SHMUPS



EXED EXES
CAPCOM - ARCADE

Reviewed by Deeto

Exed Exes was one of Capcoms earlier games, but even then, Capcom proved that they were masters of their domain, by making a fun little shmup with some superb graphics, gameplay, and sound, even for 1985. Apparently, it's the future, and Earth (or some sort of planet) has been overrun by evil bugs! So, it's your job to take out the evil insects in the latest most incredibly powerful spacecraft devised, perhaps get a cup of coffee, and todays newspaper, etc.

Besides having a (in the words of the semi-immortal tsr) 'rockin' intro tune', you'll also notice the graphic style being definitively.... buggy. The entire landscape is made of this honey-comb pattern, with random specks of forest and dirt. While the graphic style changes subtlely throughout the rest of the game, the basic idea stays the same, so be prepared to see a lot of honeycomb. The enemies are all either insects or mechanical insect-like machines, but i'm not complaining.

Moving on, Exed Exes is very simple, giving you a standard shot, or a bomb which causes all enemy bullets onscreen to vaporize, which can be helpful in some areas, but overall is not as helpful as the loop in the 194x series. Also, your ship is painfully slow, and there are many areas when you see the enemy coming, but your sluggish ship doesn't move out of the way in time, and you soon realize that your about to be killed instantly. Very annoying.

Despite some shortcomings, Exed Exes is a very good little game in the old-school sense of kill or be killed, and if you don't watch out, you could find yourself wasting an hour or two with the game. Yes, this game can be addictive.

GRAPHICS: 80%
SOUND: 70%
GAMEPLAY: 80%
OVERALL: 75%

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Here I am getting acosted by an evil buggie, over the wonderful honeycomb landscape. Those green things will destroy you if you touch them, which definitely caught me off-guard the first time.

Those red things do a dissapearing act if you don't kill them fast enough... so be sure to kill them before they do.



This is the high-score area, where the background dissapears, and only EVIL remains. The skulls give off a lot of points when killed, and grabbing the 'pow' will turn them all into...

...tomatoes, which give off even more points!



Whoo, here's the dangerous boss, who does pretty much nothing while you blow it away. Actually, those spinny things (which later made a reapearance in several other capcom games) spin around and try to kill you, so I guess the boss isn't TOTALLY defenseless... but it's close enough.

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