Exed Exes
After the creation of Vulgus, Capcom continued to pursue the shoot-em-up genre. 1942 was a big success and sequels would soon follow, but before then, Capcom got a little weird with Exed Exes. Its strange name refers to the final weapon of the Exes, an invading insectoid force that the ships called Colonel Issue and Sergeant Issue have to do battle with. Exed Exes sets out to do things differently than anything Capcom put out previously and concurrently, including Section Z, Capcom’s other 1985 shoot-em-up. In some ways, Exed Exes bridges the gap between Vulgus and 1942 by incorporating ideas from both, but it just as quickly foregoes what made those games work to stand out in other ways. It’s also an uncommon case of a mid-80s shoot-em-up that doesn’t follow the Xevious formula, making it feel even more like a curious experiment. The game was distributed by Memetron in North America as the more easily understood “Savage Bees”, though the game never caught on in the US the way it did in Japan.
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