Alien Hominid HD

Alien Hominid is still very much an homage to Metal Slug that was evidently produced in the early-mid 2000's with an impressive litany of handmade art primarily by Dan Paladin and with the devil-may-care sensibilities of the era in a way that I think still holds up quite well. Originally a short Flash demo followed by a full commercial release on 6th gen consoles (still got my GameCube copy!) back when such an indie production was generally unheard of, shortly followed by an HD XBLA release that I never tried because I'm not an Xbox guy. All this time later it's finally on PC, and the shined up less-artifacted graphics are great, the wider aspect ratio feels pretty natural, and it may well be faithful to the XBLA release, I'm not sure. But it is [i]hellishly[/i] overtuned next to the original 6th gen releases. If you try them side by side, it's like Street Fighter 2 versus Street Fighter 2 Turbo. It also doesn't help that I'm not quite jiving with the default controller mappings and they can't be adjusted, even though keyboard controls can. On an Xbox layout, B jumps, Y shoots, A is grenade. Huh?? If you want a strictly arcadey button masher that's barely human-reactable, dive right in, it's interesting and quite fluid as these things go. But for me the two-decade gap since first playing this has not done my reflexes any favors and the original game is already hard enough, thanks. I'd make some crack like "I never asked for this", but I do retain a distinct embarrassing memory of weird Internet gremlin me posting on Dan's forum back in late 2004 complaining that the game's framerate was noticeably stiffer compared to the original Flash release, so I'd like to take the opportunity to personally apologize for invoking the monkey's paw. That is all.