And before we go any further, you can download it for free at RozzBozzy’s itch.io page right here. When the ports finally arrived, they never stopped coming, and you’ll also find arcade Xevious on dozens of compilations released for everything ever since, although the near-complete but unreleased Atari 26 do intrigue me, so we’ll have to have a dig into those sometime! Then there was the sequel, Super Xevious, and MSX and PC-Engine remakes, and that 3D PlayStation thing that I really never got on with, but for now though, we’re heading all the way forward to late 2021 when a friend of mine announced his solo-dev side-project, Re-Xevious, a fan-made homage to the original updated for the modern era.
Which is all very ironic, considering none of those would probably exist without Xevious, so often overlooked as the first vertical shooter, or the first game with bosses, or the first to use pre-rendered graphics, or even the first have a storyline in a cohesive world. It was a full five years after the original arcade release before it appeared on the Spectrum, and when it did eventually arrive it didn’t stand a chance for a while – I’ve still never been as excited about a new game coming than the port of Shao-Lin’s Road that same month! And while it’s a decent version, by then it was also competing with the likes of Uridium and Lightforce, not to mention new-fangled 3D shooters like Space Harrier, so it never really set the world on fire. It took a while to actually get my hands on Xevious. Second, those looked like forests and rivers and not outer space – had the invaders actually invaded?
I’m not sure what it was about Xevious that sparked my imagination quite as much as it did, because I’m not even talking about playing that groundbreaking vertically scrolling shoot ‘em up, but seeing a single screenshot in some dim and distant issue of Computer & Video Games magazine! With hindsight I’m putting that down to two things though… First, it looked like there was a bombsight in front of your ship.
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