Xenophobe is a 1987 arcade game developed and published by Bally Midway. Starbases, moons, ships, and space cities are infested with aliens, and the players have to kill the aliens before each is completely overrun.
Gameplay:
Xenophobe can be played by up to three players, and the goal of each level is to defeat all the aliens before time runs out. Some rooms routinely display the percentage of alien infection and time remaining until self-destruct when the level ends (but a nearby button can temporarily deactivate the count-down). Levels may contain more than one floor, and players use elevators (and sometimes holes in the floor) to move between floors to defeat all of the aliens. Players can also pick up more powerful weapons and other items to help in their eradication of the aliens.
The hostile aliens (known as “Xenos”) come in different forms. There are “Eggs” (similar to the eggs in Alien). If an Egg hatches, it creates a “Critter” which can attach itself to the player and drain health. If a Critter is not killed, it eventually matures into a “Roller” (a cross between a lizard, caterpillar, and armadillo). Rollers are one of the tougher enemies, as they can ball themselves up and roll around while impervious to the players’ guns. Rollers sometimes grow into the “Warrior” Xeno form, which attacks by leaping and requires multiple hits to kill from most weapons. Warriors are able to spit damaging acid across rooms (and sometimes into adjacent rooms). This acid also drips from the ceiling in some rooms. They also have a devastating leap attack that will knock down and disarm. One of the more insidious attacks in a Warrior’s arsenal is its ability to disarm a player. Simply walking past a Warrior can cause the player’s gun to drop to the floor (destroying it if still in a doorway). Other Xenos include “Tentacles” that randomly appear from the deck or ceiling, and trap or strangle the player respectively, and the arguably toughest enemy is a Xeno “Queen” which appears either in doorways or behind certain backgrounds and throws proto-eggs at the players and shoots hypnotic eye beams which trap players and drain their health. If the proto-egg lands on a screen with a player, it grows into another Egg, which eventually hatches into a Critter as usual. Any biological kinship between Warrior Xenos and Queen Xenos, and whether the Tentacles growing in the ducting are part of the Queen Xenos, is merely implied. There are much larger alien carcasses the player can walk past or through but they only appear as part of the background.
The weapons a player collects are fairly diverse. In order of damage, the weapons are: punch (unarmed), phazer (the starting weapon), laser pistol, lightning rifle, gas gun, and grenades. The guns tend to trade power for range. The one exception to this is the phaser, which has medium range and very low damage. Great care has to be taken with the grenades, as they bounce off walls and doors and can hit the player who threw it, or even other players. None of the guns can hurt other players, but punching can, and makes the punched player fall down, and drop the gun he was carrying, which the attacker is then free to pick up. Whenever a player’s gun is lost and destroyed (such as by dropping it in a doorway), a small robot wheels into his room and dispenses a random gun for him to use. The laser pistol lends itself to a conservative play style, keeping opponents at range and moving through levels slowly (often crouched) while the gas gun encourages faster moving play since the player must close quickly to eliminate foes.
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