Aliens
Aliens is an arcade game based loosely on the 1986 movie Aliens. You and a friend play female Marines and you must explore and destroy all aliens who have taken over a now abandoned space settlement LV426 Acheron. If you can find any survivors try to rescue them. As well as your normal gun there are other weapons that can be used to help you. A Caterpillar P-5000 can also be found and used. Aliens is mainly a side view horizontal shooter where the screen scrolls as you move from left to right. Some parts of the game require you to look behind the hero firing into the screen as aliens come towards from the distance as well as moving in other directions like in a lift. You can also be driving into the screen trying to shoot aliens.
SCREENSHOTS
HISTORY
Aliens is a 1990 run and gun video game developed and published for arcades by Konami. It is based on the 1986 film of the same title. Two players can play the game cooperatively in addition to single-player.
Gameplay
Aliens is primarily a side-scrolling shooter in which the player must defend against various Aliens, with certain parts of the game switching to a third-person rail shooter perspective. Players can play as either Ellen Ripley or Corporal Hicks, who both begin the game with a smart gun and can upgrade to other weapons such as flamethrowers and missile or grenade launchers. The player is given several health points, one of which is lost if the player is attacked by an Alien. The player loses a life if all the health points are lost, and the game ends if all the player's lives are depleted. Boss enemies are encountered at the end of each level, with the final boss being the Alien Queen, which the player fights with a power exoskeleton loader. A two-player mode is also available. The enemies range from standard ones seen in the films to specialized ones created exclusively for this game. When fighting the Alien Queen, two victorious outcomes are possible. In the first, the player simply opens the airlock, as in the 1986 film. If the player chooses, they can fight the Queen further, wearing her down until she bursts apart.
Release
The arcade game made its worldwide debut at the Amusement Trades Exhibition International (ATEI) in London, United Kingdom. In Japan, it was exhibited at AOU in February 1990, and then received a wide release in March 1990. It made its North American debut at Chicago's American Coin Machine Exposition (ACME) the same month.
Reception
In North America, Alien was declared the best new conversion kit at the ACME show by RePlay magazine and several distributors. It went on to win a Silver award from the American Amusement Machine Association (AAMA) for sales achievement in 1990, making it Konami's second best-selling arcade game that year after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In Japan, Game Machine listed Aliens on their April 15, 1990 issue as being the second most-successful table arcade unit of the month.
Upon release in arcades, Aliens was met with mostly positive reception from reviewers. Upon release, Julian Rignall of Computer and Video Games gave Aliens an overall score of 91%, noting its "simply brilliant" graphics and describing it as "one of the goriest coin-ops since Splatterhouse." Robin Hogg of Zzap!64 gave it a positive outlook. Both Martin Gaksch and Heinrich Lenhardt of German magazine Power Play also gave Aliens a positive outlook. Crash's Mark Caswell praised the visuals. CU Amiga gave Aliens a 44% rating and criticized its "uniformly bland and drab" graphics, its "irritatingly unresponsive" controls, and its "dull" action. Brett Alan Weiss of AllGame gave Aliens three and a half stars, calling it an "enjoyably fast-paced" and "graphically creepy, smoothly animated game".
More than a decade and a half later, Retro Gamer editor-in-chief Darran Jones praised it as a "superb" game. In a more reserved opinion, Stephen Kleckner of VentureBeat included Aliens in his list of "must-play" Alien franchise games, but wrote it "is competent and entertaining for a quarter sucker, but it lacks the creative push in gameplay found in other entries on this list." Den of Geek's Ryan Lambie described it as "one of the best Alien games ever."
STORY
The multinational conglomerate Weyland-Yutani Corporation has lost contact with its mining colony, Hadley's Hope, in LV426 Acheron. In response, the Colonial Marine troops of the USS Sulaco decide to send their team to investigate. The marines soon discover that the place is infested by an unknown parasitic alien life form and that the Hadley's Hope crew was either exterminated or used as hosts to breed the creatures' next offspring.
1CC RUNS
One-credit clears we point to as the benchmark for this game.
GAMEPLAY VIDEO
SCORES
ACHIEVEMENTS 1 set
Tracked by RetroAchievements and earned in an emulator that reports to it. A game tracked on more than one machine gets a set for each, because they are different lists earned on different hardware.