Lethal Xcess is a shoot 'em up

Shoot 'em up

Shoot 'em up is a subgenre of shooter video games. In a shoot 'em up, the player controls a lone character, often in a spacecraft or aircraft, shooting large numbers of enemies while dodging their attacks. The genre in turn encompasses various types or subgenres and critics differ on exactly what...

 game developed by two members of the Atari ST

Atari ST

The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals...

 demo crew

Demoscene

The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer...

 X-Troll

X-Troll

X-Troll was a demo group of the Atari ST Demo Scene. It was founded in 1989 and went inactive in 1994. Beside some demos two members of the X-Trolls coded the technically most impressive shoot'em up game on the Atari ST: "Lethal Xcess", the follow-up to the famous "Wings of Death"...

 and published by Eclipse in 1991

1991 in video gaming

-Notable releases:*Microprose creates Civilization, Sid Meier's most successful game .*Electronic Arts releases James Pond 2 and Road Rash for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, starting a series of games that were popular in the 1990s....

. An Amiga

Amiga

The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...

 version was also created.

Gameplay

Story

After the great magician Sagyr had succeeded in defeating the wicked sorceress Xandrilia, and regaining the human shape of his former self, he is cursed again and teleported 3,000 years in the future. There he finds out that the witch's descendants, the Xandrilians, have conquered most of the universe. Now his only chance to stop the forces of evil from succeeding is to use a small combat spacecraft on a last-ditch mission to destroy the Xandrillian Empire's home planet called Metallycha.

Development

Lethal Xcess was coded by Claus Frein and Heinz Rudolf. Originally it was planned to be an independent release, but in the end it became the sequel to Wings of Death

Wings of Death

Wings of Death is a shoot 'em up game released in 1990 for Atari ST and Amiga, developed by Eclipse Software and distributed by Thalion Software. The two versions of the game are mostly the same, the only noticeable difference is in the sounds...

and features music by Jochen Hippel

Jochen Hippel

Jochen Hippel is a musician from Kirchheimbolanden in southwest Germany. He played one of the most prominent roles in computer music during the 16-bit microcomputer era, composing the music for tens of games. He was also an experienced Amiga programmer and ported many of Thalion Software's Atari...

 and the cover picture was created by Celal Kandemiroglu

Celal Kandemiroglu

Celal Kandemiroglu is a graphic artist in the German computer games industry. He was born in 1953 in Turkey and made his first comic when he was five years old. After graduating at the fine arts academy in Istanbul he started to offer his comics to the Bastei-Verlag in Germany around 1978...

. Lethal Xcess has been the first commercial project of Frein and Rudolf, although they had some offers before. Due to the disappointing sales, both coders quit the gaming industry and became IT consultants later. While it's a rather average shooter on the Amiga platform, the game is one of the technically most impressive titles for the Atari ST. Besides many technically-impressive features, such as digital sound, sync-scrolling, overscan

Overscan

Overscan is extra image area around the four edges of a video image that may not be seen reliably by the viewer. It exists because television sets in the 1930s through 1970s were highly variable in how the video image was framed within the cathode ray tube .-Origins of overscan:Early televisions...

, and full 2-player support, all original copies of Lethal Xcess featured dual format

Dual format

Dual Format is a technique used to allow two completely different systems software to reside on the same disk.The term was used on the Amiga and Atari ST platform to indicate that the disk could be inserted into either machine and it would still boot and run...

, which allowed the Amiga and Atari versions to boot from the very same disk.

External links

• Official website
• Lethal Xcess at MobyGames
  MobyGames
  -Platforms not yet included:- Further reading :* Rusel DeMaria, Johnny L. Wilson, High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games, McGraw-Hill/Osborne Media; 2 edition , ISBN 0-07-223172-6...
  
  
• Lethal Xcess: Wings Of Death II Amiga - HOL database