Posted on 03/31/2017 at 09:46 AM
| Filed Under Blogs
Yeah the Xevious history is crazy. It has a super long story that even got novels in Japan. The graphics of the spaceships in the first game are actually pre-rendered, so it was the first arcade game that did that. I always thought it looked like you were flying over a golf course, though.
Remember how dot matrix printer paper was attached to each page back in the day? Well when I was a kid, I took a big long roll of my dad's printer paper, spread it out from the front door to the back door, and drew a Xevious map on one side and a Zaxxon map on the other side. Then I got out my toy spaceships and played pretend Xevious and Zaxxon with them. That is, until my dad got home and I got in trouble for doing that (but not too much trouble, I think deep down he thought that was cool, too, even if I did waste paper).
There are actually two 3-D Xevious games. One is called Solavou and it's a 3-D from the cockpit view kind of game and I think uses the same engine as StarBlade. It plays the same, too. The other one was called Xevious 3-D/G+. It had 3-D graphics, but it was still a 2-D shooter like the original. And it was ported to the PlayStation, unlike Solvalou (that's the name of the Xevious spaceship, by the way).
I had Marble Madness on the NES as a kid, and back then, I thought it was pretty good. But then, I was a kid and you know how kids can be pretty happy with crap sometimes. But I could never get the hang of trackballs so I ended up doing better on the NES version. It was actually pretty close to the arcade game, all things considered. Interesting fact: the NES version of Marble Madness was developed by Rare.