Aliens have invaded old-timey Japan and are eating everyone, and as a man who can't walk without flapping his arms in the air, your only method of killing them is BURYING THEM ALIVE.

Despite the fact this is the only Heiankyo Alien game I know of, there's an option of a NEW and OLD mode.

The NEW mode is what this "walkthrough", if you can even call it that, is all about. In NEW mode, you restart the stage if you die, your character digs and fills up holes at a relatively quick pace, aliens that fall into unfinished holes are stunned for a half second, and when there's only alien remaining, it speeds up. There are such gimmicks as super aliens that move faster than regular ones, steel tiles that you cannot dig on, walls that lower and rise, granting access or blocking off areas, a raft in a whopping three levels, and so on.

The OLD mode is essentially one of those endless arcade games that keeps on going until you get a game over. There are no set maps, but merely just four blocks randomly placed to create dead ends and walls and whatnot. The player takes a whole second or more to dig or bury a hole, and an alien will not stall upon touching an unfinished one, it just ploughs on through and destroys it. Because of these disadvantages, unless they're at the other side of the screen, it's pretty much impossible to ambush an enemy, and combined with the lack of obstacles in your favour and the fact a new batch of aliens appear if you take too long, it's all a bit bleak.

And now the NEW mode walkthrough! And by walkthrough I mean pictures with comments.

S T A G E - 0 1

With three aliens and the lowering walls blocking nothing major, this should be a snap.

S T A G E - 0 2

The exact same map except with new placement and a super alien.

S T A G E - 0 3

Another super alien and a starting position that has you closer to the monsters

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S T A G E - 0 4

Inconvenient lowering walls. Be wary of them if you're camping on either side.

S T A G E - 0 5

Exactly the same, only with an extra super alien.

S T A G E - 0 6

New placement, with another super alien. If they stay behind the lowering walls, they can be taken care of semi-easily.

I N T E R M I S S I O N

S T A G E - 0 7

This introduces the raft and has more steel tiles. Monsters can't board the raft, so it can be a safe haven.

S T A G E - 0 8

You start off within range of three monsters, and another super alien is added. Yikes.

S T A G E - 0 9

Things can get tricky, as you can essentially be cornered from every direction if you camp in your beginning area.

S T A G E - 1 0

A new map, and . All the junctions make this easy to kill enemies.

S T A G E - 1 1

All the enemies start off close, so this may cause problems.

S T A G E - 1 2

Seven super aliens. This may have been tricky on another map, but whoever added all those junctions was just too kind.

E N D I N G

And there you go.

It wasn't until I began writing this walkthrough that I found out there's a 2-Player mode! Simply link up two Game Boys with the game in them and a flashing VS. symbol appears on the title screen, and then pick a mode.

2-Player OLD mode makes the game slightly more bearable, as the second player is your companion and your goal remains the same, to annihilate the alien threat. With two slowass mofos digging holes at snail paces, you may make slightly more progress. I say may because I didn't actually try it out. Hence the zero score.

NEW mode, however, is what the VS. symbol belongs to. You start off in the same map with the same amount of enemies, and your goal is to last as long as possible. If an alien is killed, it is transferred to your opponent's field as a super alien, which is particularly fiendish. Whenever someone dies, the other play gets a point, and the man with the most points after five rounds wins.

So I spent three hours of my time writing about an obscure, simplistic Game Boy game that has no reason to be popular, and and half of it was spent seeing if there was an ending to the OLD mode. What do I think of it?

The NEW mode is fun. It's balanced, has a decent learning curve, and adds a nice strategic twist to those Pac-Man style games that usually involve running away until you're invincible. If it were longer, had a boss or two, a password system or level skip, maybe a level creator or a co-operative mode, I think it could have been fit to have a cartridge all to itself.

The OLD mode, on the other hand, is pretty abysmal. I understand it was made in 1979, and there are times that I like a challenge, but at least having some odds in our favour never hurt. The fact your character digs holes so slowly could be acceptable if he was able to outrun monsters with ease, but he can't; his speed matches them, but like so many terrible Pac-Man clones, he cannot turn corners without stopping for a split second, which means a lot when the aliens may as well be masters of those rocket-skates that Wile E. Coyote failed to use so many times. The ability to continue the level after dying without having to kill all the monsters again is nice, but that's the most positive I can be about it.

In summary, NEW mode is fun, but I can't justify buying it alone just for that. Find it in a multi-cart. That's how I did.