Alien Brigade

Alien Brigade is among the Atari 7800 titles that make full use of the XG-1 light gun bundled with the console. Playing a soldier defending Earth against an alien invasion, the player moves through a series of rail-guided scenes and must quickly aim and shoot at waves of attackers, all while dodging incoming fire and collecting power-ups that temporarily upgrade the arsenal. The game combines pure reflex-based play with progressively escalating scenes, where the number and type of enemies changes and forces the player to adapt their shooting style, since some targets must be hit at a precise spot while others just need to slow down or move.

Technically, the game shows that the Atari 7800, despite its limitations, could deliver smooth action with plenty of moving objects on screen without the pronounced sprite flicker that plagued many other titles of this generation. The backgrounds of the individual scenes evoke a raw sci-fi invasion atmosphere rather than an elaborate story, matched by a sparse soundtrack made mostly of laser blasts and explosions on impact, which nicely underscores the tension of an approaching wave of enemies. The game can also be played without the light gun, using a standard controller instead, though this changes the feel of play and aiming precision, since the cursor then has to be moved more slowly and less intuitively.

In the context of the light-gun shooter offerings of the time, it was one of the few original efforts made directly for the 7800 rather than a port of an arcade machine, setting it apart from the competition on other platforms, where such home adaptations of arcade games predominated. Today, Alien Brigade is interesting mainly as an example of how the console handled game peripherals, and as a quick, undemanding dose of action for moments when you don't want to deal with complex mechanics or learn an extensive control scheme. Without the light gun it loses some of its charm, but it still remains a usable showcase of the 1980s rail-shooter genre, when this peripheral was at the height of its popularity.

Why play it: For a quick, undemanding dose of rail-shooter action from the heyday of light guns, though without the peripheral the game loses a substantial part of its charm.