xsoldier

About the game

xsoldier is a classic vertical shooter from the Unix world. Your small grey fighter sits at the bottom of a tall screen, enemies arrive from the top (a few sneak in from below), and at the end of each stage a boss shows up. Beat it, or survive until it gets bored and leaves, and you move on. There are eight stages, and clearing them all starts a second loop with more and faster enemy fire, then a third in which every enemy leaves a shot behind when it dies.

The twist is the question the second author asked himself: why a fire button at all? In most shooters, firing is always good and you hold the button down. Here, the more enemies, shots, power-ups and explosions are on the screen, the bigger the bonus you earn for every moment you are not shooting. You can play it as a plain shooter and survive that way, but a high score means picking which enemies to kill, spending as few bullets as possible, and sometimes simply letting the field fill up. A second bonus rewards the share of a stage's enemies you shot down by the time the boss falls.

Yuusuke Hashimoto wrote the original in 1997 for the X Window System. Oohara Yuuma took it over after version 0.96, added the not-shooting bonus and kept improving it until the last release, 1.8, in 2011.

Playing it here

This is xsoldier 1.8 compiled for the browser from the project's source code, using the SDL version of the game. It is a small download, under 1 MB, and plays offline once loaded. The ranking, the ten best scores, stays in this browser; clearing this site's data deletes it. A keyboard is required. The game has no sound.

Controls

Power-ups and weapons

Some enemies leave a power-up when they die. The one marked Pow makes every shot stronger; the other, which keeps changing its look, switches your weapon and adds a little power. There are three weapons: the blue shot is fast, hits hard and can fire backward once you have collected enough power; the yellow shot sprays many weak bullets, so you hardly need to aim; the grey one is slow and only goes forward, but it is strong enough to melt a boss in a few seconds. If you are already at full power, another power-up gives bonus points, and losing a ship can cost you some of your power.

Tips

Your ship is smaller than it looks. A shot that grazes the sprite does not destroy it, so you can slip between bullets more tightly than you would think.

Survive first. The yellow shot is the safest weapon: keep the fire button down until you know the stages, then start experimenting with not shooting.

Play with the bosses. A boss on the screen is worth a lot of not-shooting points, so you do not need to rush it, as long as you destroy it before it escapes to keep the shoot-down bonus.