Arcade Archives: Super Xevious & ACA News Update

[tepidsnake]

This week;s Arcade Archives release is... Super Xevious (Namco, 1984)

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Just the one ROM exists for this game. As well as the enemy guide you would've seen in the ACA version of Xevious, the manual has a pretty robust list of differences between this and the original game, which is very handy! Preference Settings allow players to view the boot screen on start-up, adjust game speed, reproduce the title screen burn-in to different degrees, reproduce the original explosion effect for Giddo Spario, display the area number, show the Sol and Special Flag locations and view an enemy encounter table at all times.

Not to be confused with Vs. Super Xevious: Mystery of GUMP (yes, they localise it as GUMP, let's have a good chuckle about it) which was the Famicom Super Xevious (imagine Xevious with The Tower of Druaga-style secrets required to advance from one Area to the next), the arcade Super Xevious is an updated version of the original game. It makes the game harder. Much, much harder. In fact, by default, the difficulty is set to Very Hard. It changes some other things too of course (there's some new enemies and the locations of Sol Citadels and Lucky Flags have been moved, among other things) but the main takeaway is that this is for experts only. This is a game only for those who've absolutely mastered the original Xevious and want a new challenge, because for the rest of you, GUMP's Xevious forces will crush your spirit. That's me, by the way- I am terrible at Xevious, so this version scares me!! Ahem, this is also the first home version of this game since Namco Museum DS (available as a toggle for Xevious), which surprised me- I thought the last home port of that was Xevious 3D/G+ on PS1 (which also had the original Xevious and Xevious Arrangement) but, as usual, I was wrong!

In other Arcade Archives news, Arcade Archives 2: Ridge Racer is coming to Playstation 5 as well as Switch 2! I expected we'd get this (pour one out for arcade game fans with an Xbox Series X / S, no version for them) but, surprisingly, there'll be a standard Arcade Archives (1) version of the game for Playstation 4! Now that I wasn't expecting, but it's a nice surprise and good for those who don't want to get one of those fancy newer consoles to race the ridgers. Also, the next game of Namco Month has been revealed- the clue was 'first release for a home console', so who out there guessed Nebulasray, the 1994 vertical shmup? I didn't. I guessed Blazer. Swing and a miss! I'm also probably wrong about World Stadium too. Is it too late to change my guess? It is? Oh well.