It's Xevious! This game inspired like a trillion billion jillion different shmups and to be honest I'm not the biggest fan of Xevious-likes, but here we are. This game does a lot of interesting things with the shmup genre. There's obviously the main gimmick this game has with the dual-layer gameplay where enemies are both in front of the solvalou that must be shot with the main weapon whereas enemies on the floor below must be destroyed with carefully-aimed ground bombs. It do provide a level of depth not seen in other shmups of its ilk, but I think it can be a little overwhelming at times. This game also has its fair share of secrets, such as the mysterious Sol Citadels that can be destroyed by bombing specific ground tiles for extra points, as well as the S flags that show up on random tiles of a certain tile row on the map for extra lives. Those extra lives are also extremely necessary as this game does not pull its punches at times, throwing huge amounts of bullets at your large-hitboxed, slow moving ship.

I think what makes this game really stick for me despite me not being the biggest fan of the style of game it pioneered is its aesthetic. Things are just so.... sterile? The music is this very short bloopy 5-second loop that plays the whole time, enemies are usually very basic shapes in grey colors, the ground is a flat green for grass, brown for dirt, grey for road, blue for water, etc. It makes a game that just has a certain strange vibe to it. Not very worldly, but also not very otherworldly either.

All in all, it's a game that I respect and enjoy the vibe of for sure, but dual-plane shooters like this just aren't really my jam when it comes to the shmup genre.

I have really nothing to say about this game except that 1). to suggest a narrative, if the above blurb is to be believed, that there is an indigenous race on earth that is not human and THEY are the bad guys is ah, remarkable to say the least, and 2). to have all that and no ending? To not tell me if the humans or xeviousians come out on top? Just a loop that never ends? Or is that the xevious secret weapon, an “eternal recurrence bomb?” I mean yeah it’s more likely the developers couldn’t have been arsed to make an ending but said oh well we made it so hard it’s not like anyone’s beating it anyway but still, it’s fun to imagine

It's likely Ridge Racer and Taiko no Tatsujin talking, but I can't help but kind of like Xevious. I've been brainwashed by Namco so thoroughly that I've been convinced there's some value in this screensaver of a game.

Hideo Kojima has said that Xevious was one of his favourite games growing up, and admired its sense of a tangible world. I think that's what I appreciate about it. The landscapes. Xevious's backgrounds aren't built out of repeated patterns and tilesets, but unspectacular dirt roads, forests and coastlines. The hypnotically repetitive gameplay casts your attention to them. It's easy to start thinking about the lives of the people below, and the day-to-day operations of each base you fly over. It feels convincingly mundane, and builds the illusion quite invitingly. It's quite unique for a shoot 'em up of its vintage, and it's easy to see how this sense of purposeful adventure inspired Kojima's work.

Then you snap out of it and realise how fucking boring the game is.

The most interesting thing about this game is the background being on earth. It's fascinating how it feels to be a paradigm shift in graphics by simply giving you something to look at that isn't yet another star field.

That being said, nothing here is better or more interesting than in many schmups that came before it, and I would argue the combat just feels unfocused. Rather than waves of enemies that you need to figure out how to deal with, it's almost as if they randomly populated them on the map.

The sound effects are basic, and the obnoxious background music that just repeats the same few grating notes detracts from the experience as well.