Xevious

"One who considers this inspiration is frightening."

''Ah, but 30% of the maximum? More failure than what was success,'' one's voice reaches my ears, while I sit here going through the pain that is known as Xevious. The awesome-sounded name can draw one in, but immediately suck one out. I was told that the game would force me to be sick of it in less than a few minutes.

Unfortunately, they also had to be right.

You know, this may be the first shooter ever created for the NES, and as time has passed many people say that this has been the inspiration for shooters. However, this is totally wrong. This is a vertical-scrolling, 2D shooter, but while many shooters have variety, this doesn't. You'll encounter nothing but a point system with no point to it, and dozens of ships to mindlessly shoot down. If all shooters were like, the world wouldn't be as good a place as it is.

The evil begins when a bunch of aliens from the planet Xevious wish to attack the earth and destroy it. And a typical pilot named Mu (using the ship Solvalou) goes through several stages, shooting apart UFOs, then gets to a big baddie, destroys it, and saves earth. As you can see, the task of blowing up aliens attacking from an outer planet who want to destroy the earth got old the third time it was put to execution. Of course, Xevious has no intro and you have to have an instruction manual to learn the story.

As Solvalou soars through the blue skies, seemingly attempting to give you, instead of your foes themselves pain, a muster of equally tedious enemies come to greet you! Space saucers shaped like gray Cheerios, small tanks on the ground, and ships that are the spitting images of the saucers, except white. The layout of the enemies you'll find, as well as the variety of them makes baby Jesus cry.

Controlling the ship is not exactly difficult, which is the only saving grace. You can drop a bomb where the crosshair in front of your ship is, you can fire lasers, and the directional buttons are self-explanatory. The bombs, however, don't prove much use since they're very short ranged, and when you need to use them you'll get fired at and killed in that one hit you're allowed. Moving onward, you'll do nothing at all except shoot down anything in your path and then eventually, you'll meet a really friggin' hard boss.

Do you happen to remember your childhood days when you were in preschool or kindergarten, drawing things on paper? Xevious is the perfect gate back to those days in appearance. To put it simply, it looks terrible. Solvalou itself is your average plane, the ships and saucers are your average Os, but that wasn't so bad in the old days. It doesn't help that you see that ground down below, which is flat as a piece of cardboard. All you see down there is that blue strip they call water, and combinations or green and beige which pretend to look like baseball fields.

It might also be one of the most distracting games ever made, graphically-wise. Whenever an enemy fires, their shot hardly has any color to it at all. In fact, look with all your might and you might see it. Xevious is a 2D shooter, so those jagged edges on the ground don't help that case either. And there's a crosshair feature for firing bombs. It's accurate enough, but it happens to be immensely distracting. I would have given a bag of gold for a feature to turn it off.

Of course, it's not only my eyes that have been bruised. My ears also feel like rotten meat after listening to the music and sound of this game, because to put it in one word, it is appalling whereas shooter music leaves desire to be appealing. Almost all of the music you'll hear in this whole game is dull, high pitched music that makes you want to mute your TV immediately. All of it gets so annoying after about ten minutes it makes the sound look good. There's nothing but blips and beeps, when you'll be wanting standard shooting. I hated it all, let it burn in the flames of hell!

That random guy down the street who enjoys throwing their controllers at the wall would get good joy at playing this, simply because it's so difficult. Solvalou must have had every bit of armor removed since a single bullet onto it makes it blow up. Add to that you're always getting tons of things firing at you, and it's a struggle trying to see enemy fire.

''Ergh, I can't go over there, it's being fired at.''

And under your command, Solvalou moves to the right to avoid the tanks from the left shooting. And then, you blink. Your eyes are getting watery after all the watching.

''Where am I now? Uh-oh...''

You're shot, but of course, it's too late now. And you get a horrendously difficult game that makes me cough. You'll also go through so much pain on the way through that there will never be a desire to play this game again. In a nutshell, you've got a game that gets repetitive after a few minutes, has little to no variety, graphics and music that lower one's life expectancy, and to top it all off, ear-biting difficulty.

There's no reason to play Xevious. It fails at almost everything it does, although that's unfair seeing as how it doesn't try. Pass it up when you see it in a flea market, or better yet take it, break it, and let one less gamer in the world play it. And then, my dear reader, they'll be happier.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 04/19/04