Aliens: Alien 2

Aliens: Alien 2 is a platform shooter created by Squaresoft and released exclusively in Japan for MSX computers.

As you can imagine from the title, it's the official videogame based on the 1986 James Cameron movie Aliens, the sequel to the 1979 Ridley Scott's movie Alien.

There are three different games based on this movie: in Europe, Electric Dreams published a game called Aliens: The Computer Game, for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC. It was a first-person strategy game, similar to Space Hulk, but released 6 years before. In the USA, Activision released a game with the same title but completely different since it was a mini-games collection. Still for a range of 8-bit platforms.

The game that we are presenting here was available only in Japan and only for MSX. It's a totally different genre because this one is a run-and-gun horizontal-scrolling shooter, like Turrican. The graphics are essential, with mostly plain black backgrounds and monochrome sprites (MSX1 didn't have multi-color sprites). The speed could have been faster, ok, but the negative aspects end here. Despite its simplicity, the game has all we expect from this kind of shooter: different weapons, power-ups, and a big, end-of-level boss. If you add that the hero is not just another hero, but it's simply the most badass female character ever - Ellen Ripley -, and the villain is one of the scariest monsters ever - the friggin Xenomorph Alien Queen -, what else do you need?

It's just a pity that nobody made an Amiga, or SEGA Master System, version. However this a perfectly enjoyable 8-bit platformer.