Atari promoted the game with the slogan "Are you devious enough to beat Xevious?" and closed the commercial with a tagline branding it "the arcade game you can't play at home." (Note: the name is actually pronounced "ZEH-vee-us") In 1983, the original Xevious was the first arcade game to actually have a television commercial aired for it in the U.S. In this game the flag gave the player an extra life and this feature was carried over to numerous subsequent Namco games. Among these was the 'special flag' which first appeared in Rally-X. It was one of the first games to have hidden bonuses which are not mentioned in the instructions but can be revealed by a secret maneuver. The graphics were revolutionary for their time, and characters were rendered with remarkable clarity and effect through careful use of shades of gray and palette-shifting. Xevious was one of the earliest vertical scrolling shooters, and greatly influenced games in this genre. Shmups (Flight & Naval Shoot'Em Up) (35).Shmups (Flight Shoot'em Up Scrollers) (67).Fans of Xevious would be better served by finding a copy of Namco Museum Volume 2 for the PlayStation, which contains the arcade version of Xevious and can probably be bought for less money than this cart. Charging $20 for one 20-year-old game of middling quality certainly doesn't help matters either. Unfortunately, the NES version of Xevious was never really all that great of a game, and its "classic" status on the NES is questionable, at best. Now the NES version has been ported to the GBA.Īll in all, this Classic NES Series game does a great job of playing the NES version of Xevious. But since Xevious' two-player mode is alternating, you can get by just fine passing the GBA back and forth as necessary. It also has link cable support to allow two players to play the game with just one cartridge. Like other games in the Classic NES Series, Xevious has save support for storing your high score. The repetitive, high-pitched music sounds roughly the same, but the aural effects used for hitting targets and shooting at the game's flying, spinning monoliths don't sound quite right. The sound also isn't quite as crisp as that found in the arcade game. Graphically, the NES version of the game lacked the sharpness of the arcade original, and that trait has carried over to the GBA. The mechanics are sound, but since the game doesn't really change very much as you play, it can get tiresome pretty quickly. There are no power-ups or anything of that nature, so the game simply trucks along indefinitely, pausing from time to time to serve up a boss-style encounter against a large, dangerous mothership. You still fly your ship around while blasting anything that attacks from the air, and you still use your onscreen crosshairs to deliver bombs to ground-bound enemies. The gameplay, though, has remained largely unchanged. To fit on a TV, the game was stretched out for the NES, so it took up the entire width of a TV screen-and now it takes up an entire Game Boy Advance screen. The original arcade game was played on a vertical monitor. The music in Xevious is totally classic, but it might just drive you crazy. Xevious is certainly a classic game, but it's a classic arcade game, not a classic NES game. While players will find that this game-part of the Classic NES Series-is a pretty faithful duplication of the NES game, it isn't exactly the most exciting concept. Now, that NES version has been ported over to the Game Boy Advance. The game was a success, and Namco eventually ported it over to the Famicom in 1984, releasing it on the NES some time later. Not only could you shoot directly ahead of you but also you could drop bombs to take out ground-based targets. The scrolling shooter was, at the time, very unique. Xevious was first released as an arcade game back in 1982.
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