Review: Xevious (Namco)

[Daniel W. Rouse Jr.]

Summary: Namco made a good vertical scrolling shoot-em-up for its time, with
adaptive enemy difficulty depending on player skill, but I think it is also
somewhat unbalanced due to its black ball enemies.

Xevious uses two weapons--a basic shot, and a basic bomb. The bomb will drop
where the bomb target is placed.

The adaptive enemy difficulty is as follows: if a player hits too many of
one type of enemy, another type of enemy will appear, and in some cases two
types of enemies will appear at the same time. Occasionally, in addition to
enemies on screen, there is a small interval where shots fly downward like
raindrops and must be dodged or shot.

There are also hidden targets--flags and Sol-Citadels. Sites on the web
contain the location of these hidden targets; however, I find it's more
risky to even try for these hidden targets and have just stopped trying to
find them. The bomb target does NOT flash red for flags. The bomb target
DOES flash red for a hidden Sol-Citadel. That said, flags are worth an extra
life or 10,000 points, depending on the game setting. Sol-Citadels are worth
2,000 points for revealing them and another 2,000 points for destroying the.

And then there are the black balls. Arguably, the first occurrence of what
later shoot-em-ups would call "suicide bullets"--meaning enemies destroying
themselves into bullets. Depending on the size of the black ball, it does
one of the following:

* Small black ball, destroys itself into a single bullet aimed at the
player. Usually enough time to shoot a black ball or dodge its single shot.

* Medium black ball, destroys itself into a medium fast five spread of
bullets aimed at the player. Shoot quickly or find a gap in the five spread.

* Large flashing black ball, destroys itself into a huge screen filling
rapid spread plus homing bullets aimed at the player. I *hate* these because
they flash red for only about half a second before they explode into the
huge screen filling bullet spread--the homing bullets ARE able to be dodged
but it's a balance between too little movement and too much movement.

In my opinion, it is these black balls that ruin the balance of the game,
because--except for Andor Genesis mothership sections--those too are part of
the adaptive difficulty.

Regarding the Andor Genesis mothership: hitting the mothership right in the
center with a bomb destroys it immediately. Destroying each shot turret
separately before hitting it in the middle earns more points. It's a fairly
easy boss type enemy and will even leave the screen in a few seconds if it
is not destroyed.

So far, I've never finished Xevious, but from what I have read there are 16
sections total before the game loops starting again with the second section.

The versions of Xevious I have played are on Microsoft Revenge of Arcade for
the PC, and on Namco Museum volume 2 for the PSOne.