Xevious

Well, it was conveyed in those little moments.

I think it's very similar to what we talked about with Masanobu Endo in the concept of Sakai-ken in Xevious.

Xevious didn't really have a lot of plot in it, less than Mortal Kombat has in it.

But through details within the world, details within the characters, and little snippets of text here and there... you build hints of a larger mythology.

That draws a certain type of person in.

No, I'm going to say the wrong answer, and I know it's wrong.

I'm going to say Xevious, but that's wrong.

It is not Xevious.

DJ, risking a key, would you like to take a guess on what this game is? I will not.

All right.

And one of the rare vertical scrollers for the era.

Everything used to go mostly went left and right, but you traveled up when you played this game, which I thought was interesting.

That and another one of theirs, Xevious, was very similar with the going

It's just one of those things that's always struck me as emblematic of the 7800 platform.

Like, I know a lot of people put Xevious, uh, really high up on their lists.

Yeah.

And Xevious is without a doubt a better game than Desert Falcon, but I don't feel like Xevious says, uh, holds the personality of the 7800 quite as much as Desert Falcon does.

I think this is, uh, I j- I just think that this really has a lot of the 7800's heart in it, and that's why it made my list.

Yeah, I, I thought this was a very cool game.

That is also another, another solid one.

Yeah.

Dedicated video game magazines did not exist yet in the '83, '84, '85 period in which the Famicom boom is starting to get going.

Because there was a lot of material that was going to be interesting to this demographic, these games are full of secrets, something that has become very popular in Japanese video games, thanks especially to Xevious and Tower of Druaga, which we talked about in our Masanobu Endo episode.

These are also games with a variety of tricks based on the way they're programmed, something that has been true going back to Space Invaders and the way that you counted your shots to hit the UFO with the right shot because the UFO points were tied to the shot increments as kind of a shortcut to make all of that work.

So there were ways to maximize your s- score by counting shots.

There, I think, was also a video.

Namco was the team that made Ace Combat was like toying with a Xevious sequel of some sort.

And so they made like this prototype demo of Xevious stuff just running in the Ace Combat 4 engine.

And so there's, I guess, a little video of it on YouTube and stuff.

I think it's from some release of one of the games, or hidden on a DVD or something like that.

Anyway, it was kind of neat.

I was like, oh yeah, that'd be fun if Xevious was kind of like Flight Sim adjacent in the same way Ace Combat is.

But they didn't go through with it, of course, which is a fun thing.