Throughout it all, you'll hear the same sirenlike music and "plink, plink, plink" laser fire constantly. The brown and green backgrounds look vaguely like terrain, while the gray enemy ships more closely resemble geometric shapes than aircraft. Graphics and audio are rather basic, as well. As such, the game becomes tiresome pretty quickly. While it's not a bad design, you don't see anything new after the first 30 seconds or so. The game simply loops the same 10 brief areas indefinitely until you run out of ships. If you get hit by a single bullet, you'll lose a ship and start from a predetermined point. Occasionally, a large mothership will appear, and you can try to shoot it down or wait until it leaves. Enemy tanks and planes swoop into view, fire off some bullets, and retreat. You pilot a ship, called the Solvalou, over a scrolling landscape and blast enemies using an endless supply of bullets and bombs. Xevious was one of the first vertical-scrolling ship shoot-'em-ups.Īs shooters go, it doesn't get much simpler than Xevious. Today, Xevious seems totally ancient with its overly repetitious design and ugly 8-bit visuals. The game was already behind the times when it finally hit the NES in 1984. However, that respect doesn't mean you should pay 500 Wii points ($5) to play the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Xevious on your Wii's Virtual Console. For that reason alone, Xevious deserves respect. Without Xevious, superlative shoot-'em-ups like 1942, Raiden, and Ikaruga may never have seen the light of day. Namco released the original arcade cabinet in 1982 and subsequently published numerous versions for the various home consoles of the day. Xevious holds the distinction of being one of the first vertical-scrolling aircraft shoot-'em-ups.
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