Retro Game of the Day! Alien Storm

Boom-boom-CHOKK!! That is the sound you first hear at the title screen for Alien Storm, a Sega Genesis effort (developed by a Sega in-house team) which lets you know you are in for some gruesome violence, circa 1990. Well, far be it from me to stand in the way of the commencement of gruesome violence, then..


Famously, the mostly-forgotten Alien Storm is essentially a reskin of Sega's quite popular Golden Axe games, themselves a derivative of the classic Double Dragon formula. The gameplay is quite simple - you move your character around, kill all the enemeis in the immediate segment, are allowed to advance the screen slightly, collect MP, make it to the boss, wash-rinse-repeat. The built-up MP lets you fire a mega-weapon to the detriment of all foes on screen. Basically, same thing as Golden Axe but without the creature riding, and the motif is obviously dressed-up differently. But yeah, same stuff.

It was therefore branded as being trendy and shallow at the time, but so what? It was nice to just have simple games that looked really nice, had 2-player co-op, and involved killing crazy mutants. I mean, what's not to like? Most of the shots being shown here are from the arcade board, though the Genesis version still held it's own fairly well.

I do kind of miss games like this where they wouldn't sweat getting right to the point and throwing you into a crazy world full of colorful creatures and instant action. Not terribly deep, but I could see this being a lot of fun if done properly in hirez. They don't really do that sort of thing nowadays though.

Overall, I concede that there's not much to a game like this, and overall it's largely forgettable. But whatever, it looked cool (still does) and inspires me to want to put together a world like that. Someday!