Xenon 2 Megablast

Xenon 2 Megablast is a video game originally produced for the Amiga and Atari ST, and later converted to the PC, Sega Master System, Sega Mega Drive, Acorn Archimedes, and Game Boy platforms. The sequel to Xenon was designed by The Bitmap Brothers (although coded by The Assembly Line). It became one of their most well-known titles.

Plot

After the Xenites' defeat in the Galactic Conflict which took place in the first Xenon, they have returned with a plan to wipe out the player's history by planting four bombs in space-time areas. The Megablaster pilot will have to fend off the bizarre wildlife around them. It is necessary to destroy the largest animal in each area as they have been fused with the bomb; once the creature is slain, the bomb is shut off.

Theme and gameplay

Xenon 2 Megablast is a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up. Unusual for the genre at the time, the player's spaceship can reverse the scrolling of the play area for a limited distance; which is used in the game for defeating bosses, avoiding enemies and escaping dead ends. This game consists of five levels which are each divided into two sections.

Xenon

Xenon is a chemical element with symbol Xe and atomic number 54. It is a colorless, dense, odorless noble gas, that occurs in the Earth's atmosphere in trace amounts. Although generally unreactive, xenon can undergo a few chemical reactions such as the formation of xenon hexafluoroplatinate, the first noble gas compound to be synthesized.

Naturally occurring xenon consists of eight stable isotopes. There are also over 40 unstable isotopes that undergo radioactive decay. The isotope ratios of xenon are an important tool for studying the early history of the Solar System. Radioactive xenon-135 is produced by beta decay from iodine-135 (which is a product of nuclear fission), and it acts as the most significant neutron absorber in nuclear reactors.

Xenon is used in flash lamps and arc lamps, and as a general anesthetic. The first excimer laser design used a xenon dimer molecule (Xe₂) as its lasing medium, and the earliest laser designs used xenon flash lamps as pumps. Xenon is also being used to search for hypothetical weakly interacting massive particles and as the propellant for ion thrusters in spacecraft.

Bomb the Bass

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Bomb the Bass is an electronic dance music one-man band consisting of English musician and producer Tim Simenon.

As a name, Bomb the Bass came from Simenon's approach to collaging and mixing sounds whilst DJing in the mid to late 1980s; he says "samples were either scratched in live or sampled and looped on top of the rhythm section. So the concept was one of bombing the bass line with different ideas, with a collage of sounds. Bombing was a graffiti term for writing, like people would 'bomb' trains or whatever."

History

Pushing the needle: The accelerated success of Beat Dis

Released in 1987, the band's debut single was "Beat Dis", with composition credited to Emilio Pasquel / Captain Black / DJ Kid 33. Disguised as a U.S. import on the Mister-Ron imprint, in an attempt to conjure the mystique of Bomb the Bass being an underground New York act, the single exceeded expectations by eventually reaching number two on the UK charts.

Its roaring success put the then still relatively unknown Simenon on the front cover of Britain's most serious, and highly influential music newspaper, NME. This event was notable not only for being the moment when the previously pro-rock/anti-disco paper sided with post-disco dance music (at this time indie was NME's genre du jour), recognising and valuing Simenon for being a DJ first and foremost, rather than a musician; but also for the dawn of the term DJ culture. Used as the cover's sub-heading, the term would henceforth become the accepted term for the incoming trend (of which Simenon was arguably one of the UK's pioneers) of DJs as superstars, and which would dominate popular music at least for the next decade.

Bass Rock

The Bass Rock, or simply the Bass,/ˈbæs/, is an island in the outer part of the Firth of Forth in the east of Scotland. Approximately 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) offshore, and 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) north-east of North Berwick, it is a steep-sided volcanic rock, 107 metres (351 ft) at its highest point, and is home to a large colony of gannets. The rock is currently uninhabited, but historically has been settled by an early Christian hermit, and later was the site of an important castle, which after the Commonwealth period was used as a prison. The island is in the ownership of Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, whose family acquired it in 1706, and before that belonged to the Lauder family for almost six centuries. The Bass Rock Lighthouse was constructed on the rock in 1902, and the remains of an ancient chapel survive.

The Bass Rock features in many works of fiction, including Robert Louis Stevenson's Catriona and The Lion is Rampant by the Scottish novelist Ross Laidlaw.

Geography and geology

The Bitmap Brothers

The Bitmap Brothers are a UK based video game developer founded in 1987. The company entered the industry in 1988 with the scrolling shooter Xenon. They quickly followed with the classic Speedball. Prior to becoming the publisher of their own games (under Renegade Software), early Bitmap Brothers titles were distributed by Image Works and Konami.

The Bitmap Brothers released several games on the Amiga and Atari ST, and were one of the most successful companies on those platforms. They became known in particular for releasing games from a variety of different genres that usually came to be regarded as leaders in their respective fields. Their PC games have never matched the sales of their previous Amiga titles, despite garnering positive critical reviews in the press.

They were the first game developers to publicise themselves as rock stars, and were featured in the press posing in dark glasses standing next to the helicopter of Robert Maxwell, the owner of Mirrorsoft, the publisher of a number of their games. They were also one of the first companies to use licensed music in their games. Xenon 2 Megablast featured music by Bomb the Bass.