Hard games are always a tricky thing to deal with. As a player, who got all five endings of Contra: The Hard Corps, finished R-Type 3 and is a huge fan of Ikaruga, I don't throw around the label 'too hard' for no reason. However, many companies continue to make the mistake of assuming a good hard game is simply one that is very difficult to complete. In practice, it's not that simple: the partner of difficulty is frustration, and a good difficult game must be absolutely, studiously fair to the player; any death must be their fault, not the fault of imprecise controls, sloppy design or overly powerful enemy design.
Hard games are always a tricky thing to deal with. As a player, who got all five endings of Contra: The Hard Corps, finished R-Type 3 and is a huge fan of Ikaruga, I don't throw around the label 'too hard' for no reason. However, many companies continue to make the mistake of assuming a good hard game is simply one that is very difficult to complete. In practice, it's not that simple: the partner of difficulty is frustration, and a good difficult game must be absolutely, studiously fair to the player; any death must be their fault, not the fault of imprecise controls, sloppy design or overly powerful enemy design. As Amiga Power once said of Ruff 'n' Tumble, 'If you were some kind of gameplaying colossus,
with pico-second reactions and enormous powers of calculation, [you would] be able to play right through without losing a sliver of energy: nothing's been left to chance.'
Project X comes close to achieving this balance, but never quite reaches it. Anyone reading the contemporary reviews of Project X, will rapidly conclude from the fact that few magazines had screenshots from any level past the second that something was up; indeed, even Project X's most hardcore fans are likely to admit they don't know what the last few levels look like. A hack was eventually published that allowed players to skip levels by holding fire and pressing escape, which is the only way most people ever saw the comparatively spectacular ending.
Firstly, Project X has absolutely nothing to do with the 1968 movie of the same name, instead, it's a side-scrolling shooter with sensibilities drawn directly from R-Type, but a new power-up system. Starting with the good points: for the time, Project X's graphics were amazing, with attractive backgrounds, well-detailed and large enemies and a lot going on-screen without any slowdown. There are some massive set pieces; the battles with the giant snake-like enemies on level 2 are particularly cool and the creatures themselves well-realised. It's certainly arcade quality for the time, and would look impressive on a dedicated console like the SNES.
Project X has five levels, a fast-scrolling bonus stage, and a final stage with no enemies where your only enemy is the ground and your own poor accuracy. Stage 1 is set in space, with the remainder the fairly obvious combination of ice, fire, water and metal backgrounds, each well realised and teeming with enemies.
You start out with a choice of three ships. In the original release, well, you technically have a choice, but if you choose the medium one you're dead because it starts out with an idiotically weak gun. The weak-but-fast one doesn't max out with anything like enough power for the later game, so say hello to your only choice, the Crux II battle class.
Along the bottom of Project X's screen is a bar listing, from right to left, all the power-ups. These go speed, guns, build, side, missile, plasma, magma, laser and stealth. Yes, you know you're in the 90s when invincibility is called 'stealth.' Each power-up takes an equivalent number of 'P' items to get to, so speed takes one, while Stealth takes nine. There's an interesting mechanic whereby the more power-ups you pack the more inertia your ship has, but really this just means you have to save the Crux's single speed boost until last to nullify this. There's certainly no realistic way you could get by without gaining enough power-ups to trigger the inertia mechanic, since enemies get fearsomely tough very quickly. It shouldn't really be necessary for a balanced game to add this rather artificial downside to having a powerful ship, especially given all the other punishment mechanics Project X already has.
As with R-Type, dying will take you back to the nearest continue point; in R-Type's case, minus all of your maximum of six power ups [3 force, 2 bit, 1 missile]. Project X 'only' halves your power-ups, which might seem oddly generous, until you realise just how the power-up system is implemented.
Ok, the most powerful configuration, in most players' minds, was plasma [8 levels], build [3 levels], side [2 levels], missile [4 levels] and speed [1 level]. This means death would knock a truly obscene forty-five power-ups off the player's armament. Two deaths and they'll be back down to nothing, with all eighty-six power-ups gone. Further, unlike R-Type you don't start out with the 'build' ability, so you really have no chance at all if your continue point is near anything powerful. This leads to a lot of times when you simply have to quit the game because it's stuffed you into a position you have no way of getting out of. It's fair enough to punish a player for dying, but when that punishment is essentially 'game over', it seems more than a little excessive.
To compound this, Project X actually uses its power-up system as an essential part of its difficulty: there's no shortage of places where you require the Stealth ability to survive. This wouldn't be so bad, but for one tiny problem: as in Xenon 1 and Apidya, you can activate power-ups [in Xenon's case, change from plane to tank] by wiggling the stick. As in Xenon, and unlike in Apidya, you can't turn this off, and it seems horribly oversensitive. As a result, the player is forced to be overly cautious when dodging enemy fire, he trigger the precious Stealth ability too soon or accidentally switch his level 8 plasma for level 2 guns in the middle of a firefight and essentially kill himself. To crucify the player for dying is one thing, but to have a system so sloppy the player dies because of things that aren't his fault at all is quite another.
While, as said above, the graphics are extremely impressive for the time, the bosses are something of a let-down: most of them are only five or six times the size of the player's ship, with one or two attacks. This seems to be because Team 17 wanted to show off their ability to rotate when they move, much as SNES games enjoyed showing off their Mode 7-rotated backgrounds. To save animation frames, this means all the bosses are vertically symmetrical. The results are fake-looking and curiously un-menacing; the two blocky ships at the end of level 3, for example, compare poorly as bosses to the gargantuan magma-spitting silver dragons in the level itself.
Team 17 actually recognised some of the problems in Project X and made an attempt at rectifying some of the game's more grating cases of unfairness in the budget re-release, with limited success. Powerup losses were downgraded to one or two levels per life, the ship's starting armaments all hugely increased, and, rather oddly, the first level was cut down to about a third of its original length, ending just before the volley of missiles the player needed Stealth to survive. While this did make the game at least theoretically possible to finish, it still didn't address the issues of the game's power-up system being fundamentally broken, and simply made it harder to get used to the massive jump in difficulty from the truncated level 1 to the full-length level 2.
Today, Project X's graphics have been eclipsed by newer shooters like R-Type 3, R-Type Final and Ikaruga: while this might seem an unfair comparison, with its graphical 'wow' factor gone, the flawed gameplay mechanics underneath are much, much more obvious. Project X is worth a blast, and if you want a side-scroller you won't finish in a hurry, it's got the challenge. Just don't expect the game to treat you fairly.
