341st played so far
Genre: Action
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1981
Developer: Taito
Publisher: Taito
ย Qix! That’s today’s game. It’s a game we both know – we just don’t know the name and can’t remember it. It has just been copied that often. This should be pretty straightforward!
Our Thoughts
For some reason, I kept thinking Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor would be more like this game, not knowing we’d be playing the proper game a few weeks later.
The game is simple: only able to move around the outsides, you cut areas through the field, claiming it. Claim 75% and you win the level, moving up. This is made more difficult by both Qix, the coloured lines moving around the arena that kills you if it touches one of your lines, and sparks that follow the outside border and do the same if they reach you.
It’s a pretty simple concept, true, but it works out well. The game is pretty fast paced, pretty much from the start considering the speed your enemies move at. Aside from strategy in picking your moment, a lot of it can feel like a Mexican standoff – How far do you dare go in creating your squares, do you dare taking that bit more, or is it too close?
One of the more interesting things that we noticed about the game is how completely abstract it is. The enemies look like nothing, there’s no story and no explanation about what you’re doing. No attempt is made to explain what you are doing. You don’t need it for the game really. Games don’t need all that – as long as it’s fun.
Final Thoughts
This is one of those games that pretty much any gamer has played even if it is not the actual game of Qix. In fact we saw this a few years ago when there was a Qix-esque minigame as part of the art curriculum in Bully.ย What these clones don’t have, however, is a strange line-based enemy that can make you feel very uneasy for no explainable reason.