Aliens (Arcade) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Konami's 1990 license-based arcade game, Aliens.

Played through on the machine's default settings.

Aliens was one of the best Hollywood action flicks to come out of the 1980s, so it was only suiting that it would receive a big-budget video game to capitalize on its massive box-office success, right? And even though the game didn't come out until nearly four years after the film was released, Konami didn't disappoint.

Aliens was one of the company's first major arcade releases based on a major movie license, and it was one of the first-wave of successful media tie-ins that Konami produced through the early 90s.

It is a run-and-gun shooter, though instead of playing like Contra (which also took a great deal of inspiration from the Aliens movie), it's closer to Sega's Alien Storm in how it feels more like a beat 'em up that features firearms than a true shooter.

You can choose to play as either Ripley or Hicks, and in addition to your pulse rifle, you can find and use things like rocket launchers and flamethrowers. The aliens will regularly swarm you from every direction, so the huge amounts of firepower are welcome. When you aren't exploring the corridors of Hadley's Hope on foot, you'll be riding down corridors fighting incoming hordes, or in my favorite scene, taking on the Queen Alien in the hydraulic power loader.

The game isn't quite as innovative or deep as later Konami arcade games based on popular IPs, nor is it very faithful to its source (since when did Ripley fight zombies?) but the game is so short that it doesn't suffer too much from this. It does an excellent job of creating an atmosphere through both its graphics and sound, and it has no problem maintaining a constant tone of stressful excitement through its challenge.

But were there really that many hot pink xenomorph cruising around?

I always found it a bit strange that Aliens, like a lot of other games based on licenses, was based on an R-rated movie. Many of the kids that the game would've targeted for pocket money would've never seen the movie, but I suppose that just made it all the more tantalizing to play.

It's an excellent game, and well worth an hour or two of your time to revisit.

And if you don't, who is going to help our good lieutenant save the human race? That alien isn't going to fling itself out of an airlock, you know.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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