The Famicom version is a particularly celebrated early release for Japanese players. Nevertheless, the game was ported to several consoles and computers. Divides in taste were never made more apparent than with Xevious, as Endoh had no problem designing a game whose challenge was ramped differently from one play experience to the next, and placing secrets randomly throughout the landscape, with very little indication to their whereabouts. However, Xevious was only a modest success in the United States, where it was licensed and published by Atari. In addition to all of those, there were several secrets tucked away into the game for players to discover that kept them coming back to it, and a giant mothership that served as one of the earliest templates for a game boss.īecause of all this, Xevious was a massive hit in Japan. Visually, it contained realistically shaded enemy characters, and an eyepopping scrolling background which went beyond what most arcade gamers had seen at the time. Xevious had many other things going for it, including not one, but two forms of weapons, one for the air and one for the ground. This concept would be revisited several times, most notably by Compile's Zanac, in 1986. If you played aggressively, Xevious responded more aggressively as well. If you were clearing enemies rather quickly, Xevious ramped up the challenge by throwing a different type of enemy at you.

that adapted the challenges of the game to your performance. In addition to this realistic Artificial Intelligence, the game itself also ran on a kind of A.I. It runs on three Zilog Z80 run at 3.072 MHz. Instead, they get as close as possible, take a good shot at you, and retreat to the top or the sides of the screen. Endoh did not think that a real enemy would behave so recklessly. Unlike those games, enemies do not sit passively in a formation or take kamikaze dives at your ship. Following the wake of popularity of games like Space Invaders, Galaxian, and Galaga, Endoh desired to make a far more realistic game. Xevious was one of the earliest vertical scrolling shootemups, and undoubtably shaped the shoot 'em up genre that it helped to create. Xevious is an arcade game designed by Masanobu Endoh, one of Japan's most respected game creators and the mastermind behind Namco's later arcade hit of '84, The Tower of Druaga.

Xevious nes release date