“Are you devious enough to play Xevious”? Well yes, yes, I am, particularly if it’s an apparently unreleased prototype of indeterminate origin for my favourite 8-bit home computer system.
Namco’s Xevious is a defining influence in the shoot ’em up genre, so of course there were plenty of home ports for a variety of systems. One that never quite made it to market, however, was the Atari 5200 version, which was subsequently ported by some helpful soul to play on standard Atari 8-bit computers. (This was not a huge leap, really, because the 5200 was basically an Atari 8-bit with a horrible controller and no keyboard.)
While questionable as to whether or not it’s “finished”, it’s certainly a competent enough port that I had a good time with, so take a look!
I had never seen Xevious on the 8bit… was it late to be released? I did enjoy playing it on other systems. There was a pretty good clone of it called Flak on the 8bit which stood out thanks to its presentation. Worth a look. 🙂
The details seem to be a bit murky, but it appears there was a planned 5200 port in 1984 which never got released, then someone ported that to the 8-bit, which is what this is. Either way, it didn’t get released at all and seemed to surface in playable prototype form a few years back.
Sounds like a cool game. I might check it out one day.