Last changed: 2003-07-22

Alienfighter for Sega Dreamcast VM

Here it is: Alienfighter, my second VM mini game. It is a simple "shoot all the aliens before they kill you" style game.

The Story

Every shoot'em up game needs a background story. So earth is at war with extraterrestrial aliens for several centuries. Today nobody really knows how and why the war started. Because of the long duration both earth and aliens have built a very effective defense system and all fighting is done with remote controlled spaceships. Nearly all resources on both sides are used to improve the defense systems, so there is not much left to build attack fleets. From time to time earth chooses some of their inhabitants to start a single ship attack against the aliens. This time you are chosen to remote control a small attack vessel against the aliens main base.

Your ship is transported with the latest big distance matter transmitter directly before the first defense line. Transporting it further is impossible because the aliens use transporter scramblers. But if your ship gets destroyed the explosion energy of the main reactor is used to power an anti transporter scrambler allowing the earth attack center to transport a new ship to the current position. The new ship is even invulnerable while the transport takes place. But due to a limited budget you only get 5 ships, if you destroy them all you get fired and earth attack center starts to search for a new pilot. Your ship explodes if you fly into a wall, collide with an alien or get hit by an alien shot. Since the shots of your ship are powered by the ship you can only have up to 3 shots at the same time. This is not much especially because many aliens need more than one hit to get destroyed.

What makes your mission more difficult is that the aliens are clever: they have built many different bases and you have to attack them all one after another to find which one is the main base. As soon as you find out that the current base is not the main one you get transported back. To be able to do that just kill all alien ships at the end of each base. Without any data link to one of the alien ships (remember: they are all remote controlled, too) the transporter scramblers are no longer working and your ship can be safely transported to the next base. As a bonus you get another ship each time you reach the end of the base.

The game

Directly after starting the game a small timing calibration routine is run for about half a second. This is necessary because the frequency of the VM's RC oscillator can vary between 300 and 1200 KHz and most of the game runs in RC clock mode. This also means that Alienfighter will consume more power than other games, so the battery life time will be even shorter than normal.

After calibration the title-screen is displayed. Press A and B together to get to the main menu. Here you can start the game, set the game options, view the high-scores or look at a demo of each level. Move the cursor with the D pad, select with A or go back with B.

In the game control your ship with the D pad and shoot with A.

If you were really good you can enter your name into the high-score table, choose which char to enter with the D pad, press A to continue and B to go back.

Hints

Use the demo function to look at the levels to find the optimal way through them, on some of them are dead ends.
Don't try to shoot everything, sometimes it is easier just to avoid being shot instead of shooting the aliens.
Some of the aliens have to be shot as soon as possible, they get more aggressive the longer they live.
In some situations it is better to start a short distance attack, because you can shoot again once a shot has hit.

The aliens

Points	Image	Name
1		Cannon
1		Another Cannon
1		Stationary bomb thrower, very dangerous
1		Asteroid
5		Small alien
5		Another small alien
5		Another type of small alien
5		It smiles, but it is not friendly
5		Tiny alien carried by mother-ship
10		Bomb throwing alien
10		Single shot alien
10		Double shot alien
20		Alien mother-ship

Note to emulator users

Alienfighter runs much too fast on softvms 1.8. To correct this problem I have written a patch which you can download below. You have to apply the patch to the source distribution of softvms and recompile it. Without this patch Alienfighter is really unplayable.

Copying and license information

Alienfighter is released under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE (GPL). Summarised this means that you can copy, modify and distribute it as long as you make the source code available to anybody.