Interpose Xmas Greetings: 1996 Holiday Shmup for DOS.
Yeah, pretty good thrifting I find I gotta say! The heck is that? -This does not bode well. -Christmaasss! Alright what in -- Interpose? What in the world is this? C’mon. Oh no. Eugh. Really? Nope! Nope. Nope, nope, nope! Welp. I think I’ve seen enough.
It’s December! That means it’s time for Christmas Lazy Game Reviews. And he’s behind me, I don’t even care. I don’t even care anymore! -Christmaaasss! Greetings and welcome to another month of Christmas LGR! And this year we’re kicking things off with Interpose X-mas Greetings, developed by Twilight Zone Software and published by Webfoot Technologies in 1996 for MS-DOS.
And for any of you Legacy of Goku fans, yep, this is the same Webfoot behind those games! In fact you might’ve have seen their name on any number of titles since the mid-90s. They were quite the prolific publisher of licensed games for systems like the GameBoy Advance and Nintendo DS, not to mention dozens of mahjongg and card game compilations.
They’re still around too, as far as I can tell, though their website and social media pages haven’t been updated in over a year at the time of recording. Anyway, before they cranked out dozens of Dragon Ball Z, Hello Kitty, and My Little Pony games, Webfoot was an old school shareware publisher, signing independent developers from around the world and distributing their games online.
Games like Twilight Zone Software’s Interpose, a side-scrolling spaceship shooter for PCs created by a group of talented coders, artists, and designers out of Sarpsborg, Norway. And dang it, this is one of those shareware titles that I completely missed out on back in the day, and that just sucks.
Scrolling shoot-em-ups were one of my absolute favorite kinda games to play so Interpose here would’ve been my jam. Knowing there was a scrolling shooter this well-made that was free to download and I didn’t realize it? It induces a kind of retroactive sadness that’s hard to describe.
Like, I could’ve been playing this awesomeness but nope, I was playing the shareware version of Space Pilot for the hundredth time instead. Oh well. Despite personally missing out on its entire existence, Interpose seems to have done well for TZS and Webfoot, enough to merit the release of a second shareware version.
That being Interpose X-mas Greetings in December of 1996. It may sound like the title of a screensaver package or a greeting card publishing suite, but nope! It’s Interpose yet again, this time with a holiday makeover. The main menu now features a snow-covered logo and an ice-covered planet, as well as a Santa hat on our feline protagonist.
Yeah you play a cat person defending a whole race of cat people, that’s kind of Interpose’s thing. This Christmas edition doesn’t feature an expository intro sequence anymore unfortunately, but going back to the regular game real quick, the plot revolves around an ancient Earth ruled by the Overlynxes.
They’re a highly advanced and pacifist species, with supercomputers and spaceships and all sorts of stuff, living peacefully in harmony with the universe. Until one fateful day when a far flung alien race creates a new lifeform: humans. They send a whole buncha dudes, Rambo apparently included, across the solar system to take over planet Earth and wipe out the Overlynx population.
One brave soul has the paws to fight back though, jumping into a spaceship loaded with powerful weaponry, and then blasting away the human invaders without remorse. And it’s this cat guy that you play in Interpose X-mas Greetings. But instead of an army of Sly Stallones you’re fending off a slew of Santas.
This is the work of the evil scientist known as Atnas Sualc. As the backwards name implies, this is an anti-Santa type of fellow, and he’s built his own fighting force of robotic reindeer and Santa clones. Naturally, his goal is to disrupt the world’s Christmas gift distribution at the North Pole, and you’ve been tasked with destroying Atnas Sualc and his cybernetic minions before the real Santa is replaced and Christmas is ruined.
All you really need to know though is that you’re a battle-hardened cat guy with an awesome spaceship, so shoot anything that moves and try to avoid dying because unlike what you'd expect you do not have nine lives. Straight away it’s clear that the original Interpose formula hasn’t been altered in any notable way whatsoever.
Other than a wintry reskin with snow and presents lining the landscape, enemies composed of Cyborg Santas and Robo Reindeer, and a new background tracker tune with Christmassy implications? What you’re left with is a single new level for Interpose with a seasonal overhaul.
And that’s genuinely not a bad thing, because Interpose was already awesome! Once again, I’m sad that I missed out on this back when it came out because this is some quality shareware shmupping right here. It takes plenty of cues from classic horizontally scrolling shooters, with R-Type, Gradius, Zero Wing, and Scramble being the most obvious to me.
You begin with a few lives and a simple cannon that shoots forward in three directions at once, and along the way you’ll uncover power-ups and upgrades by taking out enemies. Cannon upgrades augment your ship to the point where you’re shooting in half a dozen directions at once, and weapon pickups provide an arsenal that’s far more powerful, with things like straightforward missiles, air-to-surface carpet bombs, and screen-clearing nukes.
But beyond its immediate arcade influences, Interpose has enough twists on the mechanics of those arcade classics that it's quickly granted its own alluring quality. For one thing, touching stationary objects and terrain won’t kill you, at least not immediately.
Your ship simply stops moving and the scrolling continues until you’re all the way to the left, at which point it’ll warn you you’re about to die before you explode. There’s also a rechargeable shield system, granting you multiple direct hits from enemy craft and ammunition before you’re taken out and lose a life.
And finally, your shield, cannon, and weapons can all be upgraded by visiting shops and spending the money you’ve picked up along the way. This is the point where I went from simply appreciating Interpose to deeply enjoying it. These shops provide a much-needed respite from all the ongoing action, giving you a chance to catch your breath, save your game, and invest some of that hard-earned cash.
The weaponry dispenser on the left doles out all sorts of goodies, from shield recharges and cannon upgrades, to special one-off weapons and spaceship add-ons. And a couple of these weren’t found in the regular shareware version either, so you get a bit more to play with as a result.
And if you’ve already got whatcha want, or you’re simply feelin’ lucky, there’s also a slot machine in the other corner to tempt your inner compulsive gambler. Augh, I love a good gambling mechanic! Er well, this kind anyway, the kind in old DOS games that aren’t tied to anything online and ruin the game progression or whatever.
Just good old basic slots, fruit machines, one-armed bandits, coin-operated salary stealers! It’s a fun way to piddle away the money you picked up from the exploded corpses of your enemies and maybe make a bit more to spend on guns. Especially since Interpose X-mas is so ridiculously short.
Yeah, it’s only one level. This is effectively a teaser for a shareware version of a full game, after all. The whole experience only lasts about five to ten minutes, depending on how often you visit and how long you stay in those checkpoint shops. And once you reach the final bit of the level you’ll come to face to face with backwards Santa himself, the only boss in this version of the game.
Simple enough to defeat: dodge his swarms of projectiles and hit him with enough of yours without dying too much, and there ya go. The world of cat people can continue celebrating the holidays as usual, and you’re greeted with the actual x-mas greetings that the title promised in the first place.
High score achieved, order screens commence, good stuff man, good stuff! And that’s about it for Interpose X-mas Greetings! It’s a short but sweet little game that absolutely leaves you wanting more, much more. Making it effective both as a shareware teaser for the full game, but also as a holiday tie-in that’s not overly holiday-ish.
There’s just enough seasonal glitz going on to get the point across, but it’s not overflowing with obnoxious visuals or cheesy Christmas music to the point of annoyance. It’s a quality special edition of a pre-existing quality game and that’s that, putting it right up there with classics like Jazz Jackrabbit Holiday Hare and Holiday Lemmings.
Not only that, but both Interpose and this Christmas edition have an air of demoscene around it that I absolutely appreciate. Everything from the music, to the art style, to the animations, to the anti-aliased text, to the fact that it’s called “X-mas Greetings.” Now, “greetings” or “greetz” have been a staple of demogroup messages and cracktros since the dawn of computerized time, so the fact that they called this “X-mas Greetings” instead of “X-mas Special Edition” or whatever? Yeah it all just screams “demoscene,” you don’t even have to look it up it’s so obvious.
Of course when I did look it up, the answer was unsurprising to say the least. Twilight Zone Software was an offshoot of the demogroup Twilight Zone, responsible for a number of MS-DOS demos in the early 90s, providing yet another degree of personal fascination regarding Interpose and its Christmas spin-off here.
Either way though, point being that I think Interpose is awesome for a multitude of reasons, I’m still sad that I didn’t get to play it back in the day, and the X-mas Greetings version is now way up there on my list of quality Christmas titles to replay each year.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve had a clone breathing down my neck this whole time and it’s getting weird. And if you enjoyed this --CHRISTMAS!-- if you enjoyed this episode of LGR then --CHRISTMAAASS-- DUDE! If you enjoyed this episode of Christmas LGR, then do check out the previous years’ videos.
