The Floofer Zone #9+10 | January 29th, 2025
XEVIOUS (is kinda cool)
My professor was late to class yesterday, so I had a spare 15 minutes or so where I was standing around in front of an empty college classroom with nothing to do. My options were to take my Retroid (pictured below) out of my pocket and play something, or just stand around and do my IRL idle animation for a while. I chose to boot up the Famicom version of Xevious, a port of a Namco-developed arcade game from 1982… and it was actually pretty fun?
I game in atomic purple, as god intended
I recognize that saying that one of the most famous arcade games of
the early 80s is “actually pretty fun” is a bit of a lukewarm take, but
I get the feeling that people don’t put Xevious on the same pedestal as
other early Namco titles. I’ve heard that in Japan, Xevious was so
popular it
broke Space Invader’s sales records, but I don’t see it discussed
very often on the English-speaking internet. It’s interesting to me how
the same thing can be a super-ultra-mega-hit in one region, and then be
relatively unknown in a different region, even though the thing in
question is really cool and good! cough cough pretty cure
A quick summary of Xevious gameplay: it’s a vertically-scrolling shoot ’em up where you pilot the Solvalou: a ship equipped with a rapid-fire air-to-air blaster weapon, as well as air-to-ground bombs, each fired with a different button on the controller. Use your arsenal to fend off waves of enemy ships and ground turrets across a bunch of different areas, and survive to face the big bad boss of them all: the Andor Genesis. Supposedly the game loops after 16 areas, but I’m not nearly good enough to get that far lol
get used to seeing this screen
I get the feeling that if you only play Xevious once or twice (like, let’s say, through a Namco Museum collection), that it just seems like another generic shooter. And to be fair, Xevious is a really old game; it’s one of the first of its kind, and many other scrolling shooters that came after built on its foundation to do bigger and better things. But I think that, much like many other arcade-y action games, where Xevious really shines is the experience you get across multiple playthroughs.
Xevious has a clever system built into it that allows the game to adapt to how you play. If you destroy a bunch of the same enemy type, a new, harder enemy type comes in to replace it, increasing the overall difficulty of the game. If you die, the reverse happens, and the game will temporarily ease up on the difficulty to give you a chance to recover. There are even certain enemies that appear harmless and can be ignored, but destroying them reduces the difficulty instead of increasing it, so targeting those enemies becomes a priority, even over the ones that are, y’know, actually shooting at you! All this results in a game that feels a little bit different each time you play. The better you get at playing Xevious, the more the game will challenge you. Get far enough and you’ll start finding new enemy types that you had never seen before!
it’s all fun and games until the bad guys start flying at Mach 5
This sort of difficulty-adjusting mechanic is pretty standard in arcade-style shmups (I believe shmup fans refer to it as a “rank system”), but still, I think I understand why Japanese gamers in 1982 where so obsessed with this game. Xevious was one of the first to implement this idea, so it must’ve felt like playing a game with infinite possibilities!
And like, really think about that for a second. Xevious came out in 1982. What else was even out at the time? Galaga? Dig Dug? Pac-Man? Those games are good, don’t get me wrong, but they’re the same every time. Xevious changes as you play it, which is just really cool, even in 2025 :3
Next time on The Floofer Zone: video games probably