I was recently talking to a few people about Nintendo and how they dont always seem to really use all of the great Intelectual Properties that they have made and yeah its true they havent made an F-zero in far too long, and there are a lot of other examples I could give but then when I stopped to think about it I thought ''hey you know what Nintendo is far from the worst when it comes to this, in fact Sega made some excellent games that really could have been the start of wonderful franchieses and then did sod all with them''. So it is with that in mind that I find myself here with an idea, and the idea in this case is that I am going to do a few blog posts on a a bunch of Sega Games which I think should have been the start of a series but instead were just one off's.
I am going to start with Alien Storm, yes apparently Alien Storm is apparently a sequel to Alien Syndrome but I am ignoring that for a whole bunch of reasons, mostly because I never ever realised that back at the time Alien Storm came out and because they are a million miles from each other at best I think you could call Alien Storm a spin off, I really dont see it as a sequel in any way shape or form.
My first ever blog post in general was made on the 16th of June 2009 and it was a review of Alien Storm, that post no longer exists as the host was shut down, I did however reproduce it and add to it for this blog for my 100th Post and so before I go on I will post the link to that just below.
http://kerr9000.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/alien-storm-for-sega-megadrivegenesis.html
So if I think Alien Storm should have been the start of a series there is obviously a whole bunch of reasons right? Well the first and main one is a purly selfish one and thats the simple fact that its a game I love and I just cant get enough of, I find myself returning to it again and again. For anyone who hasnt had the good fortune to play it its basically a side scrolling beat em up, if you have played Golden Axe then its that but with Aliens and ray guns. There is more to it than that it had light gun style shooting at the screen levels thrown in to keep things fresh and intresting and I just think they could have got a lot more milliage out of this idea, we had 3 Golden Axes after all. I can not find any proper sales figures for the game but I dont think it can have done bad seeing as it has ended up on various MegaDrive best of style collections. I also think that one of the reasons this game should have gotten at least a few sequels is that it would have been quiet easy to further develop the ideas shown in the original without going to a crazy level of effort. For a start it wouldnt have been hard to use the engine for future Golden Axe games to at least gain a starting point for sequels to Alien Storm, take the engine from Golden Axe 2 and start by dropping the character assets from Alien Storm over the top of the golden Axe stuff and take it from there.
I think at that sort of time the market was ripe for more walk along beat em ups, I just wanted more and more of them and Alien Storm was diffrent not just because of the Alien subjedct mater but the fact they threw in the shooting stages and the running stages, we could have done with a series like that, a series which had a bit of a diffrent story type to all of the others, one which also wasnt affraid to throw in a little bit of other types of gameplay to keep things fresh and intresting.
Personally what would I have liked to see from a sequel? Well my favourate character was the robot for two reasons one his electric whip and 2 well he was a robot and robots are just super cool, I would have liked to have seen more characters for a start for one I would have liked a second robot, I would have also liked to have seen more enemies. I dont think the first game was bad on the enemy front yeah some of them were just recolours but I admit a bit more variety would help, I liked the original ones so much I would want to see them all again, just with a few new faces thrown in. Id like to see more Aliens badly disgused as humans, the humour in the original game really appealed to me, I wouldnt want things to get too daft but if they could just keep throwing little bits like that in then id be very happy. A lot of the first game happens on earth, with you only getting on board a spaceship near the end, I think this is something I would really change Id have 2 levels on earth then 1 on a ship and then see some Alien plant(s) from that point onwards.
I am not going to say that a sequel would be fail proof, there is always the danger that a poor sequel can ruin a games legacy, but I really think that it would have been great to see more Alien Storm games and an Alien Storm 2 which follows the rough idea of what I have laid out above could have been a great game.
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