Zaxxon
48K plays 1984 #Shooter
Zaxxon is a 1981 scrolling shooter developed and published by Sega as an arcade video game. It was developed with assistance from Ikegami Tsushinki, the same team who had programmed Nintendo's Donkey Kong the same year. The player pilots a ship through two heavily defended space fortresses, and the outer space areas between them, to confront the Zaxxon robot at the end of the second fortress.
Zaxxon was one of the first games to employ axonometric projection, which lent its name to the game. The type of axonometric projection is isometric projection: this effect simulates three dimensions from a third-person viewpoint. It was also the first arcade game to be advertised on television, with a commercial produced by Paramount Pictures for $150,000. The game was a critical and commercial success upon release, becoming one of the top five highest-grossing arcade games of 1982 in the United States.
Sega released a modified version as Super Zaxxon the same year and the Zaxxon-like shooter Future Spy in 1984.
From Wikipedia's article Zaxxon, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Controls
This is a PC game: it uses the keyboard the way it did under MS-DOS, and the mouse where the game supports it. Click the game screen first so it gets your key presses.
Many DOS games start with a menu or ask a question first — read the screen and answer with the keyboard. Arrow keys, Enter, Space, Ctrl and Alt are the usual game keys.
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Controls
This is a PC game: it uses the keyboard the way it did under MS-DOS, and the mouse where the game supports it. Click the game screen first so it gets your key presses.
Many DOS games start with a menu or ask a question first — read the screen and answer with the keyboard. Arrow keys, Enter, Space, Ctrl and Alt are the usual game keys.
2.5 Could be better
Players 61 · 123 votes
No critic scores found for this game: this is the players' rating.
Review scorecard
- Graphics 2.5 out of 5 Overall fallback
- Sound 2.5 out of 5 Overall fallback
- Control 2.5 out of 5 Overall fallback
- Fun Factor 2.5 out of 5 Overall fallback
Overall fallback: Players 61 · 123 votes. The same 61/100 overall rating fills missing categories using the face scale; these are not separate category scores. Player rating; no critic scores available.
What the reviews talk about
Key wordsthrillingrealisticimpressiveexcellentoriginal
What the critics said
David Cohen, in his book Video Games, praised the "incredible three-dimensional realism" in the graphics, which he considered the best in a video game to date, while describing the gameplay as "a mixture of driving and zap game."
— Video Games, 1982
Computer and Video Games praised the game for being "at the frontier of a third dimension in arcade games" and for its "realistic" altitude-based gameplay for the time.
— Computer and Video Games, 1982· about another version
InfoWorld's Essential Guide to Atari Computers cited it as a good Atari arcade game, noting "its distinctive three-dimensional graphics".
— InfoWorld, 1984 (Essential Guide)· about another version
From the Reception section of Wikipedia's Zaxxon article, under CC BY-SA 4.0. The words are the critics'; their full reviews are on the publishers' pages.
Scores
- Computer and Video Games 1985 35%; 55%; 39/40 (MSX) (other versions)
From the review table of Wikipedia's article. The face takes, first that applies: the Metascore for this platform, GameRankings' average, our average of the critics (one number per publication, a panel averaged), one review alone, the players' rating. Critics and players are never mixed.
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