Run-and-gun Flash classic Alien Hominid HD will come to Steam alongside a sequel
Newgrounds to console then back to PC
Alien Hominid was a run-and-gun Adobe Flash game originally released in 2002 via influential website Newgrounds. It then got a vastly improved HD release on various consoles between 2003 and 2007.
That HD re-release is now being re-released, and this time it's heading back to PC. It'll have upgraded graphics and weekly and monthly leaderboards when it arrives sometime this year, alongside a sequel.
Alien Hominid HD can be played solo or in two-player local co-op, with three difficulty options, and half a dozen mini-games. All of which makes it seem unchanged from the mid-'00s console release, but now it's on Steam.
The original Alien Hominid was created by Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin. Fulp was also the creator of Newgrounds, a website to which anyone could upload Flash games and animations. Alien Hominid's release helped popularise Newgrounds - which in turn was influential upon internet culture - and in 2003 Fulp and Paladin co-founded a games studio, The Behemoth. The Behemoth have since released Castle Crashers, BattleBlock Theater, Pit People, and they're now working on Alien Hominid Invasion, a full sequel to their original Flash game.
Invasion, which will also be released on Steam, has four-player local or online co-op, and it looks like it has a lot more variety in its running and gunning. There was a demo available during Steam's Next Fest last month, but I missed it.
If you don't want to wait for the Steam re-release and don't have your Xbox 360 handy, you can still play the original version of Alien Hominid via Newgrounds, with the magic of Flash emulation.