NES Games No One Played: Letter X

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I’ve got a pretty extensive NES collection and have for years been writing about the best games for the system while also trying to collect every title. As such, I feel like I’ve spent tons of time playing all the great games while the lesser known titles usually come in the mail and go straight onto the shelf. I wanted to make more of an effort to explore the entire library of the NES, not just the classics, and so I’m trying out some buddies I either popped in and immediately out or never played in the first place. There were only three official NES games released in North America that begin with the Letter X and since they’re all relatively obscure, I figured “hey, why not just review them all?”

• Letter A can be found here
• Letter B can be found here
• Letter C can be found here
• Letter D can be found here
• Letter E can be found here
• Letter F can be found here
• Letter G can be found here
• Letter H can be found here
• Letter I can be found here
• Letter J can be found here
• Letter K can be found here
• Letter L can be found here
• Letter M can be found here
• Letter N can be found here
• Letter O can be found here
• Letter P can be found here
• Letter Q can be found here
• Letter R can be found here
• Letter S can be found here
• Letter T can be found here
• Letter U can be found here
• Letter V can be found here
• Letter W can be found here

XENOPHOBE | 1988

Immediately with one look at the cover of Xenophobe you’ll be able to tell that this is a unapologetic ripoff of the Alien movies. Even the title is a reference to the actual term for the movie aliens: xenomorph. I gotta say, that image of the alien ripping through the box is actually pretty terrifying! If I saw this when I was six years old there’s no way you could’ve convinced me to play it. It’s funny too because the in-game graphics and gameplay are so goofy that for sure young James had nothing to fear.

Ok so the game is obviously about Alien or Aliens, from the title to the enemies (including a cutesy facehugger) to the setting to the fact that the title screen character is a woman obviously meant to be Ripley. I say obviously, but then when you get to the character select screen not only is she not an option, but the three guys you can choose from are less hard sci-fi and more background characters from an intergalactic episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There’s “Mr Fogg” a bald pinhead with Jordi’s glasses from Star Trek, “Dr. Zordiaz” (complete with beard and eyepatch!), and “Dr. Kwack” a half human half duck half doctor. Seriously it’s like they realized they fucked up by making the box art so scary so they had to soften it up a bit by casting these lovable losers.

The first odd thing you’ll notice about the actual gameplay is that the action all takes place on the top half on the screen. The bottom half simply has the word “Xenophobe” and then “Sunsoft” bouncing and flashing on a black background. Hmmm ok. Turns out that Xenophobe is two player co-op which is pretty neat since the NES only has a handful of games that you can play simultaneously with a friend. Oddly enough even though you can both play at the same time, you can only pick one character and you both have to play as different colored versions of him. What the fuck? Were they running out of memory or something? The stages consists of a series of rooms, most of which have sliding doors at either end. Each room has aliens or robot enemies that spawn and respawn continuously. When you first play, you’ll probably walk all the way to the left before you reach some kind of energy barrier, turn around and walk all the way to the right and find…another energy barrier? Where am I supposed to go? Well, turns out that the goal is actually to just kill a bunch of bad guys until eventually one drops a glowing ball. That’s it! I have no idea what even the point of the other rooms is for, it seems like you could just stay in one place and keep killing things as they appear until it’s time to bounce.

Xenophobe is not a great game, I doubt anyone would debate that. I do however find it to be so bizarre, disjointed, and ugly that I’m fascinated with it. It’s like seeing a horrific car wreck and not being able to look away. Here’s a few oddities I have to note:

• Once the game starts, there’s no music, and while in space no one can hear you scream, they can definitely hear the endless repetition of your gun “blooping” away.
• If you pause the game it’s silent…or so you think. There’s this faint, constant squeak sound playing on repeat. Weird.
• The graphics are horrifically bad, like uglier than A Boy and His Blob, but yet I find them really charming for some reason. The screen only seems capable of showing four colors at a time and they all look like shit. The limited color palate and the primitive black outlined sprites reminds me more of a Zx Spectrum game than an NES one.
• The controls, wowzers. You shoot with the B button, but you both jump and pick up objects with A button. I don’t know why you have to press a button to do this, especially since most of these items are just for points. You duck by pressing DOWN + A. As annoying as that is, you can walk while ducking which makes your guy look like he’s got an enormous torso and tiny doll legs. It’s pretty great.
• Speaking of which, the animations for your character are my favorite part of the entire game. If you jump against a closed door, your legs prop up and then you fall straight on your ass. The same thing happens when you get hit by a xenomorph, but I love that instead of immediately standing back up you remain propped up on the floor, gun still in hand and ready to shoot. Badass!

Similar Games: Spy vs Spy,

XEVIOUS | 1988

I really love all the X words, they all sound super ill. To me Xevious sounds like the name of a comical villain on a Saturday Morning Cartoon: “Professor Xevious! I should’ve known it was you!” Either that or it’s the word devious with an x substituted in, at which point it could be a hip-hop thing. “Ey-yo they call me Xevious, rhyme scheme’s devious, change the channel on your TV but you’ll always be seein’ us.” Well shit, if that name’s not taken already it’s time to get my rap career started!

Xevious is an old arcade game (1983) that got ported pretty early on in the NES’s lifespan. As such, yeah it looks a little primitive. Like Xenophobe this game has a very limited color palate which is made more obvious by the fact that the areas on the ground (rivers, fields, forests, etc.) all have very simple if any textures; just huge blocks of green and blue. The music is probably the most basic loop I’ve ever heard on an NES cartridge and that includes the unlicensed bootleg games. The “get ready” screen is six seconds of a tune and once the game starts the same high frequency four second loop plays on repeat after that. Holy shit. If you thought Bubble Bobble’s theme was causing your mind to crack after and hour, try staying holed up in you terrorist cult compound while the ATF and FBI blast the Xevious music at high decibels. NO SURVIVORS.

As a vertical scrolling shooter, it’s not a bad game by any stretch and is obviously one of the earliest versions of this kind of title. As such comparing it to later classics like Gun Nac or even 1942 is really unfair. I love the original Super Mario Bros but if you showed me that and then showed me Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, I’m gonna tell ol’ plumber boy to hit the pipes. Xevious controls reasonably, the difficulty is easy-ish for a shooter, and since you can shoot bullets in front of you or bombs below you, I love that they included a little crosshairs on the screen. I’ve played tons of these games where you need to hit enemies on the ground but can’t really tell where those bombs are gonna land.

Other than that…ummmm it’s a game? I’m sure it’s got it’s place in history, but on a system chock full of vertically scrolling shooters I can recommend ten titles better than Xevious. And ten more after that. And so on. Good night!

Similar Games: 1942, Zanac

XEXYZ | 1990

Such a strange title and an even stranger decision to try to sell a game with a name like Xexyz. The Japanese title is Kame no Ongaeshi — Urashima Densetsu which translates to Turtle’s Repayment: Urashima Legend, so I guess that’s not really much better, but honestly just call this “Space Apollo” or “Mechanic Castle” or “Force Star” which are all things mentioned in the game. I say all this (since honestly who cares what it’s called) only because this game has remained fairly obscure until recently so I can only assume that the title is what kept people from buying/playing it back in the day, which is really a shame because it’s actually pretty damn good!

Xexyz basically boils down to this, it’s part platforming/adventure and part shooter, similar in concept to games like Blaster Master and Guardian Legend. Each level begins in an area with your standard enemies, hazards, and pits but also doors, sooooo so many doors. You know how in Monster Party each stage has a few buildings you can enter and while some contain power-ups others contain boss fights? Well Xexyz took this idea and turned it up to 11. Every five steps you take leads you to another door. There’s exposition fairies, hot tub frogs who refill your life, captured fairies who need saving, robots selling shit, robots gambling on shit, worthless robots that tell you enemy’s weaknesses (the head? I never would’ve guessed!); I mean damn they really jammed em’ in here. This would be kind of cool if even 95% of these buildings contained something useful, but 1 in 4 just give you “E” and it’s honestly just as easy to get outside by shooting people (just like in the real world!)

Anyway, your goal here is to find a mini-boss who has a “Force Star” which allows you to enter the “Mechanic Castle” (see I didn’t make those up!) The Mechanic Castle is very much like the first section except in a maze format that begins as a platformer, changes to a horizontally scrolling shooter (which is also a maze a la Section Z), then back to a platformer. Once you reach the boss the format switches AGAIN to a shooter where you’ll have to blast away at a giant robot mutant boss. There’s 9 three part levels plus a couple Dr. Wiley’s Castle type stages at the end. There’s several different weapons and upgrades you can get, along with some magic items that give you various abilities (including a clone that rides on top of you!)

Xexyz is a solid, charming game. It’s got great graphics and sprite animation, catchy music, relatively forgiving difficulty, and the gameplay variation makes it stand out quite a bit. My only gripe is that the level formats kinda get old real quick. Neither the platforming or the shooter stages are good enough on their own to compete with other, better games in each genre, and certainly not with the aforementioned Guardian Legend or Blaster Master. After going through the motions of finding the hidden doors, choosing the wrong directions in the maze, slogging through the repetitive boss fights, and of course entering and exiting doors, you may ask yourself “Am I having fun?” The answer is yes, but the real question is “could you be having more fun playing Guardian Legend?” The answer is also yes. But, does GL have bathing beauties in shower caps? Hell naw son, only Xexyz has the nudes dudes!

Similar Games: Guardian Legend, Sector Z, Monster Party, Master Blaster

OTHER LETTER X GAMES (CLASSICS)

Ummmm….

OTHER LETTER X GAMES WORTH TRYING

Well…..

OTHER LETTER X GAMES WORTH AVOIDING

Uncanny X-Men technically begins with “U”, but fuck it, let’s include it again!