TX - The Game

Published on Magic Disk 64 01/90

It's TX - The Game, not to be confused with TX - The Musical or TX - The US State. It's a fixed vertical shooter for one player. It's also one hell of a mess.

It's got a sweet mountain backdrop, though.

To this day I don't know what TX stands for, and I'll probably never get to find out, mostly due to my lack of giving a toss. According to the instructions in the diskmag part, TX is an updated homage to the arcade classic Phoenix from 1980. If you're not familiar with Phoenix, here's a screenshot of the game:

Phoenix clearly follows Space Invaders' and Galaxian's footsteps. The player shoots at formations of space birds that sometimes shoot back or start diving down on suicidal collision courses. Besides firing shots, the player can also activate a temporary shield that protects against kamikaze attacks. Phoenix is noteworthy for being one of the first games to feature a boss fight, long before final bosses were a thing in shooters.

Now, try to guess how much of this is in TX - The Game. Let's press fire and find out!

Ludicrous speed!

Hoo boy, what happened here? Do I have to downclock my C64?

That's the speed at which the first level is presented. The enemies follow wild sine curves and move so fast they look like programming errors. The flying birds never break away from their movement patterns, nor do they attempt to dive towards the player.
I suppose these formations relate to the stages in Phoenix where birds hatch out of eggs and fly back and forth in sine waves. But the movement patterns of the original game were never this erratic or repetitive.

The enemy droppings (let's call them bombs) always spawn at the same height, regardless of enemy positions, and there isn't even an attempt at making them look like they actually originate from the birds flying above you. Even if there's only one enemy remaining, it's still possible for several bombs to appear at once, spread randomly across the entire playfield. The bombs even spawn between waves, when no birds are on screen at all.

While enemy projectiles descend in slow, wavy patterns, your own shots move just as fast as the birds you're aiming at. It's hard to see if and when your energy bursts hit, though, as enemies just disappear without any visual or audible feedback.

Here's me decimating the first wave of space birds. Try to make out when I hit each of the seven enemies:

Ornithological Exodus

Annoyingly, the player shots move so fast that they skip a couple of pixels each frame, and thus it can happen that they go right through enemies without destroying them. TX retains Phoenix's rule that only one of your shots can be on screen at a time (even though you fire twin shots here). However, if you hit something, the shot continues until it reaches the top. This can be useful if you manage to hit several birds with one shot. You can also destroy the falling bombs, which is actually a nice feature that wasn't present in Phoenix.

The subsequent waves look more or less identical to the first one. The enemy sprites and their movement patterns change slightly, but the gameplay experience remains the same.

This probably won't come as a shock to anyone, but TX's menagerie of hostile birds consists of a staggering four different sprites. That's all the enemy variety you're ever going to see in the entire game.

After seven attack waves, the game advances to level 2 and switches the background graphics from mountains to the following glorious composition:

What am I even looking at?

This, in my opinion, is the best part of the entire game. Only in TX can you watch two intergalactic horses move a rift in space to cover up a chessboard with a missing column while our solar system's nine planets (including Pluto, of course) are gathered together to witness this rare interdimensional phenomenon. Also, there's a rusty pipe for some reason.

Something about this picture strikes me as very familiar, but I can't put my finger on it. Even as a kid, when I saw this background for the first time, I got a strong vibe that I had seen a very similar artwork before, like the cover of a music album. I can't remember, though, and for all I know, maybe I saw something equally tasteful airbrushed on the hood of a car.

Despite the improved background, the game doesn't play any better. The only discernible difference from the previous level are the bombs that now drop faster.

Unfortunately, the scenery goes back to the mountains once you reach level 3. The game only has two backgrounds, so you've already seen everything TX has to offer. Level 3 is also the point in the game where the bombs fall down so fast it becomes practically unplayable. And so I stopped playing.

What's with the Roman numeral in the top right, by the way? First I thought it was a level indicator, but I'm on level 3 now and it hasn't changed at all. Maybe at one stage the game was supposed to have a two player mode, and the number in the top right would've indicated whose turn it was to shoot avian dinosaurs.


Something I haven't mentioned yet is the audio: During the entire game, digitized samples of two commercial songs are played on loop, which explains TX's comparatively huge file size on the disk. Both samples are about 5 seconds long and were lifted, respectively, from Hithouse's Jack to the Sound of the Underground and Eddie Cochran's C'mon Everybody. I'm sure the game's author cordially asked the respective copyright owners for permission to use them in the game. But hey, sampling was on the rise at the time, so this wasn't an unheard-of practice. In the case of Jack to the Sound of the Underground, it's even fitting, as that track is chock-full of borrowed sound bits. To the game author's credit, both samples are clear enough that they're still recognizable, which isn't a trivial feat to pull off on a C64.

The choice of songs makes for an odd experience. The game abruptly alternates between playing rock & roll and house music, as if two people were fighting over which radio station they wanted to listen to. It's very possible that TX's author heard both songs on the radio in 1988, as they came into the European charts at about the same time (with C'mon Everybody being re-issued that year). Interestingly, both songs reached #14 in the UK Singles Chart (according to Wikipedia), so they were probably positioned pretty close to each other for a while, and thus also got played in short succession on any chart show.


CONCLUSION

Right from the start, it becomes apparent that TX is not a particularly good game. You can't just throw a couple of erratically moving sprites on the screen and call it a Phoenix tribute.

Phoenix offers an array of stages that are actually pretty different to play. It has a boss level for crying out loud. It features a temporary shield that you can activate periodically. What does TX have, apart from interstellar horses?

In all fairness, it's mainly the text in the diskmag that talks up TX as an improved version of Phoenix, and it's very possible that it wasn't the programmer's intent to make a comparable title.

On the positive side, the game certainly runs very fast, and the ship's controls are precise as well as responsive. I like TX's background graphics, especially the ones for the even numbered levels, and the digitized music samples are technically well done, if not exactly legal.

The amount of time I spent with TX - The Game purely for this article was longer than any of my previous times combined, and now I never want to play it again.