Retro spotlight: Alien Syndrome

Alien Syndrome is a game that exemplifies what hardware differences used to mean. In the present, maybe there are differing frame rates with a game released across multiple platforms, likely some lesser graphical detail, especially if something that runs on the Playstation 5 also appears on the Nintendo Switch: fidelity and performance are the clearest differentiator from platform to platform, depending on its horsepower. In the younger days of the industry, though, with markedly different hardware, and developers and publishers all putting out a game across it all? You might actually end up with different games entirely. Alien Syndrome is one such example: it’s not just the arcade-to-console conversion that caused these differences, but also what strengths of the platform hardware were emphasized in those conversions, and what translations of the original experience were made in said conversion — all of which make it so that, regardless of where you play Alien Syndrome, it is both…

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