As the commander of a sleek Solvalou fighter, you're deep into enemy territory, shooting their disc-shaped fighters out of the sky, bombing ground installations and artillery nests, bombing tanks, and trying to destroy the mothership. As you progress further behind enemy lines, heavier aircraft and more versatile and deadly ground-based defenses become the norm. Also look out for tumbling airborne mirrors - they're impervious to your fire, but you're toast if you fly right into them. (Atari [under license from Namco], 1982)

A very cool game indeed, Xevious was extremely challenging and quite nice to look at as well. (The graphics included in this page were reduced to 16 colors to keep file sizes down, so if you're thinking "This doesn't look like Xevious!," that's probably why.) The controls were smooth, and you really did have a full range of control over where your fighter was on the screen.

Xevious came toward the end of the Atari 2600's heyday, so not many home versions of it were made at the time. A fairly good Atari 7800 edition of Xevious eventually appeared, and it has also shown up in one of Microsoft's Arcade collections. I need to retract a previous statement about Xevious being unavailable on the Playstation. It is indeed available, but one must go digging. Xevious appears in its original form on the increasingly hard-to-find Namco Museum, Volume 2, as well as a bonus classic edition in 1997's 3-D update of the game, Xevious 3D/G+. For the record, it appears that an Atari 2600 version was in fact made, but only as a prototype.

Rating:  Four quarters - a couple of minor irritants, but mostly a compelling and addictive game.

Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com editor/webmaster