It is difficult to believe that James Cameron’s Aliens was released into cinemas 40 years ago. The seminal space shooter took the original Alien – a tense slasher film with a tiny cast and one monster – and transformed it into an intergalactic war movie crammed with wry one-liners, massive guns and an actual boss battle finale. As a 14-year-old, I stood in line at the Tatton Gatley cinema, unsure if I’d be allowed in – I came out three hours later a changed person, my head filled with esoteric military slang and a deep fear of beeping motion detectors. For days afterwards, I slept with my duvet covering my mouth so that no facehuggers could get me. (I was a highly impressionable teenager.)It’s little wonder that the film has had such a profound effect on video game design. Take the colonial marines, for example. Although the concept of the space soldier had been around in sci-fi novels since the 1930s, most notably in the works of EE “Doc” Smith and Robert Heinlein (the Starship Troopers), Hicks, Hudson, Vasquez and co, were the perfect 80s rendition, combining the witty banter of contemporary buddy cop flicks with awesome weaponry and hi-tech gadgets. Their influence is easy to spot in Doom, where the nameless marine fights ceaseless waves of hellish monsters using a mix of futuristic rifles and good old shotguns. It’s there too in the Halo series, the Spartan soldiers sporting the same armour and mega weapons, cruising about in very similar highly militarised starships and fighting recognisable hive-mind space beasts. Gears of War, Killzone and Marathon all borrow from the same set of costumes and deadly accessories.Also important to future game designers was the way in which James Cameron opened up the world of Alien after Ridley Scott’s original locked-room mystery of a movie. He beefed up the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, giving us the stencil for dozens of evil video game mega corps; he brought in an array of weapons from handguns to M41A pulse rifles and the M56 smart guns, introducing the idea of a scaled armoury to discover and master; and he employed a structure based around the repeated rhythm of tense exploration followed by explosive encounters that countless games would follow.Alien: Isolation … in your living room, everyone can hear you scream. Photograph: SegaIt’s weird, then, how difficult it has proven to directly translate the movie into games. While the original Alien spawned a cult 8bit translation and the brilliant Alien: Isolation, Cameron’s sequel is best known for the disastrously bugged Aliens: Colonial Marines, which led to a lawsuit for deceptive marketing. Elsewhere, third-person co-op blaster Aliens: Fireteam Elite drew mixed reviews but has at least birthed a forthcoming sequel, and the 2D Metroid-style game Aliens: Infestation has plenty of fans. My favourite, though, was one of the two official tie-ins from 1986. Aliens: the Computer Game from Electric Dreams Software was a thrilling proto-FPS, allowing you to control several of the movie’s characters as they stalked through an atmosphere processing plant getting attacked by xenomorphs and facehuggers. I’m not sure it’s ever been bettered.Watching the movie again this week, it’s impossible not to notice all the little scenic and narrative touches that have since shaped how sci-fi action games function. Even the sentry gun, which was cut from the cinematic release and only turned up in the special edition home release, has become a staple special weapon, present in everything from Call of Duty to Helldivers. I wonder how many of today’s game creators were also stood in cinema lines in the summer of 1986, too young to be there, not quite ready to have their minds blown for ever?What to playDanger at every turn … Scarlet Deer Inn. Photograph: Attu GamesThose of us with an interest in the fibre arts are always delighted to see them crop up in other media. Here, embroidered character art helps Scarlet Deer Inn to stand out in a crowded market. Once players are in, they’ll find the charming medieval village has some horrific secrets. Players guide mother-of-two Elise through danger-filled caverns on a quest to find her children and prevent them from meeting a gruesome end, a goal that gained additional meaning when the husband-and-wife developers had a baby of their own. Armed only with a torch, you must keep it lit or likely repeatedly succumb to the darkness. Jordan Erica WebberAvailable on: PC