Xevious: Fardraut Saga

Xevious is one of the foundations of the vertical shooter, and Fardraut Saga is its 1988 PC Engine incarnation. The interesting credit here is the developer: Compile, a studio that stayed with shooters for its entire existence and had an unusually good instinct for them.

The original design's defining idea is dual armament. One weapon destroys airborne targets, a separate bombing reticle handles ground targets, and hitting the ground requires anticipating where the crosshair will be rather than where it is. That two-layer attention was genuinely novel when it appeared and remains what makes Xevious recognisable at a glance. Alongside it sit hidden objects buried beneath the terrain, revealed only to players who bomb the right patch of nothing — a secret-hunting habit that spread through the genre afterwards.

The PC Engine version could improve on the arcade original in colour depth, smoothness and sound, since the console had a strong graphics subsystem for its time. Compile also had a reputation for treating conversions as opportunities rather than obligations, adding arranged content instead of simply reproducing the coin-op.

The entry records multiplayer support and a top-down playfield.

On OldGame.cz it runs directly in the browser, and it makes an unusually good entry point into classic shooters. The pace is slower than later generations, the screen stays readable, and you are not buried under projectiles from the first thirty seconds. If you want to understand where the genre came from, starting here is a reasonable plan.