Original Release: SpeedStrip Interactive, 2000, PC
A pretty solid puzzle game, but is the full version available anywhere?
5X (PC, SpeedStrip, 2000)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: MS-DOS Emulation Guide
Review by: Master-B
5X is a competitive puzzle game that traces its lineage back to 1990’s Ataxx, but you may be more familiar with the gameplay from The 7th Guest’s diabolical microscope puzzle, or maybe even Cool Spot for the NES. It’s a bit of a simplified Go variant where you just have to land next to opponent pieces to capture them, and games are usually drawn-out and messy with a lot of back-and-forth terrain shifting that is a test of multiple-order move planning.
It’s a cool game, and it works out pretty well here. The computer plays very well in the early going, but does seem to make a lot of boneheaded tradeoffs in the late stages when the board is almost filled out. That’s with the caveat that I could only play the first levels; all I could find of this game was a limited demo mode that lets you play the first stage of two boards, so the challenge may well ramp up as you go.
Also, if you have the full version, you get stripping as you go. At least with the “Sasha” board, which features a blonde Sadie who I assume gradually gets out of a red dress. The other board seems to be the “safe for work” one and just has random pics of Russia or something that you have to fight aliens over.
The game is really quite the mystery, with almost no information available about it online. The developer “SpeedStrip Interactive” only published one other game I can find record of, shockingly titled “SpeedStrip”, and both seem like low-budget self-published projects that were never well-advertised. They clearly had plans for expansion levels that you could add to the game, but again there’s so little info about it that I have no idea if they actually made any or not.
It also has the unique quality of being a DOS game released in the year 2000, when those had pretty much dried up about three years prior, though it does come packed with some sort of Windows option (didn’t try it). Runs fine in DOSBox, but there appears to be an emulation error where the re-rendering of the piece count after each turn takes a weirdly long time to load in. Then again, maybe it was an intentional nag feature for the shareware version, I dunno.
If you know where to get ahold of the full version of the game, or any expansion packs, please give a shout … or if you were involved with SpeedStrip Interactive back in the day and wouldn’t mind talking a little about the development.