Alien (1982)

In 1982, Atari and 20th Century Fox blessed us with an exciting licensed Alien game. That's right, you can be Ripley. You can feel the terrifying approach of the alien. You can relive the atmosphere of your favourite dazzling and terrifying sci-fi movie. As a Pac-Man clone, of course!

In this game, launched confidently onto the Atari 2600, you are not Pac-Man, but a regular human-shaped person. Your task is to avoid the scary aliens wandering through the gorgeous onscreen maze, and to get these yummy circles. In this game, the circles are alien eggs, and you are mercilessly crushing them - yay!

The controls are perhaps slightly more finicky than in the original Pac-Man - I found myself failing to swerve into the direction I wanted to go a few times, things feel just a touch sticker - but for the most part, this is a servicable, standard Pac-Man situation. An interesting deviation, though, is in its interstitial bonus levels.

This is a sort of Frogger. I wasn't ready for it. Quite frankly it frightened me, the presence of all those aliens. But before I knew it, I was back in the regular level, safe and sound.

It's really the look of this game that I find compelling. I love the sprites, human and alien alike, and the use of a very blue-purple colour palette creates a nice, moody, celestial feel to the whole thing. There is a beauty here in this low-effort licencing. They've taken Pac-Man away, leaving his workplace behind for you to attend to, but they've put a special little atmosphere where he once was. And there's something beautiful about it. 

Don't let the aliens get you.