Xenomorph (1990)

Name:Xenomorph
Number:219
Year:1990
Publisher:Pandora
Developer:Pandora
Genre:FPS
Difficulty:3/5
Time:20 hours 50 minutes
Won:Yes (90W/70L)

I picked out Xenomorph as a sort of filler game, knowing that it was a Dungeon Master-style RPG that the CRPG Addict didn't cover, when the sub-genre is something I think falls into the domain of FPS just enough for it to be a reasonable title to cover under my rules. As I got through more and more of the game, it became clear just how much of an odd duck Xenomorph truly was.

Whenever I hear discussions of game genres on the internet, it's very rigid, a game either is or is not a particular genre, barring the odd 50% or so genre split. You could make many valid observations about this, ranging from the impolite to the polite. I think this isn't quite true, a game can have many elements of a genre without it necessarily being the primary genre, and even what appears to be a game's genre could just not be so.

The only character you ever get, no improvement allowed.

Xenomorph is a good example of this, because everyone says it's a RPG. It isn't. There isn't that much that you could say that exclusively applies to a RPG that also applies to Xenomorph. It appears to be a RPG, though, it plays like Dungeon Master. At first glance. In Xenomorph, you have no stat growth, no role-playing, no, for a lack of a better term, RPG combat. The only thing I can think of that mostly appears in RPGs is armor, this is something that very rarely appears outside of the genre.

As I've said in the past, a Dungeon Master-style grid level is not necessarily a RPG aspect, though most FPS with them are not rigid to the grid. There is no aspect of this level design that is not out of place in Wolfenstein. Nor are food and drink exclusive to RPGs. The way you interact with things might be nearly exclusive to RPGs, but that is not necessarily because that is a RPG trait. It is ultimately as much a RPG as it is a strategy game, minor aspects we probably wouldn't think of.

So, what is it? Story-wise, it's basically Aliens, except instead of being sent to recover a destroyed colony, your ship just arrives after some horrific accident that leaves it badly damaged, and you have to explore the place to repair it. Gameplay-wise, it seems to me to be a FPS, it's in first person, you are a human, and shooting is primarily a player action, not an in-game character action. Obscuring this, is that the game is controlled exclusively by the mouse and has a fairly complicated interface. Only System Shock and Pathways into Darkness spring to mind as something with such a complicated interface, which are FPS/RPG hybrids. This is a RPG feature, but is it necessarily a component of RPGs themselves or just something we assume because FPS generally don't offer enough depth in their equipment like this? Though I say this like I know what the depth of the game's equipment even is.

One of the many dispensers around.

There's another train of thought, that this is a survival horror game. I say this knowing I don't really think it, but I must admit, by the usual logic, it is a horror game and you survive, it works flawlessly. Even better, unarguable logic is that this is a survival game, since you have food and drink meters and have to find food, and it is a horror game. By my logic of survival horror games being Alone in the Dark-clones, this it is not. By my logic of it being an action game with heavy adventure elements, like limited resources, it is not.

Which brings me to my big criticism of the game. Things are presented like you have to conserve resources. In a sense this is true, most resources are limited, money, explosives, and food/water. Except you don't need food, it just allows your stamina to regenerate faster and are presented with enough explosives to render it being limited moot. If you get hit, you regenerate health. Oh, and the ammo for all your weapons can be recharged at one of the many convenient stations around the game. In an action game, if the player has unlimited resources and the enemy doesn't, the only thing that can stop them winning is running out of interest.

One of the many computers, which only displays information found on floppies.

I don't think this is a case of the game being badly designed as much as being unfinished. There's no music, and some systems like food/water and a communicator don't work like the game implies. I get the same impression from this game that I do from games that are 80% finished. They clearly had to ship out an unfinished title, which is unfortunate, because a few more months would have done the game a lot of good.

One of the earlier enemies.

Don't mistake this for perfect, because I don't think combat can possibly be fixed. No matter what you do, shooting is point and click and it's going to be difficult to make a variation beyond fancy explosives or adjusting damage. Enemies you can do a little with, but even with the melee enemies the game understandably focuses on, it seems like there was one train of thought. Not even faster variations, just ones that do slightly more damage and take slightly more to kill.
This is not that much trouble in the finished product because you are expected to move around with the mouse. No hotkeys for moving around, in fact all you can do with the keyboard is do a keypad mouse or switch between your inventory and regular screen. At least in the DOS version, meanwhile, Amiga players can move around, but not turn. It is a problem whenever the game throws enough enemies at you for this to be a problem. At least your weapons are all point and shoot or activation based. Killing them is simple enough until you need to reload.

A fairly typical inventory in the later sections of the game.

Actually interacting with your inventory is weird, because you get a bunch of slots of varying sizes, which all can carry everything from the smallest battery to a rocket launcher. The only slots specific to any items are equipped armor, four slots for ammo and a holster for a sidearm, which works a bit weirdly. Despite the advantages this sounds like it brings, the inventory system is just bad enough that while it works, you can hide items behind other items. It's not obvious where something is dropped and it's not obvious which slot something is in.

This is something that happens when you interact with items at all, the cursor does not have an obvious point when it's your hand, let alone when it's anything you pick up. The big problem is with the cards and floppy disks. The former are how you interact with most vending machines, which are very helpful to essential, such as ammo recharge stations. The latter are your only source of figuring out what happened beyond knowledge gleaned from the title. What, a game called Xenomorph not ripping off Aliens?

There's a distinct feeling that the game wasn't ever really played during it's development, which comes across in most of the problems. It's not this way because the developer really wanted it to be this way, but because that was the way that seemed most obvious and didn't check it afterwards. I get the feeling that the Dungeon Master-style design was not what was originally in mind as much as what they could do. This was built on the ashes of another game, which I suspect is why the game plays this way even though the game takes very little advantage of said style. In another time it would have been a plain FPS or a TPS.

It's not that it's without merit, the game has a more naturalistic design that works well enough in the early half. When it starts to become a series of mazes you can tell that they just sort of gave up on the game. It's just there to pad out the game at that point, not helped by most mazes having the only unkillable enemies in the game.

The way you'd get the most enjoyment out of the game, ironically, would be to go in as blind as possible and just never use the recharge machines. Limiting your ammo gives you reason to use the explosives and to consider what a fight will cost. It makes it so you can't just do what I did and treat the laser pistol as the only weapon in the game and actually puts some tension into the game. Even what I'm telling you is enough to make the game too easy, after all, if you know that the game has enough ammo that you'd have to mess up to lose even without the charging stations, your victory becomes quite assured.

Which I would kind of recommend as while it's not the best game from the era, it is a very interesting piece of experimentation. Despite the frustrations, I found myself wanting to see the end of the game, at least the end of the game's content. The process of fighting your way down to the lowest level to find the necessary pieces of equipment to get off the planet. Not, you know, scrounging through every computer to get enough components to blast off. A fitting end, considering that the story ends without a resolution, with every intriguing question left unanswered.

Weapons:
Normally I appreciate such a large arsenal, but I can't help but look at the number of weapons and the wide variety of explosives and wonder what the difference between some of this stuff is. It doesn't matter if using an explosive is like pulling out a piece of salt water taffy if one flavor kills the enemy just as well as the next. 4/10

Enemies:
As far as I can tell, divided into two variations, just with many different sprites, invulnerable slimes and things you can kill. It's not quite that bad, the end stage shows something else, but for 90% of the game, the difference is going to be visual. Or perhaps weapons advance so well that the improvement is moot. 3/10

Non-Enemies:
None, disappointingly so, as the manual and even the game goes to a length to say that some survivors are around, you just never see them. 0/10

Levels:
Naturalistic and mazey, though the former is only as well done as 1990 allows. Half are basically a series of rooms with the odd sideroom, the other half is more open-ended with the way down/up having multiple paths between. I think enemies were supposed to respawn, because it's really obvious how some levels are empty when there's nothing there. 4/10

Player Agency:
A functional mouse interface with a lot of roughness around the edges. Any cursor outside of the crosshair is going to be a guessing game as to where you actually click. 5/10

Interactivity:
You basically get to press some buttons. Oh, I think there were some locked doors, but it never came up for me. 1/10

Atmosphere:
The game does a good job of appealing to those interested in another game ripping off Aliens, albeit playing up the element of the movie of someone arriving late to the tragedy rather than the focus on combat. It's got enough intrigue and interesting stuff that will last until the final sections. 6/10

Graphics:
Xenomorph's appeal feels tied into a very specific point in time when hi-end EGA graphics were what you strove for, and making the most out of a grid was the best you could do. In these regards, it's great. That said, limited animation is a negative and while the game makes it's ugly-feeling design work, it's still ugly. 6/10

Story:
Despite being just told through floppy disks, I was intrigued by the efforts of the members of this space station trying to fight back the hordes of aliens they found and what they discovered about them. Sadly, because the game is clearly not fully done and there was no sequel, I'll never know the answers to it all. 3/10

Sound/Music:
Outside of a few sound effects, dead and total silence. They're fine for PC Speaker, but there's just so much nothing otherwise it doesn't matter. 1/10

That's a respectable 33.

An extremely easy point of comparison is with the Turbografx game Silent Debuggers, another Dungeon Master-style FPS heavily based of Aliens. They don't really share anything outside of that, but it's weird that there are two of them.

The English reviews all seem more or less glowing. Nothing truly top tier, but all 7 to 9 ratings, outside of one lower rating that I couldn't find the magazine of. There's a lot of people on Lemon Amiga talking about how it was scary back in the day, which I can see.

Another character, oh wait, I need to flip the disk around.

After finishing the DOS port, my curiosity got the better of me and I went to check the C64 port, and I can't help but think that most of the effect went there. Here character selection is implemented, with different stats for each one. You can tell they put a ton of effort into this version, likely some of the stuff that was mentioned in the manual but wasn't included.

I say probably because when I fired it up, it was just so full of disk swapping that playing it would have been an exercise in patience. There's a reason I played the DOS version over the Amiga version despite minor advantages in controls.

Finally, the game was built off the ashes of a Mindware game called Lasers and Labyrinths. Reading about it, I can tell that they worked on this game from what they had from that game, which sounds like it was going to be a lot more of a RPG than what we got. I wonder what it would play like, but knowing it's from the same people who gave us Tracker puts me in the mindset that it wouldn't be as good as this.