As featured in Retrogaming Times Monthly issue #19, December 2005.

As with games such as Shinobi and After Burner, Alien Syndrome marks another Sega arcade game that Tengen ported over to the NES.  Originally released in 1987 and running parallels with the film "Alien," Alien Syndrome drops one or two players into the role of a space marine aboard an alien spacecraft.  In the year 2089 a race of aliens imprisons an entire space colony aboard its seven space ships.  Each ship is swarming with alien creatures as well as an alien commander.  Your mission is to board each of the seven ships, rescue your captured comrades, defeat the alien boss on each ship, and get out of there before the whole thing goes critical.  Alien Syndrome keeps the pressure on as the moment each stage begins you have just set the time bomb that will destroy the ship.  Map kiosks throughout the ships will display where your comrades are being held but it's still a race to get in and out before the bomb goes off.

Although the basic layout of the game is simple there are still a lot of fine details graphically such as pipes overhead, flickering displays, smoothly moving enemies and so forth.  While the very basics of the game's design make the transition to the NES, the conversion is barebones at best.  A genuine effort was made to have the graphics look somewhat like they did in the arcade but honestly everything looks really flat and plain.  Thankfully the boss aliens make the transition onto the NES better than the standard enemies, they're all fairly detailed and look like low resolution counterparts of their arcade originals.  Scrolling is jittery and no where near as smooth as it was in the arcade version but it's still passable as it doesn't hinder over all gameplay all that much.  However the whole game seems to play a lot slower than it did in the arcade, almost like the game is in jell-o slow.  Is the game still playable?  Yes.  Does it make the game fun to play?  Not really.

Control is how it was in the arcade, a single button to fire and the directional pad is used for player control.  Right there lies my biggest problem with Alien Syndrome both at home and in the arcade.  You shoot in the direction you are facing but if you change direction you also run in that direction.  In other words if an enemy creeps up behind you and you turn around to fire, you'll end up walking into the enemy before getting a shot off.  This game always screamed out for a dual control set up (one stick for player movement, one stick for direction of fire) or a rotating joystick.  This issue was addressed in the recently released SegaAges remake of Alien Syndrome on the PlayStation 2 and it makes the game a whole lot more fun to play, only took almost 20 years.  The NES port has decent audio but the sparse voice clips from the arcade are gone.  Additionally not all the powerups from the arcade version made it onto the NES, most notably the little option robots that could be picked up to provide cover fire.

Since the port was at the best decent and no one was really crying out for a home version of Alien Syndrome, this is one of the overlooked Tengen NES releases.  Even with the shortcomings, the basic mechanics of the arcade original carry over for the most part and the soul of the game remains.  Just the same if you liked Alien Syndrome in the arcade you'll be unimpressed with the NES version.  It's a mediocre game released in an era of horrible unlicensed mediocre games.  To me this is the most disappointing of all the Tengen NES ports, it just feels like such a rush job and the more I play it the more I dislike the conversion.  If you're looking for a good NES game look elsewhere.  I can only recommend Alien Syndrome on the NES to those collecting Tengen or NES games.  It definitely doesn't have much player appeal.
 

"InsaneDavid" also runs a slowly growing gaming site at http://www.classicplastic.net/dvgi

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