Games I Grew Up On: Xenophobe

One of the "cooperative" games I liked to play with my brothers growing up was the NES game, Xenophobe.  Since this was a game based on an arcade game, it's more about a high score and seeing how long you can play than winning.  In fact, I don't even know if this game had an end.  If it did, it was a little too repetitive and long for me to ever find it.

In the game, the players are tasked with trying to find these strange glowing orbs (dropped by killed enemies just like everything else in the game) before the space station you're on blows up.  I think if it did blow up, you still teleport off it safely, you just get less points.  So each space station is made up of a randomly generated set of rooms, which each contain some pre-determined aliens/barriers/teleport switches and also have constantly respawning enemies.  You kill enemies to get items, most just give you points, some give you health, some give you better weapons/grenades, and the glowing orb things end the level.  If you kill too many enemies in one room, they stop dropping items when killing them, so you're encouraged to keep wandering around.  While playing co-op, you can see the other player if you're both in the same room and if either player finds the orb, both players get warped out of the level (which definitely caused much strife for one of us not waiting for the other to get that awesome item that just dropped before forcing them to leave the level).

The enemies range from little amoebas that jump from the ceiling to the floor, floating laser turrets, little bitey leech guys, big jumpy Xenomorph looking aliens (like on the game cover seen above) that spit acid and basically just charge you a lot, and winged blue giraffe looking things that hang on the ceiling and drop bombs on you.  If anything touches you, you get hurt.  If you lose all your health, you lose.  It's as simple as that.  It was definitely a lot of fun at the time, but there's no way this would hold up now.  This is especially disappointing since the arcade game it's based off of sounds way more designed and fleshed out.  I guess that's probably just due to the technical limitations of the NES.  Either that or it was a cash grab...