Qix - In-depth written Amiga review with pics
QixAmiga, 1989 (Original Arcade 1981)
Taito/Alien Technology Group
$34.95
It hurts so good; the pain of an arcade great, designed masochistically to suck those quarters straight out of your front pocket. So simple to get into, so hard to get far. Twitching your joystick as the night turns to dawn, you find yourself not much further than where you began. Still you press on, the thrill of the high-score beckoning you deeper into a nearly exhausted weekend. A game-over is but an opportunity to test your new strategy, to press what could only have been bad luck into good. You scream in anger and wince with the pain of losing two lives quickly, but smooth sailing through the next several levels makes it all worthwhile. Pain is so close to pleasure.
Exquisitely painful, I'd argue Qix was the pinnacle of what arcade manufacturers wanted from a game, especially in 1981. It was unlike anything prior; while copying previous successes will always be a safe bet for mediocrity, unique firsts are always those which stand tallest. The concept needs no explanations; there's bad things you need to avoid and you do that by drawing onto the screen. Fill up enough of it and you go on, only needing but a directional controller, and two buttons for different draw speeds. Your main enemy, the qix, is there for the entire game and yet feels utterly mysterious. How does this thing work? What can be done to get around it? Your mind attempts to draw patterns out of the unpredictable nature of your enemy, convincing yourself that you'll do better on your next attempt.
^highscore, intro screens, the first level
But you won't. Oh, you'll see a few levels pass, for sure, but there's no truly mastering Qix. You are meant to die while believing that you can do better, pumping in more of that sweet nectar, quarters. This trait was actually uncommon at the time, and largely continued to be so. Plenty of arcade games had and would continue to have good concepts while being addictive and hard. But the determined were known to get the better of many games, bogarting a machine for perhaps hours on a single quarter. For those who could not master a game, the difficulty spike was often too great, perhaps fun and easy for two levels while unleashing holy hell on the third. So they played that game, had their fun, and when it got too hard they left, feeling as though they still got the complete game experience.
Qix is hard from the first level, but you want to get further, and you'll feel as though you can. When you are able to inch your way onward, you're pretty much hooked. I spent entire nights wasting away that midnight oil, shocked how it could suddenly be 5:00 am while I was still not past the fifth level! I spent as much time getting nowhere in this game as I did completing an RPG like Curse of the Azure Bonds! If I had been in front of the actual arcade cabinet, I'd no doubt have turned my jeans pockets inside out. The game manages to be addictive and hard, while just about impossible to master, the perfect arcade game to a manufactures mind.
^Spiraling inward, sealing off with a fork
The Amiga version was released around August of 1989, some time after the initial heyday of Qix. Originally it had only been ported to the home via the Atari 5200, the Atari 8-bit computer line, and the Commodore 64. After Taito decided to become more involved in the home market, the majority of the ports would end up coming out between 1989 and 1991. Based off magazine reviews I believe the Amiga version to have been the first of these later ports, and arguably the best. Here the graphics better the original arcade, largely via various colorful fill patterns, where as in the original the boxes were filled with a solid green or red. The Apple II GS version features pretty much the same graphics for the fills, but the Amiga still has the added touch of copper effects on both the qix itself, as well as the game's logo.
This copper effect allows the qix to fade in and out of various shades of colors, and for the logo to go through most of the Amiga's 4,096 colors. I also noted the "fun time arcade" title screen on the Amiga as being an interlaced 640x400 resolution image, which is obviously lower on other versions (the main Amiga game is 320x200). A comparison was made in my video review between DOS, the GameBoy, and the NES. The music and sound effects show an even larger quality enhancement on the Amiga compared to other platforms. The soundtrack is a pretty good jazzy/rock score, though playing only on the tile screen and at the end of a level. The qix itself has quite a unique and almost scary sound associated with it, heavy on the bass. While I liked that sound on the Amiga, the DOS PC Speaker effect makes the game almost unplayable in its annoyance.
^Amiga on left, DOS on right, a mixture of strategies
The qix is your main enemy, patrolling the screen and behaving erratically to say the least. At times it wants to be as far away from you as possible, while other times it will not leave you alone. It would be one thing if you could time this and use it to your advantage, but its mood swings can happen less than a second away from each other! The drawing must therefore be done in quick bursts to minimize your risk, though the loss of life is often difficult to avoid even on the initial levels. In its review for the game, Computer Gaming World made note of three schools of thought on strategy, based literally from the college campuses they originated from.
In the MIT Fork you build a series of forks with the hope that eventually the qix will wander down one of them, where you can then seal it off. The Harvard Tree has you separating areas into quadrants surrounding a tree structure, again with the hope the qix will eventually end up inside one of them. Finally the Stanford Spiral has you drawing from the outside inward, slowly trapping the qix into a tighter space. I never expressly attempted any of these strategies, having not read the review prior to playing, yet my style ended up an amalgamation of them all. I often started with a spiral toward the qix to hopefully trap them in that one area, but I'd add insurance by forking off areas behind me, or building a tree ahead of me. As the qix is unpredictable, these fallout plans often proved useful.
^A spiral and a tree, avoiding subvirus'
Computer Gaming World discussing these strategies was part of their overall angle of the game being both a strategic mind game, but also action. Even the manual attempted to have their cake and eat it too, by saying that because there's no time limit you shouldn't rush through a level, while a couple breaths later adding you should keep moving as the sub-virus' are looking for you! Perhaps this was an attempt from both to infuse a bit of Tetris fever into things, but it doesn't fly with me. It's an arcade coin muncher through and through. Any strategies you find through the course of your addiction is only going to get you so far, your destiny lies in death probably before you even get to double digit levels. Figure out Tetris, and you can go on and on, this is not a mind game.
While there's no on screen time limit ticking down to your eventual death, try not moving for 30 seconds; You're going to die. What starts off as two sub-virus' on the borders of the screen becomes four and then six via an actual on screen timer. Get good enough at the game to reach level seven, and an undocumented change in game mechanics occur. Your defense against the qix is to be on the borders where it can't touch you, while you'll have to draw to end the level but also to get away from the sub-virus' which make their way along the borders. When a certain sound plays past level seven your drawing defense stops working, as the sub-virus' start following you as you draw. No time limit, huh?
^Two of them!
Taito managed quite the advertising campaign, most people knowing that Qix is pronounced "kicks". Should you dare pronounce it differently, as you would most likely do the first time you see those letters together, people rejoice in correcting you! As a kid I called it "quicks", but my sister put a stop to all of that rather quickly! The name was as much a part of this game as its gameplay, with the advertisements always saying it was "pronounced kicks". Word of mouth seemed to do the rest, some magazines all too willing to be used to propagate Taito's various buzz words. The fuse, sparx, spiral death trap, all capitalized and used frequently to discuss the various named obstacles. They even updated the rhetoric for these late 80's versions, calling Qix the "computer virus game", and that your goal was to immunize the system against it!
My experience with the Amiga version back in the day was limited to watching my sister play, it must have gotten a read/write error at some point. But the game stuck with us to where we wanted it for the GameBoy to play on the go. Having gotten used to that version over the years, I was in for quite a shock coming back to the Amiga! The GameBoy seems to have been one of the few versions in which the difficulty was toned down. There the qix is slower and more predictable, there are even cut-scenes when you reach various levels, showing a belief that you were going to make it that far, and in which I did. My memories are of being very good at this game, but that was because I played an easy version.
^Trapping the sub-virus'
Most versions duplicated the difficulty of the arcade cabinet, including on the Amiga. Normally I would use this opportunity to point out that as an owner of a $35 computer game, I've given Taito more quarters than the most addicted person would have put into an actual cabinet. Perhaps I've bought myself a game which thinks I deserve to get past level five! This game can drive you crazy with how hard it is, and it starts from level one! For some people, the faithfulness to the arcades difficulty is going to be a major flaw, and often times it would be the same for me. Interestingly for me I ended up playing the GameBoy version, in which I was more familiar with, quite a bit to compare it with this one. I have to say the fact that it's harder on the Amiga ended up being a positive for me.
Look, there's no ending to achieve, no story in which to read. Even the gameboy's cut-scenes amount to nothing more than fireworks and Mario jumping up and down in some questionable ethnic attire. The high-score is all you've got going for you. I didn't "need" to spend days and nights on the gameboy version to feel as though I'd seen all I wished to see, that was achieved in a manner of hours. But I needed to keep playing on the Amiga. To know I had done all I could do to get a little further, even if I didn't end up making it all that far. The hard is what made it great. You'll curse, you'll turn it off in frustration, but you'll come back, and you won't even need to feel bad for blowing more quarters.
^Later levels
Most of the computer ports were developed by Alien Technology Group, who had a slim resume indeed! Prior to Qix they developed a wrestling game called Take Down for the Commodore 64 and DOS, as well as the Commodore 64 port for TV Sports Football. Qix was the final credit they got for any platform, and their only work on the Amiga. Well, all in all they did rather well! As mentioned prior, while some of the fill colors were equaled by other versions, only the Amiga had that copper effect, with the sound and music you're arguably looking at the best version. That's not bad for a companies first and only foray onto the system.
Curiously, Qix appears to have been an American exclusive title. I could find no instances of this game being mentioned in European magazines of the era. While I primarily searched for Amiga references, I certainly didn't notice any other systems popping up! Perhaps this can be reasoned out, with Taito themselves being the ones to publish this game for all of these platforms. Previous Taito titles on the computer, such as Arkanoid, were developed and published by other companies. Discovery International in the case of Araknoid for the Amiga, with a licence purchased from Taito. Other games such as Bubble Bobble were published by Taito in America, but through other companies overseas. So while it is curious that Qix did not see life across the pond through a different publisher, the logistics of it do make some sense, as Taito themselves did not have a presence in Europe.
^Probably the tightest I packed one in
I found the American magazines of the era to be overwhelmingly positive toward Qix. Most noting the title as already being iconic in its arcade form. Amiga Plus called it "Unique among arcade games, and rightfully considered a classic", saying its arrival to the Amiga was welcome and giving it four out five pluses. Amiga Plus later included it in a classic Amiga games list. Compute's Amiga Resource said it "combines fast action and ear catching sound" saying that you'll enjoy it again and again. While wishing the game included difficulty settings due to its challenge, they finished with saying there might be more to drawing boxes than you thought, and giving it a 3 out of 5.
Computer Gaming World covered the Amiga version, and as mentioned before were attempting to make more out of it than was there, delving quite a bit into strategy. They called it a fascinating game and highly recommended to "those who are at one with the universe, to those who are prepared to pursue purposeful strategy in the face of intense action", noting that he loved and hated it so. Amiga World used every last buzz word provided to them by Taito, calling the game "an accurate and exciting reproduction of the arcade original", concluding that it might be tough to "qix the habit." Amazing Computing provided the most lukewarm review, saying it was surprisingly fun, and while not the world's best game, it would make a valuable addition to an arcade collection.
I would rate my opinion as a bit higher than Amazing Computing, though lower than many of the rest. It's the arcade game in its gameplay, and that game was a classic. It betters the originals graphics, although in 1989 it was by no means pushing the Amiga. There's good sound and music, and as difficult a game as it is, I've found few that are more addicting. I threw myself into this one as I would a far more in-depth game, and began to enjoy the pain. Loving and hating it so, I of course find it easy to say it's an essential ingredient to your home arcade collection, and is best on the Amiga. I hope you'll check out my video review, where I read from all of the magazines discussed here, show various comparisons with other versions, read from the manual, and express much pain. Readers of this article may also enjoy my looks at Arkanoid (Amiga), Sword of Sodan (Amiga), Dragon's Lair (Amiga), or Marble Madness (Amiga).
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