Alien Sidestep

Alien Sidestep was a 1983 shooter released for the Commodore 64 and the Commodore VIC-20, developed and published by Mr. Computer Products (also known as O.E.M. Inc.).

Why It Sucks

 * 1) This game is a very poor derivative of Space Invaders, where the aliens will actively try to dodge the bullets from your ship.
 * 2) The bullets that fire from your ship move really slowly to the top of the screen, and there can only be 16 bullets at a time.
 * 3) The only viable way to progress through the game is by going to the right side of the screen and move back to the left while firing the whole time, making sure the aliens run into the bullets. There is no other strategy to defeat the aliens, and if you deviate from that strategy, you ultimately end up losing.
 * 4) Since there's no strategy to beating the aliens other than repeatedly going from left to right and back to the left while shooting, the gameplay is boring and very repetitive.
 * 5) Sometimes, you may randomly get 50 points for shooting the aliens. There is no indication as to what alien triggers to 50 point bonus.
 * 6) There are three alien types spread over three levels each, and all of them act identical to one another, moving from left to right until they reach the bottom of the screen.
 * 7) *One of the aliens is plagiarized straight from Space Invaders.
 * 8) After all three alien types are defeated, the whole gameplay process repeats itself, just with an increased amount of points for each alien shot.
 * 9) The C64 has sprite flickering and is way slower than the VIC-20 version, despite being on a more powerful computer.

Reception
While none of the computer magazines reviewed Alien Sidestep back in the early 1980s, Stuart Ashen covered the game in his 2015 book Terrible Old Games You're Probably Never Heard Of, deriding it for its boring gameplay that offers no other strategies besides going from right to left while shooting at the aliens, comparing the process to grinding and doing boring fetch quests in an MMORPG, just distilled down to one movement.

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