First off, the music is atrocious. Just an annoying two second loop that repeats forever. I had to play with the volume turned off. Overall though, Xevious is a pretty good game that was extremely influential for the shoot 'em up genre.
However, my stupid ass thought "what if I played through all unique areas in the game" and was promptly met with the realization that the later levels suck. I think it's pretty clear the game was never meant to be played like this, the player was really only meant to get to the first mother ship and maybe a little farther. Areas 1-8 are the game at its best, Areas 9-16 are the game at its most tedious and frustrating. They constantly spam projectiles that just appear in the middle of the screen and move toward you, seemingly at random and occasionally spawning right next to you. The last area is absolutely insane, it puts the hell in bullet hell. I didn't want to save scum, and was able to complete Areas 1-8 with only save stating between Areas, but the projectiles suddenly appearing out of thin air was just too much and I started to save scum. This is genuinely one of the hardest games I've ever played and the game isn't exactly designed to be fair after Area 8.
It was especially bad that the site I played this on was terrible, with ads popping up and blocking the screen every 10 or so minutes, the screen going black with "click to make keyboard keys work" quite often (you only need to press a button you weren't before on a controller, but it's still annoying). And save stating and loading a state are not assigned to single keys, but have to be manually set up with the mouse. Not only that, but every time you click the screen or any of the menu options on it, you'll be automatically sent to a new tab you have to close, and the game will still be running in spite of this. What a terrible site.
Yeah, don't play the game like this, don't try to go through all unique areas, you'll torture yourself. Just enjoy a solid early shoot em game and you're golden.
However, my stupid ass thought "what if I played through all unique areas in the game" and was promptly met with the realization that the later levels suck. I think it's pretty clear the game was never meant to be played like this, the player was really only meant to get to the first mother ship and maybe a little farther. Areas 1-8 are the game at its best, Areas 9-16 are the game at its most tedious and frustrating. They constantly spam projectiles that just appear in the middle of the screen and move toward you, seemingly at random and occasionally spawning right next to you. The last area is absolutely insane, it puts the hell in bullet hell. I didn't want to save scum, and was able to complete Areas 1-8 with only save stating between Areas, but the projectiles suddenly appearing out of thin air was just too much and I started to save scum. This is genuinely one of the hardest games I've ever played and the game isn't exactly designed to be fair after Area 8.
It was especially bad that the site I played this on was terrible, with ads popping up and blocking the screen every 10 or so minutes, the screen going black with "click to make keyboard keys work" quite often (you only need to press a button you weren't before on a controller, but it's still annoying). And save stating and loading a state are not assigned to single keys, but have to be manually set up with the mouse. Not only that, but every time you click the screen or any of the menu options on it, you'll be automatically sent to a new tab you have to close, and the game will still be running in spite of this. What a terrible site.
Yeah, don't play the game like this, don't try to go through all unique areas, you'll torture yourself. Just enjoy a solid early shoot em game and you're golden.