Posted on 03/29/2019 at 08:41 AM
| Filed Under Review
I've always been fascinated by Xevious for some reason. Not sure why, since I'm so bad at it. I guess I've always been a Namco fan, even when I didn't know it.
Have you seen the cabinet for the US version of Xevious by Atari. It's pretty sweet, and what grabbed me to the game in the first place.
Here's a funny childhood story about Xevious. You remember dot matrix printer paper, right? And how it was all connected and you had to rip them out via the preforations? Well, when I was a kid, I got some of my dad's computer dot matrix printer paper. I spread it out on the floor from the front door to the back door. Then I got out my pencils and crayons and made a Xevious map on one side and a Zaxxon map on the other side. Then I would get out my toy spaceships and play 'pretend Xevious' over the printer paper! Yeah I was a weird kid I guess. I did get in a little bit of trouble for wasting so much of my dad's printer paper, though!
I read somewhere that Xevious was the first game to use pre-rendered graphics in the sprites. I always thought the backgrounds you were flying over looked like a golf course, though.
I think I've played nearly every Xevious game in the series except for Solvalou, which used the StarBlade engine. I especially like Xevious 3-D/G+, and the music in Xevious Arrangement. Gotta love all the Xevious cameos in other Namco games, too. Too many to mention here, though. Did you know that Grobda is a spinoff to Xevious and uses the tanks from that game? Also I can't believe how extensive the Xevious story is! They've written whole volumes of books about it in Japan!