Aliens (1986)

There's a nice little title animation where the letters fade in from some sort of hole.

Name:Aliens
Number:222
Year:1986
Publisher:Activision
Developer:Activision
Genre:Action
Difficulty:4/5
Time:3 hours 50 minutes
Won:Yes (93W/70L)

Aliens is one of those films I hope needs no introduction, considering how many times I've brought up something related to it in passing over the years, recently calling Xenomorph another unofficial adaptation of the game. It's one of those things that I sort of just expect the audience interested in someone yapping about old shooters and survival horror games to know about enough that I don't need to explain.

Naturally, given the number of unofficial titles, it was inevitable that I'd play an official game based off it eventually. They're not all strategy games and Pac-Man-clones. This brings us to 1986's Aliens, the US one by Activision as opposed to the EU one by Electric Dreams. It's funny to think about two different companies being able to make games on the same license, but imagine telling someone in 1986 about Fortnite.

It would be really cool if at the end of the game you got to see the same image, but minus whoever you lost. Instead they don't really matter.

We start with a recap of the movie, told through walls of text and then a shot of the marines talking on the ship. Ridley is recovered from the Nostromo's escape pod, they don't believe her when she talks about the Xenomorph, and they penalize her. But uh-oh, the space marines contact her since they've lost contact with the colony after a report of something exactly like Ridley described.

Actually, I don't think that even if you haven't seen the movie you'd have too much trouble with this, since most are fairly obvious.

This is one of those mini-game games that were popular around this time. To start with, we get an identification game, which may be copy protection. If it is, it's the worst copy protection I've ever seen, because I could easily solve it and I don't necessarily recognize any Alien equipment outside of the pulse gun.

Then we get...a series of rings I have to navigate into. Holy crap, it's the Superman 64 thing. It's less crap, but the general concept means that this was never going to be anything but an annoyance. I say less crap in the sense that this isn't some absurd maze the game expects you to make in a certain amount of time, but a series of increasing hard to follow rings that just aren't fun. While it may control better with a joystick, with the keyboard it can be hard to build up the momentum to make the sharper turns the game asks for. Even if you hit the rings, the game may decide you fail anyways because you didn't hit them well enough. Infinite attempts or not, I'm glad there are codes for later levels.

I don't know if the scale on the Xenomorphs is right, but it certainly feels right, towering over my guys like that.

The story cuts ahead somewhat, with some of the group having gone off...somewhere I don't remember, and now I have to recover them. (In retrospect, this might be the part where they find the cocoons) I screw this up the first time, which ironically enough makes this section really, really boring. I didn't know you could change characters by pressing the function key below their lifesigns, which in retrospect was stupid of me. So instead of a tense scene fighting off aliens, I'm slowly walking with just the sounds of my footsteps as my squad slowly die, before I end up fighting the aliens in vain. Rather than with the flight thing, this automatically advances to the next stage. We'll do these in order though.

What I also didn't get the first time was that the controls are ideal for 1986. The joystick moves and the fire button shoots. Hold down the fire button and you strafe. It's hard for the Xenomorphs to kill you while you're shooting, since you just hit things in front of you. The motion detector tells you where more Xenomorphs are coming from. Once I got that down, or half my squad on the inital attempt, it becomes boringly easy. The endless occasional hordes are quite boring to shoot. It's an endless maze with no real way to navigate it outside of guessing.

However, the key point here is that paradoxically, you need to go the area that's been built up by the Xenomorphs to get out, as that's where the APC is. This area also has them coming out from areas you can't walk across, but this isn't that tricky. The only thing that killed one of my guys was that for a time before I could finish one fight against them, another group was approaching another. You can save a guy who gets captured, but it's such a brief window of opportunity that you have no chance of doing it unless you can specifically set it up.

Next, we get something that looks like a weird game of Tapper. Not quite the best comparison, but when you're sliding up and down giving someone something, even if they're aliens and flames, it's what comes to my mind. We're waiting for the guys at the bottom to cut through a steel door, and I'm preventing them from getting kidnapped by the Xenomorphs who have to get past my guy, either by dashing up and down causing the Xenomorphs to retreat or by shooting them with the laughably short-ranged flamethrower. Unsurprisingly, I die here straight away.

This one isn't really fair. Sure, there's the illusion of fairness, for a while even with the fast Xenomorphs you can reach them from the opposite side of the screen before they go to the right. But quickly this doesn't seem true even if they're alone. With how many are thrown at you, there's no getting past it, you're losing a guy unless you get lucky. This is even knowing that there are two tricks, that it's about causing them to retreat when you're forced to, and that you can cause groups of two to retreat even when one is past you. I think this is a preset pattern, but even if it isn't, I hate it. I looked up a longplay after a while and saw that even someone that good at this game was screwing up.

This is actually a good situation, I'm about to get out of their sight and they're all behind me.

Somehow I manage to win with two guys left. I can believe someone can win with everyone remaining, but damn, you'd have to be insanely good to pull that off. This is followed up by a maze of ducts, which makes the last section look reasonable. Xenomorphs randomly spawn in, but only chase after you if they see you. Your defense seems to be your remaining soldiers, who function like explosives killing one of the Xenomorphs. Oh, and they automatically make turns based on which direction it is to you. Hope you saved more than two guys like I did.

I never actually needed the flares, honestly, you get enough time to make it out anyway.

Next up, another shooting section, this time without the soldiers acting as lives, this time you're Ripley, finding Newt. Ninety-nine bullets and eight flares. Or not in my case, because the joystick button is the space bar. It's not that difficult though, since you can just walk past most of the Xenomorphs owing to them no longer blocking you. This is actually wiser, since they respawn on the same screen. It is more difficult to stand and fight now.

I started with 17 minutes, and this is how long it took the first time to reach Newt, it's not that tricky.

Eventually, I find Newt, and she follows me back. Before I can return to the ship, I have to outwit the Xenomorph Queen. I try it a couple of times, first by shooting it, then by trying to trick it with movement somehow. Neither works. Aha! I think, this must be a job for the flares. Because I've figured out how to make save states in Denise, I've been using that. (Neither Denise nor WinVICE are Linux-native or have good screenshot functions, so Denise gets the edge now, and those are the two emulators I've found that work the best) Because of it being in Windows, there's an issue where sometimes the configuration menu doesn't work properly which causes it to not save changes. Fortunately, I can manually change the keycode to something other than space. Oh, flares don't work, must be an issue with my emulator, I'll just see how it works in a longplay...oh damn it, I've done it all for nothing.

After considerably more time spent fixing the issue than I'd like, I take the plan into action. It's simple and clever, but surprisingly difficult to figure out. Move to one side and wait for her to reach that side, turn sideways, then shoot from that way. She won't move while you're shooting. Hope you saved enough ammo for it. It's beautiful really. After that, it's simply a matter of getting back to the elevator you started from. The Queen comes back on the ship and it's time for us to fight.

The power loader section is one of those from the back fighting game sections that were common around this time. Left and right move in that direction, while up and down move the arms of your power loader. Hit the queen with the arms while not letting her reach the bottom of the screen. Only one hit for you, of course. She meanwhile, gets a massive health bar that regenerates. One mistake on your part, and death. I suppose it's been the same the entire game, but it really hits when it's a genre known for pretending to be fair even if it isn't at all.

The manual's advice is somewhat terrible, because while it's both true, it's also seemingly false. Hit her as often as you can. This seems false because, again, massive health bar, but at first it doesn't even seem like you're damaging her. When I actually had a strategy, it didn't seem like I was dealing any damage at all despite several good hits. No, you need to be hitting her often, otherwise she regenerates it all back. You need to get her into a loop where you constantly hit her, but not the kind of loop where if she gets out of it she runs away from you until her health restores. Which is probably related to where your prongs are.

And then it sort of just falls into place. I guess once you get into a proper loop of hitting the queen it all just falls into place. To finish her off, you need her health bar to be entirely green, then bring the prong down, then towards her, before pressing the button, then drag her into the middle of the airlock.

Did someone object to the white blood?

Then we get the ending of Aliens. They put a lot of effort into it, it's nice. But, that's not something that will be nice in the rating.

Sweet dreams, because when you wake up you're all going to die horrible deaths...

Weapons:
The pulse rifle is something I enjoy, but not particularly interesting of itself. Oddly, despite my frustrations with the level it was in, I felt the flamethrower had some depth to it. 2/10

Enemies:
Just Xenomorphs, no facehuggers, and two fights with the queen. The former is more of a puzzle, while the latter is tedious. Still, the whole package was nice. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
Tricky, because the non-player characters are your lives, and in their first appearance, a squad of sorts, though not even pretending to have the depth of even the crudest AI you'd see down the line. Since they stand there getting killed if you aren't playing as them. 0/10

Levels:
Six levels of varying quality and difficulty. Obviously my favorites were where you were moving around shooting things, despite their shortcomings. The others just sort of mixed things up and were there because they were in the movie. A lot of my more disliked missions made obvious how random enemies spawn and act sometimes. 3/10

Player Agency:
Everything is very smooth, it's telling that my complaints are all about randomness, not the controls. The top-down shooting sections were absolutely perfect for the era, and would be worth imitating today. I do think the fighting controls in the last section take a bit to get used to, since moving the joystick up and down to do something happening sideways is unintuitive. 6/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
It's Aliens and feels like it. 5/10

Graphics:
Very smooth and well-animated, with lovely backgrounds. Obviously some of the smaller sprites lack detail and some uninteresting objects are made very uninteresting because of the low resolution. 5/10

Story:
It is recognizably Aliens, and you'd be able to follow the story even if you didn't see the movie, with a few things happening out of game. 3/10

Sound/Music:
Pretty good. Most things sound like a good enough imitation, outside of what I presume was a Xenomorph screeching. The sole music track is nice, but because of how many times you'll restart a mission, it can get slightly grating. 3/10

That's 29, somehow, pretty high up in the ratings for now, but feels more generous than I should be giving it. Eh, let's go with 27.

Everyone likes this, which makes my distaste of some parts feel more pronounced. It's all fair once you figure out the trick, but it can take a while before you're any good at some parts. You really need to get a perfect way through the first two missions with the marines before you can make it through the ducts, in which you are completely at the mercy of the RNG. That first one isn't too tricky, but man, oh, man, is that second one ever.

I feel like it's probably worth it if you like the movie and the period, but if not, you aren't going to be pressed for a game that feels like the movie. And if you are, you don't really need to hear what I have to say about the game, now do you?

Next up, you know what's the best game to play after one inspired by Aliens? Another game inspired by Aliens.