How to play Aliens on Mac

Game summary

Aliens is an arcade game based loosely on the 1986 movie Aliens. You and a friend play female Marines and you must explore and destroy all aliens who have taken over a now abandoned space settlement LV426 Acheron. If you can find any survivors try to rescue them. As well as your normal gun there are other weapons that can be used to help you. A Caterpillar P-5000 can also be found and used. Aliens is mainly a side view horizontal shooter where the screen scrolls as you move from left to right. Some parts of the game require you to look behind the hero firing into the screen as aliens come towards from the distance as well as moving in other directions like in a lift. You can also be driving into the screen trying to shoot aliens.
First released: Dec 1990

Play Aliens on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Aliens on a Mac is through Parallels, which allows you to virtualize a Windows machine on Macs. The setup is very easy and it works for Apple Silicon Macs as well as for older Intel-based Macs.

Parallels supports the latest version of DirectX and OpenGL, allowing you to play the latest PC games on any Mac. The latest version of DirectX is up to 20% faster.

Our favorite feature of Parallels Desktop is that when you turn off your virtual machine, all the unused disk space gets returned to your main OS, thus minimizing resource waste (which used to be a problem with virtualization).

Aliens installation steps for Mac

Step 1
Go to Parallels.com and download the latest version of the software.
Step 2
Follow the installation process and make sure you allow Parallels in your Mac’s security preferences (it will prompt you to do so).
Step 3
When prompted, download and install Windows 10. The download is around 5.7GB. Make sure you give it all the permissions that it asks for.
Step 4
Once Windows is done installing, you are ready to go. All that’s left to do is install Aliens like you would on any PC.
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