In the late eighties, the charismatic Mastertronic, which so many joys (cheap) had brought us at the height of 8 bits, made a superhuman effort to enter through the front door in the new 16 bits systems. A result of this emerged a few games, which even where converted to the arcade coin-ops, like AAARGH!, Road Wars, Magic Johnson´s Basketball, Sidewinder and Xenon, a frenetic shooter, first game of the Bitmap Bros, who gave us so many happy hours on Amiga.

For 8 bits versions, Mastertronic commissioned the work to different teams. In Spectrum, the geniuses at Binary Design gave us a version, with music by David Whittaker at its best, and a game that, although monochrome, retained all the original elements. At Commodore 64, the work went to MC Lothlorien, which did a mediocre conversion, at the level of some games created by the Shoot 'em Up Construction Kit.

The MSX and Amstrad versions, two machines whose were not very popular in the UK, were asigned to Animagic, who commissioned the MSX work to New Frontier, which left a pretty decent game, similar to the Spectrum (alhtough this MSX version is outweighed by a ton of much better shooters), while the CPC version was coded by the own Animagic.

In CPC, Xenon is graphically amazing, definitely the best version after the 16-bit, with music, a sound quite decent, and yes it is a tad slow, but I think we can forgive it because it is best of the genre for the Amstrad machine.