Extropia’s Retro-gaming: ‘Aliens’

Extropia’s Retro-Gaming: ‘Aliens’

‘Aliens’ was one of two games that were released for the C64 in 1986. One was published in the United States, hence its alternative title Aliens: USA. The version we are looking back over, however, is the English version, which was originally published by Activision.

As you have no doubt guessed already, ‘Aliens’ is based on the film by James Cameron. Now, normally, the fact that this is a movie tie-in should set alarm bells ringing, because the vast majority of games based on movies that came out in the 8bit era were pretty dreadful. Aliens, however, was one of the few movie adaptations that manages to be pretty good.

The objective of the game seems simple enough. Those who have seen the film will recall how the colonial marines wore cameras that transmitted what they were seeing back to a bank of screens on the APC. Your game screen shows six monitors displaying what Ripley, Gorman, Hicks, Bishop, Vasquez and Burke are seeing. Your task is to negotiate your team around the maze of rooms until you get to room 248, which is where the aliens nest is. Once that is cleared, you must then make your way back to room one, where your dropship is waiting to fly you to safety. Simple!

Only, of course, it’s all made rather more difficult by a few things. One of these is the limited stamina and ammunition of your team, as depicted by diminishing bars to the left and right of your character’s screen. You cannot just keep on moving room to 248, because your team’s limited stamina will run out and they’ll have to rest. And then there are the aliens. When a team member enters a room with an alien in it, you’ll get a warning from the proximity detector. You’ll have just a few seconds to find the alien and kill it before it grabs that team member. Should a team member be grabbed, if you can get a fellow team member to that same room in time (well under a minute) they can kill the alien and rescue their team mate. If you cannot get anyone else there in time, that person is lost.

Because ammunition is rather limited, and because it’s better to have someone else watch your back, it’s preferable to think tactically and move your team as a squad. In that respect, this game is an early example of several genres, since it combines squad-based tactics, first-person shooting, and survival horror. The survival horror comes from the aliens, of course, and they are pretty impressive given the lack of graphical power the game publishers had to work with. Right away, you can recognise the iconic alien eggs, face huggers, and warrior aliens from the movies, and trying to locate them and shoot them before they can grab you is a pretty tense experience.

When not shooting aliens you are trying to make your way to the aliens’ nest. You take control of a character by typing the first letter of their name, say ‘R’ for ‘Ripley’ (or U for Burke since Bishop gets the B). When the gunsight/cursor is positioned over a door, a press of the space-bar will send that character through the door and into another room. If you shoot the lock next to the door, that locks it, preventing aliens from getting inside. But, should you need to access that room, you’ll have to shoot down the door, and then the room can no longer be secured. As time goes by, you’ll encounter additional obstacles like the pools of acid that aliens sometimes leave when killed (step in that and it’s an instant death), and over time the biomechanical growth the aliens secrete will cover walls and doors, and need removing by shooting it.

I said the challenge sounds easy but in practice it is anything but. Negotiating your way around the complex is not at all easy, because you lack a compass and each room looks much the same as the other. Thankfully the game did come with a map, so referring to that helped somewhat. Your ammunition is severely limited, although it can be restocked if you can make it to the armoury. And, should the aliens’ biomechanical clog up the generator room, the lights go out and you find yourself having to make your way in almost pitch darkness!

In fact, to be honest I never managed to beat this game. The further you make it into the complex, the more persistent attacks from the aliens become. If you can ignore this difficulty, though, this is not a bad game at all. Music and sound effects might be a bit lacking (in fact there is no music at all, and the only sound effects are the beep of the proximity meter, and the pop-pop-pop of your gun) and the pictures of the characters don’t much resemble the real Ripley, Bishop etc. But the aliens look good and it does manage to capture the feel of the movie, creeping through that complex that becomes increasingly ‘alien’, gun at the ready to defend yourself.

Just don’t expect to make it out alive!

Thanks to Activision for the images