You may remember this game as "Volfied". Seal off the menace and make him go BOOM!
By any other name this game is still Volfied. The sci-fi ish Qix game that had you controlling a tiny space craft around the screen. The premise is familiar to veteran gamers but it is a genre that has faded into arcade history. The objective is to guide your ship on the borders of the rectangle screen. In true Qix fashion, you must guide your craft at right angles into the rectangle while a line follows you. This line must then be connected to the border to seal it. This draw and seal process slowly whittles away at the space the stage started as. As opposed to a "QIX" floating around the space that you seal, the space in Qix Neo is inhabited by mecha-beasts and it's minions which are of varying degrees of oddness. The real trick is that while you venture from the safety of the border where you are invincible, you become vulnerable to destruction by the enemies. Your draw line is yellow when you leave the edge, indicating that if you are touched by an enemy or the line is touched...you die. Not until you complete a sealed area with your draw line and the border you left, will it become green which indicates you are safe. Accompanying this push for space is a timer that relentlessly counts down to the inevitable ZERO...or in simple terms...DEATH! Sealing off areas can lead to the destruction of minions or the release of power-ups. Power-ups include things like speed, laser shot, time freeze, things of that nature. Now the whole objective of this land grab is to get 75% of the play field sealed off. The real hero will strive for 99.9%, with the 0.1% holding the shrunk down mecha-beast. Not easy...but not impossible either. As you seal off more of the play area, the Mecha-beast will shrink in size but increase in speed, resulting in a hyper active mini-beast that will resist attempts to be boxed in. The infamous "Sparx" from the original Qix games that rode the border line, forcing you to make a move, do not make an appearance in Qix Neo. All the fundamentals of Qix are here though: the draw line, the enemy bouncing within the play area, the whole claim space without getting caught in the process and the objective of getting the highest percentage sealed for the most points. What Qix Neo does is update the formula with a sci-fi theme,explosions and graphics that actually create the illusion of space. In addition to the 12 levels of the standard game there is also an arrange mode . This will randomly arrange levels up to 99 for the gamer. Strange in the sense that they contain a weird grid filter over the play field , these arrange levels do not have the complexity or activity of the standard levels and they are not quite as crisp as the regular mode. These bonus stages definitely up the longevity of the game's playability.
Addicting by nature, these types of gain-ground games are a thing of the past. While being hectic and annoying at the same time, the game comes down to patience and pattern learning. As each enemy moves in a certain way, it is up to the gamer to utilize these move patterns to trap the mecha-beasts as fast as possible. Understanding the way the creatures are programmed to move is the only way to achieve the heroic 99.9%(which gives the player extreme point bonus).
If you are into the whole Qix vibe then you probably already own this game. If not, it is worth a try. Taito basically ported the arcade version of Volfied spot on here but be that it's based on an older arcade game the graphics are dated but functional. The added Arrange mode is nice, but only for those really into the seal-off process. Chances are you would not pay more than $5 for this game wherever you see it, and that is a pretty fair price for the obscure, yet respected "Volfied". Give it a shot...you may find this type of gaming fits in with a need to zone out.