The most effective is an army of invincible spinning plates. Most opposing ships in Xevious don’t even look like planes-instead the game throws geometric shards at you, each moving with different patterns and speeds. The graphical effect makes the harsh angles and clean exteriors of the enemies even more harrowing. Like those clouds, which are not truly white and pillowy, but instead a mass of water molecules, you see something with the 3D effect turned on-the distance between your spaceship and the prairie lands below-that is not really there.īut to fans of vertical shooters, the approach borders on heresy, as if forcing you down a warp pipe you didn’t know existed. Since the 3DS’s top screen is wider than the 4:3 monitors of yesteryear, the designers have added a column of clouds on either side of the playing area, a clever frame but also a safe zone in which to avoid oncoming fire. You are affected, not by the fluidness of movement or audacity of an enemy’s design, but by a perception of space. It’s a strange feeling: you “see” something that is entirely absent. Here, the mere distance between sky and earth can prove beautiful. The basic architecture of Xevious brings a clarity to this depth that might have been marred with the more detailed graphics of modern shoot ’em ups. Now there is a clear separation between the level at which you fly and the ground below you. Onscreen, you saw one flat mess of objects. In the original, this separation of playfields was all imagination. What makes the gameplay interesting is the playfield-you either shoot craft in the sky, or bomb tanks and structures below on the ground. Your ship travels at a pace approaching “plod.” Your weapons are simple bullets or bombs, with no option of upgrades. What is more important to consider, in this new version of a nearly 30-year-old game, is what has been found. This sense of communal awe is lost on the handheld, but that’s the story for any arcade port brought home. With its unceasing march toward victory or defeat, I can imagine the tension of a freak run, the crowd slowly building behind your shoulders as you dodge floating saucers and maneuver around the spontaneous appearance of black orbs. The original game was developed for the arcades, and it shows. Nintendo and Namco Bandai have remastered the 1982 vertical-scrolling shoot ’em up as a 3D Classic, a downloadable title for the Nintendo 3DS handheld. Unlike its contemporaries, there are no lava stages, no snow-capped mountain stages, no stages set entirely within a space station.
Scenery changes at a metastatic pace, a slow spreading of new enemies and environmental cues until you’re someplace you haven’t been before.
There are barely levels, with each of the game’s 16 areas cordoned off by a patch of forest. Your ship Solvalou explodes, or you reach a predetermined high score of 9,999,990. Once you begin Xevious, there are only two ways to end.
Reset is a series of second looks at influential, interesting, or forgotten games through a contemporary lens.