Xevious
You fly low over the landscape, with one hand spraying air fighters, with the other dropping bombs on ground targets - and beneath you spreads a world that feels surprisingly alive and elaborate for a game from 1982. Xevious is one of the pillars of the vertical shooter genre, and on the Atari 7800 it got a dignified home rendition.
Xevious was created by Japan's Namco, with Masanobu Endo as designer. The game introduced into arcades a concept that became essential for the whole genre: simultaneous combat against two planes of enemies. One weapon aims forward at flying opponents, the other - the bomber - hits targets on the ground. The player thus has to constantly switch attention between the sky and the terrain below.
For its time, Xevious dazzled with an elaborate, detailed background featuring forests, rivers, and mysterious geoglyphs that evoked a real landscape instead of abstract space. On top of that it added hidden bonuses and secrets that tempted players to discover just how far the game's long world extended. This combination of smooth action and atmosphere made it one of the first machines with its own distinctive identity.
The home version for the Atari 7800 was among the titles that used the console's power for a more faithful transfer of arcade graphics and smooth background scrolling. For a vertical shooter, where the legibility of enemy shots and the density of the action matter, this was an important criterion, and the 7800 handled it convincingly.
Xevious wrote itself in as one of the most influential shoot 'em ups ever and inspired countless followers. In Japan it became an enormous hit, its music and visual style became widely popular, and gradually a whole series of sequels and ports arose that kept the brand alive for further generations.
Why play: A founding title of vertical shooters that forces you to watch the sky and the ground at once and still enchants today with the elaborate world spreading out beneath your wings.
Game 7 of 37 for Atari 7800
The same title elsewhere (1)
Namco's 1983 arcade cabinet built its reputation on densely detailed underground and ground targets and smooth vertical scrolling that felt like flying over a living world. The Atari 7800 port from 1986 was a solid conversion for its generation, but the console's hardware couldn't match the same number of colors or the same smooth background scrolling as the original, so both the visuals and the world's motion had to be simplified. Even so, the core gameplay — the Vulcan cannon against aircraft paired with bombs against ground targets — survived intact, making it one of the 7800's more ambitious titles. Anyone wanting the full experience in its original glory should reach for the arcade version.
