Alien Storm

Alien Storm is a side-scrolling beat 'em up. The game resembles Golden Axe, with a similar artistic style, three playable characters (a man, a woman, and a novel character), and pick-up or power-up special attacks. The player (only one player for the Master System version, up to two players for the Mega Drive version, three for the arcade version) chooses one of the three different characters and goes on a quest to save Earth from an alien invasion. All Busters are playable from the beginning of the game. There are 6 missions (8 in the Mega Drive version) with multiple stages to complete. In each mission, the player must blast aliens from the streets to the mother ship, where the mother of all aliens can be found. This task becomes more difficult with each new mission, and the aliens can hide in objects such as plants, mailboxes, trash cans, barrels and other items. Each mission has a goal, for example, saving people or destroying a UFO. When you deal with some aliens, flying heads appear that you can shoot to collect lives or energy. Energy is mainly used for the energy-based attacks of the player's weapons (such as flames or electricity) and for the much more powerful special weapons. Similar to other early Sega arcade games, each character can use unlimited different short-range attacks such as punches and kicks. In addition to these standard attacks, each character has their own weapon (Garth's weapon that shoots lightning was replaced with a flame weapon in the Master System version). There are also special attacks that vary depending on the character chosen at the beginning of the game. For example, Garth summons a U.S. Air Force spaceship that drops bombs overhead (in the Master System version, he has Karen's special attack, a ballistic missile strike). Scooter teleports away from his current location, leaving behind a series of bombs that explode when aliens appear, after which he reappears (in the Mega Drive version, he simply explodes, leaving behind his head, which his new body retrieves). Karen summons a nuclear missile, which incinerates all the enemies on the screen. However, using each character's special attacks consumes a large amount of energy that can't be used if the player character's energy is too low. There are only a few bosses in the game. In the arcade original, there is only one boss, which has three different forms. In the Mega Drive version, there are two of these forms as two separate bosses. At the end of each mission, the side-scrolling gameplay switches to either a shooting gallery perspective where the player must take out the aliens that appear in various locations, similar to the bonus stages of Shinobi and Shadow Dancer, both also from Sega, or a running section that resembles the side-scrolling mode but plays like a horizontal shooter with projectile weapons.