Following my last blog on Schwarzenegger- related arcade games and because several people mentioned it, this new article will be on the classic Alien vs Predator arcade game. No not the rubbish movie, or the Jaguar first-person shooter, or even the recent AvP FPS. This Final Fight-like title was released in 1994 by Capcom and featured fantastic 4-player co-op like the Simpsons and TMNT games back then. It was later ported to the Neo-Geo I think, but honestly how many of us owned one of those?

Story: Pretty predictable – Earth is invaded by the Aliens and four heroes are summoned to save it. Yes, ONLY four. Never mind the armies around the world or anything. And two of them are Predators (it is not explained why the Predators are helping the humans instead of hunting and killing them, but it was really cool to use those guys).

Playable Characters: Major Dutch Schaefer (who apparently is now a cyborg) had a cybernetic arm that doubled as a smart-gun. Unfortunately no Arnie dialogue was recorded for the game – it would’ve been cool to hear him shout “Run, go, get to da chopper!” and so on.

Predator Hunter was ‘young’ and fought with a cool-looking spear and was super quick.

Predator Warrior I guess then was the ‘old and experienced’ one with a not-so-cool-looking spear, was slower than his little bro but more powerful. [Both Predators could throw their sharp-frisbee thing from Predator 2 as well as blast xenomorph suckas with their shoulder-mounted laser cannon which would frustratingly overheat too quickly (advanced technology and yet the damn thing overheats every 3 seconds??)].

Lieutenant Linn Kurosawa, a snazzy looking Japanese chick (and also a cyborg – what’s with the cyborgs Capcom?) who was decked-out in breast-contoured body armour, knee-pads (just in case, you know, she fell over and scraped herself) and a long long ponytail. Her character design is like Ibuki from SF3 and she made cameos in a couple of backgrounds in SF3 and SFA2. But where is Ripley? It would’ve been great if she was in it, but never mind.

Extras: Apart from the typical genre-specific wooden boxes that you broke to get health pick-ups and throwable pipes (always the pipes), the game also featured the cool Marine APC from the Aliens film and an almighty boss battle against the Queen. There was also this Power-Up-Special-Move-Shoryuken thing you could do that wiped out enemies around you at the cost of lowering your health. Ive lost count of the number of times I did that and got killed straight after (I’ve also lost count of the number of times I heard someone yell out “Slut!” when Chun-Li whipped their arses in Street Fighter 2, but that’s another story). Like Elevator Action Returns, I never finished this game either because it had quite an unfairly high difficulty level, but it was a real classic nonetheless and so so so much better than that crappy Paul W S Anderson movie.

Overall score: 8/10, Nostalgia Score: 9/10

Edit: According to Wikipedia, “the game was based on an early draft script for the movie adaptation of the series and was intended to have been a tie-in to the movie”!