Orius? When did this come out?

[You]

I have been waiting for Xexex to be released on a platform, for like, forever.

Had no idea this game was even out, let alone had a different name.

 

So many trash games and stacks, knocking new trophy lists of good and notables games off the top of the page...

Edited January 1, 2022 by enaysoft

[RadiantFlamberge]

I've had this on the PSP Salamander Portable, and always wished for a console version. Sure glad to see it on PS4. This has the superior Japanese edition, with a better weapon selection (I love that shadow laser) and the usual 3 lives instead of the international versions' life bar which can be drained all too quickly. Konami had a bad habit of making unfavorable changes to certain games for the world releases.

 

Konami missed out by not porting it to the original PS1. Xexex/Orius would've demonstrated the power of PS1 or Saturn over the 16-bit systems. I think it looks almost on par with Gradius Gaiden visually.

[You]

Konami's Crime Fighters is a very strange game as there are 4 versions of it (8 if you consider the Hamster Arcade Archives since those versions have been censored)

 

Xexex is also another curious game as like CrimeFighters the 2 versions are pretty different, I guess technically 3 versionsince EU and US have a different name.

 

In the case of Xexex though I feel like there is no perfect version, it niggles at me playing either version, the Japanese version is certainly the better of the two and in all likelyhood the definitive edition.

 

However it's ONLY a 1 player game...

If you die in the Japanese version you lose all your powerups and have to go back to a respawn point, just like R-Type.

 

In the western release you kind have all your lives, as health, but one life...You don't have respawn points but like you say, if you get stuck in a boss, you only get 1 second of invincibility, it can be Game Over before you know it if you get hit multiple times in quick succession.

 

I don't know which system I like as both seem way too unfair for different reasons. Western release feels more like Gradius.

 

I would probably prefer the Western release because of the fairer system and 2 player coop, however, they have borked up a ton of other stuff.

 

In the Japanese version the music is perhaps slightly too loud, with 60% music and 40% sfx but I think it is perfect, in the western release they tried to fix that but fucked it up, with it being 30% music and 70% sfx, the music is awesome in this game, and it's so quiet in the western release. Not only that they've borked the gameplay a bit.

In the Japanese release you could fire bullets as fast as you could press the fire button. In the western version, it is capped, to something paltry like 4 bullets at a time, this is not an issue perhaps in coop, but in single player, your ship is so painfully weak, especially when you have no powerups. Inserting a new credit in western release and you start so weak right in the middle of a boss, resulting in your dying again almost straight away.

 

I guess they limited your bullets to try and stop making the game too easy on coop, but why limit the bullet count on 1 player? You've just made the game even harder, the game still suffers from awful slowdown though in the western release even when there are not many enemies on screen.

 

Like I say, it's sad because both versions have good and bad points. If the western version didn't have such quiet music I would probably play that one. Both are brutally hard.