Alien Hominid is the upcoming GameCube and PlayStation 2 shooter from newly formed developer The Behemoth and publisher O3 Entertainment, and it will officially be announced tomorrow. The game's title may sound familiar to veteran Web surfers and frequent visitors to Newgrounds.com--a Web site for Flash games and movies that lets aspiring artists upload their work for the world to see--where a rough prototype for the game was uploaded in 2002. The brainchild of Newgrounds founder Tom Fulp and artist Dan Paladin, this simple game was a funny and surprisingly hardcore shooter that put you in control of an alien and asked you to blast everything in your path.

Square off against the FBI and its deadly robot war machines. Wait, what?

As luck would have it, the pair hooked up with John Baez, who would eventually come to produce the game. He urged them to make a console version of Alien Hominid. Following an assortment of power meetings, The Behemoth was born, and a team composed of Baez, Fulp, Paladin, and a tiny handful of others set out to reimagine the simple Flash game into a fully fleshed-out console shooter. We had the chance to visit the team at The Behemoth's modest San Diego offices to get an exclusive look at the game, which has come light years from its simple Flash roots.

Alien Hominid's story is a simple one, and it unfolds much like a director's cut of E.T. in which, rather than passively sitting back to play with a Speak & Spell and sucking down Reese's Pieces, E.T. comes packing an alien piece. You'll play the role of a small yellow gender-neutral alien who has the misfortune to crash-land on Earth after slightly overzealous FBI agents shoot down his ship as it cruises by. To add insult to injury, the ship literally crashes on the doorstep of FBI headquarters. As if that weren't bad enough, some FBI agents make off with the craft. Our yellow hero, anxious to return home, sets out to reclaim his ship.

Unable to communicate with the locals, the small alien busts out his trusty green laser pistol and grenades and begins speaking the universal language of "blowing stuff up" to the scores of FBI agents and outlandish bosses that stand between the alien and his intergalactic set of wheels. While the odds may sound daunting for a tiny yellow visitor from space new to town, it's not all bleak. Sure, the FBI is eager to take him out, and the local citizens aren't helping his cause, but, as always, children are on hand to help save the day. As he makes his way to the ship, fat kids will appear and offer help in the form of weapon power-ups, in much the same way the hostages in the Metal Slug series do. While power-up-dispensing fat kids aren't a replacement for, say, an enormous martian death walker or a space tank, they're better than nothing, and besides, this alien is nothing if not handy.

The game's structure is pretty basic and is broken up into several main levels, which are divided into sublevels that have their own unique bosses and minibosses. Your goal on most levels is basically to run to the right and kill anything in your way. Besides using guns and grenades, you'll also be able to make use of vehicles strewn about certain levels and even engage in some carjacking. During boss fights you'll often have to use your head to figure out how to defeat obviously superior foes by using the alien's modest arsenal or the environment. Every so often you'll come across levels that put you in a spaceship and require you to shoot up everything around you.

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The gameplay in Alien Hominid is old-school gold and features a run-and-gun mechanic that feels both old and new at the same time. The core mechanics are clearly inspired by classic 2D shooters such as Contra and Metal Slug. However, while Alien Hominid has obviously been influenced by those games, it doesn't end up being derivative. You'll move the little yellow whatsit with the left analog stick, and you'll have buttons to jump, shoot, and pitch your grenades. The shoulder buttons will let you perform rolls for avoiding gunfire. You'll also have a button that lets you enter vehicles, and to control them you'll use a variation of the above control scheme.

The basic move set is dressed up with a number of little touches that give the game a nice bit of variety. You can use your weapon's bullets to slow your descent as you come down from a jump, and you can hold down the fire button and charge up your weapon in order to unleash a mighty power shot. Hitting the fire button when you're close to an enemy will pull off a melee attack that slices your foes in half. The fire button will also let you bite the heads off your foes if you've jumped on their shoulders (which is always fun to do). Another option is to pick up your foes and throw them. Perhaps the coolest move for the alien is the ability to burrow underground and lie in wait for foes that you can grab and pull under when they walk over you. You won't be able to abuse the ability, as our boy does still have to breathe and will suffocate if you leave him underground too long.