Skip to main content

Super Xevious: The Mystery of GAMP: Can you solve it?


The 1984 arcade game Super Xevious received a Famicom-exclusive spin-off of the same name but with the sub-title "Ganpu no Nazo," which translates to "The Mystery of GAMP." GAMP is an acronym for General Artificial Matrix Producer, the final boss of Xevious and Super Xevious.

GAMP's "mystery" (or puzzle) refers to how each level requires the completion of a hidden objective to proceed. The level keeps looping until you do it. The first level, for example, requires you to fly your ship (the Solvalou) into a random cloud. The second level requires you to rescue another ship (called Phantom). None of the objectives are off-the-wall, and several are just destroying all the ground targets.

As in Xevious, you shoot your gun with B and lob bombs at ground targets with A. The actual shooting part of the game is not too difficult. The enemies never overwhelm you, and there are rarely too many bullets to dodge. That's not to say that the game is easy. I haven't yet passed the eighth stage, which requires you to navigate the Solvalou through two narrow tunnels while seeking a certain item—and your gun is inoperable, so you can only bomb. Every 50,000 points you get another life, which helps.


The game only has three main power-ups. On certain stages the Phantom appears and launches three colored balls. The black one gives you a shield that can absorb a single shot, the yellow one quadruples the size of your bomb blasts, and the blue one bestows a rear-facing gun. Having played TwinBee, I found these abilities a little underwhelming, especially given how rarely they show up. 

There are twenty-one stages with a final boss and ending. In a nod to its arcade origin, you can loop the game twice on harder settings to rack up a higher score. Weirdly, the game contains a secret password system, accessed via a certain sequence of button presses. Passwords can be discovered by pressing START at the beginning of some stages. A lot of early games were miserly about continuing. Sometimes they would hide continuing behind a special item (e.g, the Hudson Bee in Adventure Island) or require special button inputs (like holding A in Super Mario Bros.). Hiding the passwords this deeply is annoying but fits with the game's "mystery" theme!

The first secret password is to the fourth stage: 6974 

Personally, I wasn't enthralled by the concept of hidden objectives, and consulted a strategy guide. They reminded me of The Tower of Druaga, and that's not a good thing. I might have liked it better if the level gave you a hint to help you figure it out. Also, the background "music" is an annoying pulsing rhythm that repeats continuously. Whose idea was that?

Super Xevious: The Mystery of GAMP Famicom cartridge

The Mystery of GAMP deserves credit for doing something different with the shooter genre. Super Xevious was just a slightly enhanced version of Xevious, which was already on Famicom (and later on NES), so a straight port would have been a bit redundant. Instead, Namco created this unique variant! Unfortunately, the end result is probably less fun than Xevious.

Grade: B-

Gameplay: Fun, but perhaps not for everyone (16/20)
Theme: Interesting concept and characters, if a bit generic (16/20)
Controls: Controls are smooth and let you do what you want (15/15)
Difficulty: Goldilocks: not too hard, not too easy (15/15)
Graphics: Beautiful, well designed graphics (15/15)
Sound: Better on mute! (5/12)
Stats
Developer: Namco & Tose
Publisher: Namco
Famicom release date: September 1986
Genre: Shooter
Extend: 50,000
My high score: 122,260

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Mega Man X: 30th anniversary

Thirty years ago Mega Man X brought Capcom's beloved blue bomber into the 16-bit era, to great acclaim. In a creative twist, Mega Man X (called X for short) is a new robot, not the original Mega Man . As with Super Metroid, Super Castlevania IV , and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past , Mega Man X uses the winning formula of remaking the original NES game but with more and better. Mega Man X, like his predecessor, faces eight robot masters, now called "Mavericks." Instead of "men," they are made in the image of animals: Chill Penguin, Storm Eagle, Launch Octopus, Spark Mandrill (a kind of monkey), Armored Armadillo, Sting Chameleon, Flame Mammoth, and Boomer Kuwanger (a Japanese stag beetle). An opening stage ends with X being defeated by the robot Vile, a henchman of Sigma, who wants to destroy humanity using something called "Reploids" (the Mavericks?). Fortunately, a "Maverick Hunter" robot named Zero jumps in to save X. He encourages

Secret of Mana: 30th anniversary

It's been three decades since Americans were treated to the action RPG Secret of Mana. Called The Legend of the Holy Sword 2 in Japan, it's the sequel to Final Fantasy Adventure . It builds upon some of its predecessor's unusual conventions, including a tedious weapon-charging system. What most sets it apart, however, is it supports two and even three   player simultaneous play. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past can't do that! Secret of Mana's threadbare plotline is a rehash of the first game. The Mana Tree and its eight sacred seeds are threatened by monsters, led by the villain Thanatos (Greek for "death"). A young hero, gifted with the legendary holy sword, must defeat them and save the tree. His ability to remove the sword from a stone, Arthur-like, is treated as a calamity by his village, which banishes him. But the young hero soon saves a blond girl and a "sprite." They join him as party members. A sprite is a fairy, but this person

Final Fantasy II: The lost "black sheep"

Final Fantasy II, the 1988 sequel, never came to the NES. The "black sheep" of the series, it is inferior to both I and III. A complete English prototype of the game was made but then shelved due to the release of the SNES. This was an understandable business decision, as FF4  is the far better game. The root problem was how long it took RPGs to make it to the West. Final Fantasy II has a clichéd story cribbed from Star Wars. There is an evil empire and emperor, rebels, dark knight, and city-destroying, flying death machine. The protagonists are four young people, orphaned by the empire. The game opens with a battle they can't win, but three of them are revived by one of the game's many NPCs, Minwu, a white mage. He works for Princess Leia—I mean Hilda, the leader of the rebellion (and yes, at one point you have to rescue her from a cell). You choose the names for the heroes: each is a tabula rasa , like in FF1. The girl's brother is missing and doesn't appea