Alright, I'm making good on my word. After all this time, I'm ready to do another little retro video game ramble. This is gonna be a stream of consciousness type of blog post, so forgive me if it's not the most eloquent, LOL. Without further ado, it's time to talk about...
If memory serves, my first memory of Xevious was around when I was 7 or 8 years old, playing it on one of those little Jakks Pacific Plug-n-Play joysticks with my cousins in a family friend's basement. I mostly just remember the repetitive music getting burned into my brain as we took turns playing it, but something about it stuck with me. Maybe it was the graphics? It definitely looked a fair bit more impressive visually compared to the other games on the system -- where Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga were just characters on a black background, Xevious had a full-color, scrolling landscape that made it feel way more lively. Okay, I think that collection also included one of the Pole Position games, which looked pretty nice too, but we didn't play that one a lot compared to Xevious.
Before I knew it, our parents were making us get ready to go home, and I was annoyed that I barely got to play because my younger cousin wound up hogging the controller for most of the night. But a few short years later, I had gotten Namco Museum's 50th Anniversary collection on my PS2, and I was thrilled to find Xevious in the selection of titles. I still sucked ass at it, but damn it felt good to keep playing without having to surrender my controller to someone else after one attempt.
Seriously. Majestic as shit.
Anyway, what I didn't learn until much, much later -- as in, like, this week -- is that not only were there several other Xevious games, but also a full-blown backstory?? Hell, apparently the developer, Masanobu Endo, actually wrote an entire novel about the story behind the game's world. I haven't bothered tracking it down yet, but I do have a basic summary based on scouring some wiki articles. In the distant past, mankind had crazy-advanced technology, and they made a supercomputer that could produce humanoid clone-servants programmed to accompany and protect the people of Earth. As you'd expect, this backfired like crazy, and soon the clones seized control, and set out to relocate humanity to other planets to dodge an incoming ice age. The few that managed to resist their robotic overlords remained on Earth, and so on and so forth. Fast forward to the 21st century, and the ancient androids have returned from outer space to reclaim Earth, and you the player are the only one who can stop them.
Quick aside, too, Xevious also has its own fictional language, which is where all the enemies in the games get their names from. Like, there's a written language and everything. It only shows up in one of the sequel games, but it's still neat as hell that it exists! According to what I read, Endo was extremely set on making sure Xevious was fully fleshed out, and it shows.
All of that aside, I've really only ever played the original Xevious, so that's what I'm gonna continue talking about for now. Now, bear in mind that I am not a shmup guy. I've played a handful, but usually the difficulty or the game's feel just made me bounce off of it after a while. Not saying any of what I played was necessary bad, just that those games were not for me. But Xevious just kinda clicked for me. Not sure why, it just kinda did. It's addictive as hell and I could probably spend an entire day playing it if I was able to.
Okay so right off the bat, what I love about this game is that unlike your other typical space shooters of the era, Xevious has you fighting enemies both in the sky and on the ground, and you need to use two different weapons to accomplish this. You have a gun which is your typical Galaga fare, the shots go straight in front of you and keep going until they hit another ship or the top of the screen. But for grounded enemies, you have to use bombs. The crosshairs ahead of your ship show where the bomb will land at the moment you fire it, and will only hit that exact spot. So where you can kinda just spam your regular gun and hit stuff in the sky, you have to be way more precise to hit stuff on the ground as the stage scrolls by. Now, factor in that in addition to the auto-scrolling, you also have to weave past enemy fire, and keep shooting at said enemies -- some stationary, some mobile. It definitely takes a little getting used to, but it's a fun little juggling act that keeps you on your toes.
What will also keep you on your toes is the enemy AI itself. The game actively adjusts its difficulty based on how well you're playing. If you're just scraping by and not landing a lot of hits, you'll mostly see basic enemies that aren't too tricky to deal with. On the other hand, if you're playing aggressively and blasting everything in sight, the game wises up and starts sending in more and more advanced enemies -- ships will have more erratic flight patterns, and ground turrets will fire at you more frequently. Occasionally the game will even decide to just make it start raining bullets that tear across the screen at high speed, or cannonballs that show up out of thin air (There's a bit of a visual tell but it's hard to notice if you're not looking for it). This game is not afraid to thrash your ass if you're doing well at it. Which is not very surprising considering it's an arcade game, of course. But I think it's neat that the game will adjust to your skill level instead of just being on a set curve.
Earlier I mentioned how impressed I was as a kid with the game's colorful scrolling world... Well, as it turns out, I recently discovered a new reason to be impressed with the map of Xevious today. As it turns out, the whole game uses one big ol' map, and seamlessly moves you across it in strips, hopping to a different horizontal position each time you hit the forested section at the top. Check it out:
Alright, maybe it isn't that impressive by today's standards, but I thought it was a clever little trick for making the game feel like it has a whole bunch of unique zones. Between swapping what strip of the world you fly over in each stage, and actively changing what enemies show up to attack you, Xevious does a good job keeping the game feeling fresh as you progress, despite the technical limitations of the time.
The map has a bunch of secrets scattered around it too. Towers are hidden underground, but you can detect them with your crosshairs -- they'll blink red whenever you're aimed at something that can be hit with a bomb, including the towers. You drop a bomb on them to make them appear, and the animation for when they emerge out of the ground is sick, it like slowly rises up and casts a big shadow behind it. It's so damn satisfying to see. The towers are in fixed positions in each stage too (just in terms of the individual levels' layouts, not in terms of the above map!), so once you find one in a particular part of the game, you can find it there consistently. They give you 2000 points when you unearth them, and an addition 2000 if you can hit them again with a bomb once they're done emerging. Simple enough in theory if you have a map, but tricky in practice.
Another slightly less consistent secret is the yellow "S" flags hidden in a few stages (if you've played Rally-X, you've seen them before). They always show up in a set horizontal strip of the map, but the exact position is random, so you have to try and carpet bomb that row of tiles while also trying to dodge everything the game is throwing at you. If you find one, it's an instant extra life, so the risk is worth the reward, but man, it's tough to pull off. Even if you know the general whereabouts of the flags, you kinda just have to hope you're lucky, especially if the game is being particularly generous with enemy fire.
Anyway...uhhh...I think I've run out of steam on writing for now. Xevious is cool. You should go play it! I would say it's a nice introduction to the shump genre if you're interested in diving into that. Just maybe consider finding something else to listen to if you don't just want to listen to the same short phrase of music on repeat. I mean, I don't mind it, but I'm also a freak who likes that shit, so YMMV. If you made it all the way to the end here, thanks for listening to me ramble! When I get around to checking out more of the series I might do another post on that. We'll see.
Ciao for now!
--mel