denofgeek: In 1990, Konami made an arcade-only scrolling shooter based on James Cameron's Aliens. It's one of the best Alien games ever.
When James Cameron's Aliens stalked into cinemas in 1986, it was at a time when video game adaptations of major films and TV shows were really beginning to take off. Sylvester Stallone's shoulder-padded Dirty Harry clone Cobra was turned into a surprisingly decent run-and-gun courtesy of Ocean in 1986. Things like Airwolf, Miami Vice, and even Oliver Stone's anti-war film Platoon were all shrunk down to fit the computers of their day. Many were terrible, but a few, like Ocean's other licensed titles (RoboCop, The Untouchables, and the like) were perfectly decent. Aliens certainly seemed to be a better candidate for a game tie-in than most movies. This was, after all, about a group of heavily-armed Marines led by Ripley, the survivor of Alien, as they're assaulted on all sides by acid-spitting, hissing xenomorphs. Its humans-versus-monsters premise probably explains why a grand total of three games based on the movie appeared in the 1980s alone. Konami's Aliens game was somewhat late to the party, since it didn't appear in arcades until 1990. Taking the form of a scrolling shooter, it loosely adapted the film's final third, in which a heavily-armed Ripley heads back into the aliens' nest to rescue Newt. The weapons have a satisfying, meaty feel, which makes you feel like an invincible, alien-mashing warrior right up until you're overwhelmed on all sides and, inevitably, shown the dreaded Game Over screen.
Aliens is certainly more varied than most of the coin-ops that lined up arcades at the time. The first level's side-scrolling section (where you can move in and out of the screen, like Double Dragon), which takes Ripley through the relatively unmolested areas of Hadley's Hope, is followed up by an up-the-screen boss battle. Entirely disconnected from Alien lore though it is, this boss battle's typical of Konami's approach to game design at the time. Reaching an atrium the end of a long corridor, you're confronted by a huge...thing, which proceeds to lunge out of the screen at you. It seems like a simple opponent to beat at first, but just when you think you've defeated it (by blowing its screeching head off), the thing starts charging around and firing balls of plasma from its neck hole.
Konami wisely gave would-be players a glimpse of the climactic battle in Aliens' attract mode, knowing full well, it seems, why games like this were so popular in arcades. For players who weren't yet old enough to see the film itself, the game provided a taste of its deep-space horrors. As a youngster at the time, I actually played Aliens a good couple of years before I saw the movie, and I didn't realize that, one, Cameron's sci-fi epic didn't have a pounding electronic soundtrack, and two, that the xenomorphs in the movie aren't a weird shade of pink. At the time, I didn't care. All I knew was that I was being given a glimpse inside an R-rated universe I would never otherwise have been allowed to see.
Unusually, Konami's version of Aliens wasn't ported for home devices, perhaps because it arrived far too late to cash in on the film's run in theatres. Instead, it was one of those arcade games that kept popping up here and there—a bowling alley perhaps, the end of a pier, or in the foyer of a swimming pool, which is where I first encountered it—before gradually fading out of public view.
Konami hasn't done much with Aliens since 1990, either—probably because it no longer owns the rights to the film's intellectual property. The Aliens IP now rests, of course, with Sega, and the resulting games have ranged from the sublime (the superbly-made but incredibly stressful Alien: Isolation) to the ridiculous (the disappointing Aliens: Colonial Marines) to the cancelled (Obsidian's Aliens tactical game).
Full article here: https://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/alien/245182/aliens-konamis-arcade-game-is-still-amazing
Aliens: The Arcade Game Review (Konami, 1989) - Selling R-Rated Franchises to Kids -
(Kim Justice)
Print magazine coverage:
Computer and Video Games (UK) issue 100 - March 1990
CU Amiga (UK) - March 1990
The Games Machine (UK) issue 30 - March 1990
EGM issue #10 -May 1990 edit: sorry it's issue #11 - June 1990
GamePro issue 13 - August 1990
Actual coin-op arcade machine at Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield, Illinois near Chicago.
longplay, 60fps
Flyers: (Japan)
(U.S.)
There are actually two different versions of Aliens. The Japanese version (probably the initial release) is lacking the APC stages, as well as Newt. The game in general is a bit easier, with enemies taking fewer hits, and power-ups are much more frequent. There are a few new minor enemies, and some of the other ones appear at different points. The final battle is actually harder, with the Alien Queen having an attack that sends out multiple images of herself, as opposed to the acid spit in the other version.
GAME OVER MAN, GAME OVER.
