Xevious
Xevious was first released in the arcades back in 1982 and the most innovative feature it had was the fact that you had different weapons for ground and air attacks. This gave a whole new dimension as you had to keep track of two different types of enemies. The story involves the Xevions who are at first glance aliens but it turns out humans are actually the ones who were aliens on planet earth and now the Xevions want their planet back. Unfortunately mankind is outdated as far as technology is concerned so they’ve put all their hope into a prototype ship called the Solvalou fighter plane to save them.
The game takes the form of a vertically scrolling shoot’em up and the object is the standard blast anything that gets in your way before they do the same to you. There are your regular flying enemies which at the start have simple patterns and retreat directly after firing a shot but later on you will encounter faster and more manouverable craft as well. Ground targets start of as stationary target which often don’t fire or are commandunits which will decrease enemy attack power temperary but later on you will face tanks and other more dangerous vehicles. You are armed with air to air missiles, stated in the manual but they look like bullets, and a ground bomb which can only be dropped with a few seconds interval to take care of ground targets. There are no powerups or anything and if you get hit by an enemy or enemy fire you explode in a ball of flame and are send back a long way back. If you manage to get to the end of the level there is a big boss, usually a fortress of some kind, waiting to battle it out with you.
Xevious was released very early in the arcades but the home translations were released several years later at which point it wasn’t very special anymore. The pace of the game is also rather slow which isn’t very good for a scrolling shooter and there’s no powerups of any kind but I guess this is because the game is so old and none of that was standard at the time. Most of the home versions weren’t too good but the NES and PC-engine one are ok so if you want to try the game give those a go.
Overal rating: 6/10
This game was released for many different systems here are some notes:
| Amstrad CPC | Released in 1986. Like some of the home versions it has a big sidebar where info like number of players and the score are displayed. Of the 8-bit home computer verions this one is the best. |
| Atari 7800 | Released in 1988. I’d say this was in between the home versions and the console versions, only average. |
| C64 | Released in 1987. This is the worst version there is, bad use of colors and overall bad graphics make the bombs and missiles very hard to see which is a killer for gameplay. |
| NES | Released in 1988. Quite good. |
| PC-Engine/ Turbo Grafx |
Released in 1990. Best version without a doubt, there are even story bits but too bad they are in Japanese. |
| ZX Spectrum | Released in 1987. Similar to the Amstrad version but with monochrome graphics. |
| Others | These versions are not available. Apple released in 1984. Atari ST released in 1987. Sega Master system released in 1990. |
| Date added | May-16-2009 10:37 |
| Name | Xevious |
| Developer | Namco limited |
| Publisher | |
| First released | 1984 |
| Genre | Action |
