Use the arrow keys to move your aircraft. Press space to fire your canon. Use the power-ups for more firepower and other gadgets.

Fly your plane and shoot the aircrafts, tanks and other enemies.

Xevious  is a vertical scrolling shooter arcade game by Namco, released in 1982. It was designed by Masanobu Endoh. In the U.S., the game was manufactured and distributed by Atari. Xevious runs on Namco Galaga hardware.

Gameplay

The game was noted for the varied terrain below, which included forests, airstrips, bases, and mysterious Nazca Line-like drawings on the ground.

There are various aerial enemy aircraft which shoot relatively slow bullets, as well as (presumably unpiloted) fast-moving projectiles and exploding black spheres. Ground enemies are a combination of stationary bases and moving vehicles, most of which also fire slow bullets. Giant floating motherships appear in certain areas; these are killed by knocking out their cores. These are considered one of the first level-bosses to be incorporated into a video game.[1]

The game has 16 levels but these merge into one another seamlessly. The Solvalou continually advances over varying terrain and the boundaries between levels are marked only by dense forests being overflown. If the player dies, play normally resumes from the start of the level. If the player has completed at least 70% of the level before dying, play will begin at the start of the next level instead.[1] As the Solvalou constantly flies forward, it is theoretically possible to advance without killing any enemies.

History

Xevious was one of the earliest vertical scrolling shooters, and greatly influenced games in this genre. The graphics were revolutionary for their time, and characters were rendered with remarkable clarity and effect through careful use of shades of gray and palette-shifting. It was one of the first games to have hidden bonuses which are not mentioned in the instructions but can be revealed by a secret maneuver. Among these was the 'special flag' which first appeared in Rally-X. In this game the flag gave the player an extra life and this feature was carried over to numerous subsequent Namco games. In 1983, the original Xevious was the first arcade game to actually have a television commercial aired for it in the U.S. Atari promoted the game with the slogan "Are you devious enough to beat Xevious?" and closed the commercial with a tag line branding it "the arcade game you can't play at home."

While it saw limited popularity in the U.S., Xevious was a huge cult hit in Japan, and to this day is considered one of the greatest video-games of all time. Popular musicians Haruomi Hosono (Yellow Magic Orchestra) and Keisuke Kuwata (Southern All Stars) were known to be fans of the game, and the former produced an album of music from Namco video-games, with Xevious as its centerpiece. A follow-up 12" single featured in its liner notes an entire science-fiction short story by Endoh, set in the world of Xevious, with even a rudimentary fictional language.