Aliens!
First published 2/25/1999

If ever there was a generation meant to battle aliens, it was ours. Any Generation X'er worth his salt has logged in thousands of hours of battle time: flying through space, taking on hordes of extraterrestrial monsters bent on enslaving our planet.

Usually, the aliens would swoop down out of the sky and we'd blow them away single-handedly (Galaga, Galaxian, Gorf, Space Invaders). Sometimes the aliens would come at us sideways (R-Type, Defender). Very rarely, we'd beam over to the aliens' ship and engage in hand-to-hand combat (Xenophobe).

Usually, we never actually got to see our enemies. They never got out of their ships. Hell, maybe they were their ships -- why else did their spaceships have eyes (if that's what those two pixels represented)?

We didn't always fight aliens who swooped down at us in orderly rows. Sometimes we'd fight demons or planes who swooped down out at us in orderly rows (Satan's Hollow, 1941). Sometimes we'd fight robots..

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