Most people who know me know that “Aliens” is one of my favorite movies ever. It has action, it has humor, it has thrills, and it has Ellen Ripley, who pretty much single-handedly kicks the collective butts of Lara Croft et al.

Before I watched the movie, though, I played the game. Yup. Back when I was about five or six years old we played this on Commodore 64 all the time. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to one of the hardest games EVER.

We start out with the dropship sequence. This sequence involved piloting the dropship through a bunch of hula hoops in a first-person view. Sounds easy enough, right?

WRONG.

This thing threw hairpin turns at you and “rough air” made your screen wobble and your controls go all over the place. And if you missed going through one of the hoops? “Game over, man. Game over!” The only redeeming quality for this level was the awesome music.

Nobody in my household (gaming was a family affair back then, often branching out to extended family as well) could beat this level except for my little brother, who I’m pretty sure was still in diapers. So we’d hand the joystick to him, he’d beat the level for us, and then we’d resume playing.

…you know, as if it was going to get any easier.

Because next was the level where you had to get all (well, four) of your marines to safety, which involved guiding them one by one through a giant maze where they were prone to being attacked by packs of aliens. Heaven help you if more than one of your guys was attacked by aliens at once, since you could only “be” one guy at a time.

Alien attacks were more frequent if you were in “the nest”, aka “A bunch of random pixels making squiggly lines”, but they could happen at any time, and if you lost said attack, your guy would slowly be devoured while you couldn’t do much about it.

There was a bit of an element of strategy to it though: if you had more than one guy together, then they were immune to alien attacks. Which was handy. Your best bet, though, was probably to get them through to the end as straight as possible. You started in a random place every time and this level was so labyrinth-like that my mom actually took a pad of graph paper and mapped the entire place out.

My mom: hardcore with video games before the rest of us.

Once you got through this level it was time for a further descent into nightmares with The Most Difficult Level of All Time. This level involved staving off aliens with a gun while you waited for the door to open. If an alien got through, he took one of your guys, until you had none left, at which point it was game over. Here’s the thing, though: the game didn’t care if they sent a superfast alien at you at the top of the screen and a superfast alien at you at the bottom of the screen at the same time. The game didn’t care that you couldn’t be at two places at once. As such, I am 99% sure that it is impossible to beat this level with all your “lives” remaining. Heck, if you get through it with more than one or two lives remaining, you are a god among men.

(As an aside, Blizzard remade this level as a Blizz-game-related Flash game on the BlizzCon site a year or two back. The nightmarish flashbacks: they happened.)

As I very rarely could pass this level myself, my memories on the rest of the levels are fuzzy, though they were just as difficult and involved another maze like level, this time with bombs, and then going back to the FIRST maze, except this time you’re Ripley and you have to save Newt. Oh, and you have a strict time limit.

This game did save the best for last, though, because you do, in fact, get to beat up on the Alien Queen with your hydraulic suit…

…in a sequence that was kicked off in one of the most memorable ways ever in Commodore 64 gaming.

Primarily because I was five years old and *gasp!* She said a bad word!

And if you managed to beat all of that?

“Not bad… for a human!”