#alien shootout

When I was 13, I was fond of flash games on sites like this one, but I did not... actually have Flash. What I did have was Microsoft Powerpoint. So, I made a series of games (insofar as one can make a game in Powerpoint) where you would navigate a world, react to QTEs, etc. They were created with whatever means I had available: art composed in MSPaint, voice acting recorded on a tiny clip on mic, music composed in eJay.

Well, last year I found an old hard drive backup and discovered them again and found the whole thing incredibly endearing, so I shared them with the girls. One day I intend to figure out a way to release them online, but it’s a bit hard when they only really work in Powerpoint 2003. In any case! We ran a small game jam where we would make fangames and sequels using the tools available to 13-year-old me.

In the end, @footsteps-on-the-dance-floor was the only person who actually finished a game, which she called Alien Shootout Dread. (I’m still working on mine! I’m sure you’ll be shocked to know it got a bit overambitious.)

And like, seriously, Ash’s game was a work of absolute fucking genius. She went as far as to implement a maze, a keycard puzzle and blackjack game with a degree of pseudorandom number generation all in Powerpoint slides, and her script was the funniest thing. Both versions of it: she implemented a character switcher by dint of duplicating every single slide of the game.

At one point it features the main character parachuting onto a UFO in space. And that brings us here: Ash commissioned me to make a cover for it as if it was a famicom/NES game, such as Rolling Thunder (for comparison). These old games had amazing painted covers and ads which often had nothing to do with the game but were full of gleeful 80s energy: explosions, robots, bishōjos and giant blue heads, painted by all sorts of illustrators in that delightful bubble era anime style. So this is a tribute to those old game covers!