Xevious is a stone cold classic IMO, but Luigimaker is right, it's extremely similar to Dragon Spirit. The most glaring similarity is the dual weapon thing, with one button for air targets and another button for ground targets. The fact that both games are from Namco suggests that the similarities are not mere coincidence.
I've played this game here and there over the years but I've always had the difficulty on "normal." It sure was a rude awakening changing the difficulty to "hard."
As MO said, we used to play a lot of Xevious on Atari 7800 back in the late 80s; we got that console for Christmas in '87 and Xevious was one of our first games. That version is very solid, and definitely makes my list of "top 5 console ports of arcade games." I still play it in emulation every now and then.
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