playing it (well, not everyone's, but this goes for every game). Back then having an impressive-looking or -sounding title was fun on its own as we were exploring and discovering the medium. And yes there was criticism in the press back in the day for sure, but this didn't stop people from going crazy about it. I know I enjoyed SotB even on my 1040STFM which was no patch on the Amiga version (save the sound, which really gave me a great experience). And sure, nowadays we'll play it for a few minutes and immediately see its limitations, then leave it aside after marveling at its accomplishments for its era, but this doesn't mean it wasn't a good game overall back then.

Heck, I could argue that Atari's Video Music Box was so much fun I would have gladly spent countless hours watching it if I had one, despite its "gameplay" being limited to turning knobs:


Something similar with Xyphoe: I discovered it very late, in the 2000s I think, so by then I wasn't very impressed by what I saw as very pretty, yes, but not much else. This doesn't necessarily make it a bad game for when it was released. Would it be much better if this-or-that? Absolutely, but man did we love our colours and pixels.

[Shaun M. Neary]

For me it was more of a beautiful looking playable demo, but it had little to no gameplay in it whatsoever.

Kinda like many Titus games really! 

[Shaun M. Neary]

Also on SOTB, I think when I look back it, our community was probably more amazed that such a popular Amiga game made it to the CPC. But there were a number of games that were huge on certain platforms and made it to the CPC and were utter disasters.

SOTB is definitely one of them.

Double Dragon (Drosoft version) and Microprose Soccer were two others that came to mind. DD was so badly delayed (by about two years on the Amstrad that I personally got bored of waiting for it) and Microprose Soccer was boasted so much by the C64 community and when it finally came to the CPC a year or so later, it was a slow, unplayable, sluggish Speccy port.

But I'm going down a rabbit hole here and off the beaten track...

[norecess464]

Is Xyphoes Fantasy a good game?

I remember that I loved it back then. Colorful, with demomaking techniques applied, wonderful audio...
But nowadays, I don't like it anymore.
The game (3 disks!) is too slow to load, too slow to play, and just isn't fun.

In that category, I think that Prehistorik 2 / Super Cauldron aged very well in contrast.

[Shaun M. Neary]

Prehistorik II is amazing and still holds up well today.

But the slowdowns when too many sprites appear on the screen kill it for me
The recent Toki conversion is a great example of how to do that right.

[eto]

Prehistorik II is amazing and still holds up well today.

As usual it's about personal perception. 

I think it's awful. Like many of the late games. At some point they tried to replicate the ST/Amiga style of games - which is technically impressive - but it became a blurry mess on screen - and sometimes playability suffered. Imho it became the opposite of the Speccy conversion problem. Now they tried get the most out of the platform - but did not consider that on an 8-bit "less" can be "better". 

[norecess464]

@eto : While I do enjoy some of the later games, I completely agree with you that the most enjoyable games on the Amstrad weren't always the most technically advanced ones! That's what makes the Amstrad CPC so interesting IMO. The early games still had one foot in the early 80s, then came the games we all know and love. After 1990, however, games started to demand more than the machine could realistically deliver, which often led to a decline in gameplay quality.

But I still maintain that Prehistorik 2 is still amazing today. It's all about personal perception... with a mix of memories/nostalgia, of course.

[BSC]

Short answer: no. Longer: I mostly agree with andycadley. I found the graphics rather weird, the controls jerky and for that tried the game only very briefly. But I was also no fan of Shadow Of The Beast. Not even on the Amiga. 

[Anthony Flack]

I'm generally more of a fan of "8 bit games" on 8 bit machines. This applies to consoles like the Sega Master System as much as the CPC (the SMS also has a dreadful version of SotB, even).

The early and mid 80s games had that quality about them, where the 8 bit machines were the best machines available at the time and the games were proudly 8 bit. They had a sense of optimism about them: look, this computer can do C*O*L*O*U*R*S. That was impressive enough. They weren't trying to move giant sprites or do complex parallax scrolling and failing.

By the late 80s and early 90s, 8 bit machines were mostly being forced to attempt to be a poor man's 16 bit machine. A CPC game that came out in 1985 was far more likely to run at 50hz than one that released in 1990.

I also never played Xyphoe's Fantasy until internet times. I'm sure I would have appreciated it back then but not so much now. The Amiga games of the time that came on too many disks because they were loaded with fancy intros and cut scenes mostly haven't aged too well either. Whereas a simple, straightforward, single load, single disk game like IK+ (an 8 bit game gone 16 bit!) is as good as ever and still one of my go-to Amiga games.

However, as Gryzor pointed out, these things were once new. If you'd never seen a game try to be cinematic before, if you hadn't lived through decades of being bored by games trying too hard to be cinematic, something like Shadow Of The Beast was a genuinely novel experience and breaking new ground.

Xyphoe not so much, he does look like he's shat himself.

[norecess464]

Apologies for going slightly off-topic (it's easy to drift on this subject, especially since it's Friday, haha!).

Building on what @Anthony Flack just mentioned, I believe the 'best trade-offs' are found in games like P-47. Yes, the window is small, but the visuals were advanced enough while maintaining great gameplay at a decent frame rate.

Back on topic: I've probably launched Xyphoes Fantasy once or twice in the past decade. Last Sunday, I played Stunt Car Racer, Fruity Frank, and Commando. I think that says it all.

[BSC]

Small update after watching a video of the game. My last comment was based on memories from ancient times. So, I really like the music. And the background graphics of the levels are nice, but the other graphics seem a bit off, a bit too colourful (almost like coder colors) and strangely inconsistent, as if they were drawn by different people who never talked to each other. 

But the gameplay, it looked exactly like I remembered it. You just keep walking to the right, just keep bashing the fire button. No tactics needed, no well timed jumps or hidden gems or nice extras. If you were, like I was at that time, exposed to jump 'n' run games like Super Mario on the NES, Xyphoes Fantasy just would not stand the test. 

[jbaudrand]

For me it's more like lionheart on amiga, amazing coding skills, but completly unplayable.

[MartinJSUK]

Interesting thoughts, thanks. It's not hard to see why SOTB was a system-seller for the Amiga - its graphics and sound were beyond what any other system could do, and it spearheaded programmers into leading with Amiga versions and then converting down to the ST, rather than designing both versions around what could easily be ported, which most British and French teams were doing at that time. Xyphoes was never going to have the same effect for the CPC regarding selling machines or killing off Spectrum ports, partly because it was so late (elements of it outstrip what the C64 and maybe the ST can do in this style, but not Amiga or Megadrive, which were established by then), and partly because it was disk-only where the UK was tape-dominated on 8-bits. Had it been released in 1986 or even 1988, who knows how much it might have improved the CPC library? Could Xyphoes' techniques have been applied to other CPC games while still keeping them cassette-based - could Gryzor have scrolled or Strider 2 have had a bigger window and faster framerate based on what the Xyphoes guys did?

As a relative latecomer to the Amiga I didn't see Beast until it was a budget game, by which time there were other games with similar audiovisual marvels, many of which had more varied and interesting gameplay. Had I seen Beast in 1989 as an 8-bit or ST owner, perhaps it would have wowed me, but as a game I find it utterly dull, repetitive and unfair. Xyphoes isn't as bad for disk swapping or accessing times as Beast, and certainly spends less time loading than most tape games. It's definitely not as shallow as Beast either, the power-ups which gradually fall towards you are a nice touch, as are the multiple horizontal levels. The animation of the main character is poor though.

Prehistorik II looks reasonable from watching the video, but the multidirectional scroll is pretty iffy. The pure horizontal sections look pretty playable.

[dodogildo]

Playability and fun are everything. 

Unfortunately, a significant portion of our beloved CPC's later commercial-era catalog is filled with either sluggish Speccy ports or flamboyant but unplayable originals. 

Don't get me wrong, I embrace them all. Not because they're great, but because they're part of my childhood. But come on!