Aliens (Arcade)

Aliens is a shoot em' up game based off of the 1986 film of the same name. This time, however, Ripley has short blonde hair for some reason.

Unused Graphics#

An unused Alien type, which is a Hermit Crab like Ovomorph with tentacles. It contains animations for: emerging from its egg, moving, jumping and spitting either the Face Hugger or a projectile stored near this enemy.

Used	Full

The Stage 5 Boss, Electric Xenomorph is a sprite edit of the basic pink type with shared tiles for legs, which has a full set of frames for moving and attacking.

Used	Full

While the moving animation has 8 frames, the amount of used frames is only 2, probably caused by a bug or a decision to make the similarity less obvious. The same applies to the attack animation, meaning that the boss uses 2 frames for every action.

Version Differences#

The second and fourth stages of the US and European versions, both of which are set on the APC, are left out of the Japanese and Asian versions. This was likely done to remove any appearances of Newt due to the element of child endangerment, as she is also nowhere to be seen in some of the side-view stages.

A particularity is that Konami made two different versions of the arcade board for the European version. One is on a single PCB (which is the same as the other regions), and the other (which seems to be less common) is on a dual PCB stacked one on top of the other.

In MAME, the single PCB version is known as World set 1/set 2, while the dual PCB version is known as World set 3/set 4.

The dual PCB version is more difficult (even with the dip switches on easy) as it does not give the player health power ups and the default weapon no longer auto-fires. Instead if the player holds the fire button down, the default weapon will only rapidly fire for a second or so before requiring the player to release and press the fire button again.

On the other hand, the dual PCB version allows you to increase your lives by inserting more coins into the machine and press the start button, thing that you can't do in the single PCB version.

References#