Rare Xargon Artwork

[kilodude]

Enjoy this Rare collection of artwork created for Xargon but not used in the final game. I am providing this exclusively to RGB Classic Games.

I would love to hear your thoughts. Which ones should I have used in the game? Check out my comments in the readme.txt and let me know what you think.

[Hallfiry]

Box-3 is kinda cute
The tornado reminds me of the final boss from Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland...

You really should have included thse in the game, but as the readme says, it would have been too complex/too much effort.

[DOSGuy]

I like Box-3, too. I love all of the fish, although the (Dope)fish with glasses is a bit silly. Atom2 is interesting. I definitely agree that the tornado monster is cool. Thank you very much for sharing these!

Can I include this is as a download on the Xargon page, or just here in the forum?

[MrFlibble]

Awesome, thanks for sharing! ^_^

The spider thing immediately reminded me of the intro from the early seasons of The Venture Bros. (I also think that robot spider was featured in an episode or two), but I think that one is already a reference to some other show I'm unaware of. (Googling suggests that the Venture Bros. robot is called a "Walking Eye", and it's referenced in itself in the Fallout franchise; the Fallout wiki suggests that the Walking Eye is originally a reference to Johnny Quest, just like many other things in The Venture Bros.).

As for the fish, there's one of them who's wearing glasses - was this "Nerdfish" supposed to be a reference to the Dopefish?

[kilodude]

I like Box-3, too. I love all of the fish, although the (Dope)fish with glasses is a bit silly. Atom2 is interesting. I definitely agree that the tornado monster is cool. Thank you very much for sharing these!

Can I include this is as a download on the Xargon page, or just here in the forum?

Sure, you can include them as a download on the Xargon page.

I'm glad people are enjoying this behind-the-scenes look. I'm trying to think of some other things that might be of interest to the group.

[lemm]

Malvenious should change his avatar to 80's metal band Malvenious.

[spikey]

Just wanted to comment and say Allen, thanks for being so awesome and not only making Xargon/Kiloblaster, but for reappearing and being so supportive and generous. Allowing a Xargon port, exciting!

[kilodude]

Just wanted to comment and say Allen, thanks for being so awesome and not only making Xargon/Kiloblaster, but for reappearing and being so supportive and generous. Allowing a Xargon port, exciting!

You're welcome. I appreciate the kind words.

[spikey]

Hey, I appreciate you Sir! Hopefully, depending what Mal does with the music I can honour you with some sort of musical tribute.

On the artwork, it surely looks like the fish is a Keen spoof.

Old Malvineous looks almost like Michael Jackson!

Question, Allen- was it always going to be a 3-part 'Apogee- style' game?

[kilodude]

Question, Allen- was it always going to be a 3-part 'Apogee- style' game?

Yes. Tim's philosophy was to provide the best possible Volume One that we could so they would want to purchase the entire trilogy. On reflection, and I have not said this in public before, I believe I included too many FREE levels. On any new games I do I will only include 3-5 levels. I believe three should be sufficient for a person to get the idea of the game as well as have some fun if all they want to do is those levels.

[spikey]

Wow, thanks for the info

Yeah, there were a lot of good levels in Episode 1, I don't know about too many, maybe by modern standards, but for the era I think it was typical.

Sounds like exactly the Apogee-shareware method that was done in that era, the good volume One, the 3 parts, the screen when you boot one up and it shows you all 3, but you can only play the first episode and there's ordering info for 2/3..

[MrFlibble]

Yes. Tim's philosophy was to provide the best possible Volume One that we could so they would want to purchase the entire trilogy.

It is interesting how I've heard from various people (players) before that they consider the shareware episode the best in a game (like here and here for example), with the registered levels being just "more of the same". Perhaps it's a predictable side-effect of the Scott Miller model altogether, but then again, the model was generally successful after all

[kilodude]

Yes. Tim's philosophy was to provide the best possible Volume One that we could so they would want to purchase the entire trilogy.

It is interesting how I've heard from various people (players) before that they consider the shareware episode the best in a game...

I agree that many were like that. While that might also be true of "Kiloblaster" I would suggest that "Xargon" has many new and interesting features in volumes 2 & 3. I took great care to not just repeat the same things that I did in the first volume.

[MrFlibble]

I agree that many were like that.

I guess that feeling of the players is in part a purely psychological thing. When they play the shareware version for the first time, everything is new to them - levels, monsters, weapons, etc. When they get the registered version, a lot of game elements are already familiar, and that certainly affects the general perception of the registered content.

This is perhaps the downside of the Apogee model, since the shorter demo versions of later periods (well, even the shareware episodes eventually became shorter than the registered episodes, as with Duke Nukem 3D or Shadow Warrior for example) show a lot less content of the full games (and also in many cases the demo versions show a pre-release or not updated versions of the game itself).

On another note, I had always wondered, are the certain similarities between Xargon and Vinyl Goddess from Mars purely coincidental? I guess that could be ascribed to the fact that both games were developed with Jill of the Jungle as a backdrop (especially since Vinyl started as a Jill sequel), but could it be that the developers of Vinyl also followed Xargon as some sort of a standard?

[kilodude]

On another note, I had always wondered, are the certain similarities between Xargon and Vinyl Goddess from Mars purely coincidental? I guess that could be ascribed to the fact that both games were developed with Jill of the Jungle as a backdrop (especially since Vinyl started as a Jill sequel), but could it be that the developers of Vinyl also followed Xargon as some sort of a standard?

Until you mentioned it in another post, I had never even heard of it. I just looked at some screenshots of it and honestly it looks like someone took the tile sets created for "Xargon" and/or "Jill of the Jungle" and horribly mangled them so people wouldn't recognize that they were used in another game. I think that's about all I will say about that.