Qix (NES) Playthrough
108A playthrough of Taito's 1991 puzzle game for the NES, Qix.
Since the game has no ending, in this video, I play until I get a game over on level fifteen.
Qix was an early post-Space Invaders arcade hit for Taito back in 1981, and the NES version was part of a wave of home conversions that showed up in the late eighties and early nineties.
Each of Qix's stages take place on a single-screen playfield. You control a tiny red ship that draws lines, or "stix," and by drawing rectangles to section off areas, you can claim them for yourself. It feels a bit like someone took Logo for the Apple II and crossbred it with an Etch-a-Sketch.
There are several hazards to get in your way, though. The floating mass of colorful lines, "Qix," bounces around the screen, and it'll kill you if it makes contact with an unfinished Stix. (Remember how Windows 3.1 had a fractal screensaver? Doesn't Qix look just like it?) "Sparx" are the pink things that run around the edge of the playfield and will kill you if they make contact with your ship, and if you hesitate for a moment while drawing a Stix, the Stix becomes a lit fuse that'll give chase.
The rules are simple and things start slow, but you aren't given long to find your bearings. The pace becomes frantic after the first few stages, and without razor-sharp focus you'll find yourself quickly overwhelmed by the non-stop stream of enemies that come at you from every conceivable angle.
The arcade game was well before my time. I'm not very familiar with it so I can't fairly judge how faithful the NES adaptation remains to the original, but I can say that it feels very much like an early 80s arcade game. I imagine its unrelenting difficulty level and focus on chasing high scores made it an appealing prospect for NES owners who enjoyed the arcade game a decade earlier, but I found it dull and frustrating. The presentation is spartan and abstract, the controls are twitchy when you're trying to carefully carve out small paths around the enemies, and I never found the gameplay particularly exciting or satisfying. I much preferred Volfied, Qix's sci-fi themed follow-up (https://youtu.be/Ba0Aa-bjSJ8), and the SNES's anime-infused take on its gameplay, Cacoma Knight in Bizyland (https://youtu.be/stzGpuLSkoA).
Perhaps it's unfair to compare Qix and Volfied given the years between them, but I had already been spoiled by Volfied when I first tried Qix, and I found it impossible to look at the original without that frame of reference.
Qix was already very much a retro experience when the NES version came out in 1991, and I didn't find the gameplay to be compelling enough to make up for my distinct lack of nostalgia for its era. I loved Dig Dug, Pac-Man, Joust, and the like, but Qix never struck that same chord with me. It's not a bad game, but it's not my kind of game.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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