Shooting Aliens is for girlies as the lovely Sigourney Weaver has oft times demonstrated to us. And in the world of computer games girlies are good business (even if few English Roses have quite the muscle tone of Tomb Raiders' Laura Croft - Fridge Raider perhaps). In this fine female tradition Acclaim have produced this poptastic shoot-em-up in the style of Doom and Quake. This means you march along seeing things through the eyes of the character with one's chosen weapon held out in firing position (and keyboard-mouse driven commands). Horrid thingies (in this case Alien types) jump out at you and you zap them while solving ingenious puzzles to get to the next level and discover those oh-so-handy caches of ammunition and acid vests. When you fall flat on your face (or in this case have your brains sucked out) you hastily go back to your saved game and go in again. Life may not be a rehearsal but computer-gaming is.
Whereas the strategic wargame on computer shows a distressing similarity to an Avalon Hill boardgame with (if you are lucky) some boffo footage of American re-enactors discharging their pieces the tactical and skirmish level (which is what Alien ™ Trilogy is) are much more inventive and your little men actually move. Those of you who are like me mature (yet still strangely attractive) will remember General Jumbo in (?) The Victor, Jumbo was this kid who had a dead ace set of toy soldiers which he controlled by a small radio set and they then moved like wee men - oh what larks! Computers have made General Jumbos of all of us at the operational level. Yet in atmospheric terms the skirmish game seems to be the place where the best work is done, because it is here that sound, image and immediacy can be bound together.
In the case of Alien ™ Trilogy we are faced with a series of adventures based on the three films in which Ms Weaver has starred (see our regular "For Your Nostromos Only" column). We start off in the Colony overrun by xenomorphs, stroll on to the Prison complex of the third film and end up going toe-to-toe with the Queen in the boneship. Behind the flavour of the game we have the usual computer game. The traditional computer game ( for those of you who avoid them) involves:
- a degree of problem-solving ("I have to switch this computer on before this one to open the lift shaft"),
- a lot of shooting, usually with a range of weapons ("9mm only useful for plugging face-huggers"), and
- a lot of picking up fresh ammo, suits of armour et al as you leg it round the maze.
Just like Dungeons & Dragons ™then? That game has sunk itself into the consciousness of many of us and all games designers. Alien ™ Trilogy is no different and adds (as many computer games do now) bits of whizzy footage of computer graphic versions of key bits of the story line. But it is in escaping the general features of the genre that a game achieves fame. Alien ™ Trilogy has a mixed series of scenarios, some (like the garage or on the narrow walkways amidst the acid) are real pigs, but others are light relief as you shoot your way through the aliens on the way to the next level.
Where it scores very heavily is in being set securely within the fabric of the original story. As you move round you recognise a lot of the episodes from the films. This aids in establishing atmosphere and taking one more swiftly into the theme of the game. It is the area where Prestags always experienced difficulty with its, necessarily, anodyne counters compared to the purpose-designed game which (necessarily) have less replay value. The real "hook" though in Alien ™ Trilogy is the music and light, scenarios move from the heartbeat sound in the background for the exploration scenarios to a sub-Psycho violin in the Queen-hunting scenarios. Just sound and fury signifying nothing? Well my two children were mesmerised (and genuinely frightened) by the music, the gloom (the bodies on the walls crying "Please kill me"), and the sudden attacks. It helps to have survivor's tunnel-vision in playing this game (oh, and use grenades to despatch synthetics.....).
I wrote in the previous PA that I did not see this kind of computer-gaming as a rival to boardgaming (except to the extent that it consumes scarce leisure time) I remain firmly of that view. But for relaxation of both a cerebral and a mindless kind (interesting mixture that) it is first class. If only boardgames could generate that much atmosphere! Some games can do this, but they need constant interaction and a strong basis of history to get you into the part. SPI's World War One folio always kept one involved as the various fronts rose and fell and victory seemed oh so close only to be vanish. We The People is wholly absorbing, but these two (and there are many others) work at the strategic level - at skirmish level I wonder if it has to be Ambush to work?
I would thoroughly recommend Alien ™ Trilogy to those of you with the powerful PC (needs a CD-ROM drive) but I have one limit to that. There is a particular mindset to these games just as there is for crosswords. My mother is a great consumer of crosswords whereas I never have been.. Although I grasp the strange world of puns, rearrangements of letters and other whizzes that constitute the crossword I cannot quite bring myself to care long enough to do one (native laziness I suppose). There is just such a code in these games (although one I grasp better). I recently lent Mike Siggins Star Trek: The Final Unity and he really could not be bothered to solve the puzzles. If you are not persuaded by the warped world of the shoot-em-up then you may not enjoy the game, but for twenty pounds I got twenty times more playing than from many a forty pound game. Stay frosty people!
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© Copyright 1997 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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