Alien Syndrome (Arcade)

Developer:

Sega

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Release Date:

1987

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Systems:

Arcade first, then almost everything else

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing Alien Syndrome! Because I've already played Alien Breed and Alien Storm this year, so I figured I might as well.

I did play this a little bit earlier this year when I was getting a screenshot for my Alien Breed article, but until then all I knew about the game is that it was a side scrolling beat 'em up where you zap aliens... or maybe an overhead view run and gun set on a space ship. The problem I had is that I always got it mixed up with Alien Storm, because they're both arcade games by Sega with gross-looking aliens in them.

The game runs on the Sega System 16B arcade board, which is kind of like the Genesis/Mega Drive's dad. That makes it a bit weird that it never actually got a Mega Drive port, especially as other games made for the board like Altered Beast and Golden Axe did. It didn't make it to the TurboGrafx-16 or SNES either and I'm not sure what happened there, as it was ported to basically everything else at the time. Seriously, this Sega game got a NES port.

But whatever system it's on, it's still an arcade game... which means it'll be really simple and extremely difficult. I'll probably play it for 10 minutes, get hopelessly stuck, and then struggle to think of anything to say about it. I should get some good screenshots out of it though.