Alien Games

You fly the saucer: beam up cows, dodge the army, get home.

Ufo Run

UFO Shooting Game

Ufo Mars

UFO Attack

UFO IO Armada!

Survival UFO

Invaders, visitors and the player in the saucer

Aliens have been the standard enemy of arcade games since the first cabinets filled the screen with rows of descending invaders, and the label still leans that way: a large part of the shelf is about shooting things that came down from the sky. But the theme has broadened well past the cabinet. In many titles you are the alien, abducting cows with a tractor beam, steering a saucer through a city at night, or trying to get home from a planet that does not want you there. Others use aliens as a puzzle element, a cute companion or a farming neighbor with too many eyes, and a few make the visitor the one thing on the screen that cannot be shot at all. The one thing the games share is the sense of something not from here, whether that something is a threat, a joke or a friend.

The shelf overlaps with several neighbors, and it helps to know where the lines fall before you start browsing. Anything set beyond the atmosphere lives on the space games hub, which holds the rockets, the star maps and the docking puzzles whether or not anyone ever lands. The pure firing end is closer to shooting games and, when the camera sits behind the gun, to first-person shooter games. Creatures that are simply large and hostile without a spaceship belong under monster games, however many tentacles they have. What stays here is the alien itself: the saucer, the invasion, the abduction beam and the small green visitor who is either the enemy or the hero depending on which side of the screen you start.

Categories:Shooting

Shooters, defense lines and abduction runs

The classic form is the fixed shooter: rows of invaders descend, you slide along the bottom of the screen, and the pace rises as the rows thin out. Modern versions add power-ups, boss waves and vertical scrolling, but the rhythm is the one players learned decades ago, and it still holds up in a browser tab. A second group turns the invasion into a defense problem: aliens march toward a base, you place turrets or troops in their path, and the strategy is in the placement rather than the aim. Those play like the defense games hub with a different enemy skin, and a few borrow the wave-after-wave structure of survival games, where the question is not whether the base falls but how long it stands.

The abduction games flip the camera. You fly the saucer, hover over a farm or a town, and beam up whatever the level asks for while the army below tries to shoot you down. They tend to be short, silly and built for one button, which makes them good on a phone and easy to hand to a child. Alongside them sit runners with an alien lead, platformers on strange planets and physics puzzles where a small green creature has to be launched, bounced or dropped into a goal. The retro games hub has the pixel-era shooters if the cabinet feel is what you came for, and arcade games covers the score chasers of every theme when the alien is only the costume.

Categories:Arcade

Phones, keyboards and how scary it gets

The fixed shooters and the saucer games are the best of the shelf on a phone: one thumb slides the ship, firing is automatic or a single tap, and a round fits into a minute. The first-person and defense titles want a mouse or a keyboard, where aiming and placement are quicker and the screen has room for the map and the menu at once. Everything runs in the browser with nothing to install; a game that pauses on its first screen is loading assets, not a download. Most rounds are short enough that losing costs almost nothing, and the high-score loop is the reason players keep coming back to a design this old. Progress in the longer defense campaigns usually survives closing the tab.

Tone varies more than mechanics do. Most alien games are cartoon science fiction: bright saucers, googly eyes, laser sounds and a game-over screen that resets without ceremony. A few lean toward dread, with dark corridors, an unseen creature and a flashlight that keeps flickering; those sit closer to the horror games shelf and say so on their own pages, so a glance at the screenshots tells you which kind you have opened. Children usually enjoy the cheerful end, and the abduction and invader games have no gore at all, only a puff of pixels when a saucer goes down. Players who want the mechanical side of science fiction without the creatures should try robot games, and the base-building end without the invasion has more room under strategy games.

Categories:HorrorStrategy