Criminally overlooked games #19: Xexex
64Criminally overlooked games #19
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Have you ever wondered what R-Type would have been like if it were made by Konami? Well, apparently Konami did, as in 1991 they released the arcade game Xexex, which can only be considered a masterpiece.
It shares many of the same qualities of Irem's series and adds a few wrinkles of it's own. It's got the detailed graphics, difficulty, gunpod centric gameplay and charge attacks of a good R-type game, while giving the gunpod an effective AI controller, a larger arsenal of weaponry, and what was considerd to be in 1991 - unequaled sounds and eye searing special effects.
The game play is inventive as it has a rigid structure but the nature of the gunpod system allows you to be creative in your deployment as it acts as both a powerful battering ram and is invaluable as a bullet shield. The controls are top notch. Control only becomes a problem after stacking a few speed power-ups.
So, if this is one of Konami's best shooters and indeed one of it's best games, how did it go unnoticed? Simply put, it came out around the same time as Street Fighter II. Prospering under the shadow of the juggernaut is not something many games can claim to, and at release in Japan this one fell to the wayside.
Konami tried to recoup and retooled the game for a European release by changing the one-hit-wonder of a ship to one an energy meter and allowing the player's ship to continue exactly where it had been destroyed instead of employing the waypoint system. It also added powerful missile pickups, but removed all other weapon pickups. In doing this the game became much easier but also lost much of it's heart and was less interesting in general. Konami changed it's name to Orius for the US release. It didn't even manage to be a blip on the radar of most arcade owners.
It never saw a home release but curiously enough the second stage is featured as a bonus round in Ganbare Goemon 2 for the Super Famicom. Over a decade later it was released on portables as part of the Life Force Collection on Sony's PSP.
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