Xenophobe

Space stations infested with aliens, and three friends clearing them out together, room by room. Xenophobe on the Atari Lynx from 1990 is generally regarded as the very best existing version of this arcade classic, and for a port that is rare praise indeed. Where home conversions suffered from compromises, Epyx did work that is still remembered with respect today.

The premise is B-movie sci-fi and all the more fun for it. As an alien hunter you make your way through infested stations in a side view, exploring corridors and cabins, collecting weapons and eliminating the intruders before they take over the station completely. The large, detailed enemy sprites look surprisingly effective on the Lynx's small display and lend the action just the right dose of slimy horror that the genre demands.

The biggest asset, however, is cooperation. The game supports up to four players via the ComLynx console link, and what's innovative is that one of the players can even play as the alien itself and ruin everyone else's plans. This asymmetry, where one person plays against the rest of the group in the role of the monster, was an unexpectedly progressive idea for 1990, one that mainstream games only really discovered many years later.

The Lynx version benefits from the fact that the console was designed from the ground up for linking multiple units, so multiplayer wasn't an add-on crutch but a natural part of the design. Clearing stations together with friends was exactly the kind of experience Atari wanted to sell with its console, and Xenophobe delivered it better than most of the era's competition.

Xenophobe originated as an arcade cabinet from Bally/Midway, and its atmosphere clearly drew on the era's wave of space horror in the wake of the film Alien's success. The Lynx conversion by Epyx, a studio closely tied to the console's very birth, is prized among collectors today precisely as an example of what a well-made handheld arcade port should look like.

Why play: For the best version of the classic alien-blasting brawl and a surprisingly modern asymmetric co-op where one of the group can become the monster.