 Let's dive into yet another Konami arcade game, this one a little older than the others that have been featured so far. Since I looked at Alien 3 for Super Nintendo earlier this week, here's Aliens based off of the 1986 movie of the same name, with this game being made four years later in 1990. It's a two-player, side-scrolling run-and-gun game with Player One playing as Ripley and Player Two as Hicks, although Ripley looks a lot closer to Tasha Yar here, both play the same way and have the same speed and all that, so there's not really any advantage to playing as one or the other. One token gives you two lives with a health bar that allows you to absorb some damage here and there, and you gotta get through six levels that are broken down into several different sections, with some altering the scrolling viewpoint to an over-the-shoulder shooter like Wild Guns. Eventually, you even get to commandeer vehicles from this viewpoint, although you can't control the vehicle, unfortunately, you just, you know, shoot at everything that moves. There are some other really cool sections here, like this elevator, because every run-and-gun and beat-em-up has to have an elevator section, but this time as you work your way down, you've got aliens on either side of you, as well as on top of you chewing on the elevator cables. If they chew through, the elevator falls and you automatically lose a life. You can also occasionally use the power loader here and there, which is badass, and of course you use it at the final boss fight against the mother alien. The weapon power-ups are also super fun to use, there's missiles, landmines, and of course a flamethrower, which is just the best. Torching all these aliens is just super satisfying. The alien motif here in general is obviously really strong. The pixel art is spot on. All sorts of different kinds of aliens are in this game, not just the same ones over and over. And of course you gotta crawl through narrow passageways, it's not a proper aliens game without crawling, I guess. And the way these creatures die is like something straight out of Splatterhouse, it's awesome. In typical arcade fashion, the controls here are as basic as it gets. It's a simple two-button game. One button shoots high and the other shoots low, and that's it. It sure seems like shooting high is pointless though, since the majority of the enemies can be hit with the low shot, including these annoying face-huggers that pop up everywhere. Shooting higher doesn't do any kind of extra damage or anything. In fact, there's only a couple times in the entire playthrough where you need to shoot both high and low, like against these goofy ass-looking enemies here. Shoot them low and they inflate somehow, I guess? Then shoot them high after they grow. That's cool and all, but the game doesn't take advantage of that mechanic often enough. One major issue with this button arrangement is that you can pick up bombs here and there, and to use them, you hit the low-shot button, so if you pick up bombs, you may accidentally end up tossing them when you could have saved them for a boss fight. It's kind of annoying. Although, I should mention that the Japanese version of this game fixes this by making you press both buttons at the same time to throw a bomb, so that's cool. For such a simple game, Aliens still manages to do a great job keeping things interesting, whether it's with switching game modes and perspectives, or with gigantic bosses that nearly take up the entire screen, or fighting whatever this thing is, and what is with that music. Or this section here, where there's Aliens actually bursting out from people's chests. Holy crap, that is intense. That eventually leads to this bizarre looking boss where you blast off its arms so you can blast off its face. Then right after that, with barely a second to think, you're dodging barriers and gunning down Aliens dropping in from all over the place. It's a good time. The only trouble here is that even by arcade standards, this game is ridiculously cheap. I know that's to be expected with just about all of these old arcade games I talk about. I mean, that's what they were designed to do, to make money. But Aliens in particular will have you shouting, what the hell just killed me? Some sections are almost impossible to get past without taking damage, since there's no jump button, and these tunnels leave you with almost zero margin for error. You really have to be precise just to survive. They're coming out of the freaking walls man, it's game over, game over man. Well, it's not actually game over, you just, you know, add another token. Even with those annoyances in the way, they're pretty minor in the long run, because Aliens is an awesome spectacle of carnage and craziness. I don't think it's as good as Capcom's Alien vs Predator, I mean, that game might be the best beat em up of all time. But Aliens is still a fun playthrough, with it only taking about 25 minutes or so to finish. Not too long, but not too short either. And once again, of course, this game never received any kind of home console release, so this is another game you've gotta play any way you can. Alright, I wanna thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.