The Alien 3 games that came out on… Basically everything, well, I wouldn’t call them an Alien 3 game. Alien 3, as the title suggests, only has one Alien, like the original and very much unlike the stellar sequel Aliens. That plural in the title is important and genius in equal measure. Anyway, Alien 3, all the games are set on Fiorina “Fury” 161, I assume, and has Ellen Ripley running around, shooting xenomorphs (Plural) and saving prisoners who have been captured. Most of the games, the NES, Genesis, Master System, Game Gear, all use a similar format, and it sees you racing against time to rescue all the prisoners before their chests burst. Depending on what expanded universe games you have played and assorted Alien media you have consumed, surely if they are in that situation there is little we can do to properly save these poor prisoners. Removing them from their confines isn’t going to stop their internal intruder from making a hasty exit. It’s also weirdly convenient that all the chestbursters on the stage emerge all at the same time, but I digress, it is a perfectly acceptable peril that justifies the gameplay loop. Also, a common theme across all Alien 3 console games, Ripley has a Pulse Rifle complete with a flamethrower attached, like what she constructed in Aliens, nice reference and also gives her a nice collection of weapons. How she got all this on a prison planet is beyond me… I am starting to think they should have called this game Aliens, but y’know, that film came out in 1986, and Alien 3 came out in 1992. Alien 3 was the flavour of the month and current. But that’s enough nitpicking because ultimately, we got some passable games out of a movie which is… Divisive.
So, that is a quick crash course in most of the other console versions, we have two others the Gameboy and Super Nintendo, and I know nothing about the former, though it is on the list to play. Let’s talk about the Super Nintendo version, which is a very different xenomorph and I love and hate this game in equal measure. If you started Alien 3 on the SNES without knowing what you were supposed to do, you might be think you need to go around the map and rescue prisoners, and you’d be right to a certain extent, you’d also notice that you have three different buttons to fire your weapons. This is a cool element, remember, we are using the pulse rifle/flamethrower combo from Aliens, three of your face buttons fire a different type of ammo from your mega weapon, either pulse rifle bullets, a burst of fire or grenades, no clunky weapon switching here!
Where SNES Alien 3 really comes into its own is the fact that each stage you have several missions to complete, painstakingly, one at a time. These missions range from rescuing prisoners, repairing broken pipes, sealing doors and destroying Eggs and ‘Mother Aliens’, not Queens, in fact a Queen is present in this game, not the xenomorph inside Ripley, (spoiler alert for the movie) but it isn’t an encounter within gameplay. That is probably the most disappointing thing about this game, it doesn’t have a climax. The stage layouts get harder, the enemies get tougher, the health and ammo supplies get more and more scarce. But after stage 6, that’s it, the game ends with a short sequence of the Queen Alien being killed and Ripley performing her noble sacrifice. Because you can pick the order of the tasks you do on each stage, your final task might be killing some Mother Aliens or fixing some pipes. Due to this, all levels feel the same with their grey industrial hub rooms and the MC Escher web of connecting doors and rooms. Level layouts make as much sense as a magic eye picture, you need to look at them in the right way and it all starts to make sense. What is the right way to look at them? Well, through the in-game map that you can access at terminals. It’s difficult to explain in words and really benefits having a visual representation. Even thinking about it is making my head hurt, so I won’t even try to explain it without pictures.
So, besides the game requiring a theoretical degree in physics, what else can we say about this game, it can be brutally hard. Enemies will respawn constantly, and you can find yourself stuck wanting to climb a ladder, but an Alien is patrolling above, whilst on the level you are on, you are placed in the perfect spot to cause a never-ending trickle of smaller aliens. I should note there are about 4 different enemy types, facehuggers, chest bursters, small xenos and bigger xenos. I suppose we need to include the eggs and mother aliens, so 6 enemy types in total. To mix things up they come in different flavours of strength based on colour. Don’t you love it in games when you can tell that an enemy is stronger because it is a different colour? Anyway, besides never-ending hordes of enemies there are two other elements that make this game incredibly difficult. Firstly, you have one life. So, if you die, that’s it. Game over man, game over! There are no continues, you must use the passwords given to you to try again. That being said, when you go to the password screen after a game over, the password is already waiting for you, which is nice, unless you reset or turn the game off. But, back to why dying and restarting a stage from the beginning is a tiny bit of a problem. Stages take a long time to beat. I think on average a stage takes about an hour, and even though there are only 6 of them, that’s approximately 6 hours of not dying accidentally, and it will mostly likely happen a couple of times, because the game does like to make taking damage awfully easy. Graciously, health and ammo pick-ups will respawn after you been through a couple of load zones. Some of the later stages makes getting to areas where you can heal or restock ammo quite laborious and will punish you for sloppy playing.
The second element that makes this game incredibly challenging is the availability of computer terminals to not only pick your mission, but you need to return to these computers to finally complete them. Later stages only have one terminal, and that terminal is in the worst possible location, stage 5 epitomises this. In stage 5 there is one terminal that requires you to crawl through a series of vents filled with xenos and they will respawn every time you go back and forth. The worst part is, all most missions you need to do require you to go back through the vents to get to, only for you to go back AGAIN to cash in the completed mission. It is a miserable experience. Though, with the amount of times you will go through those vents, you will know where each enemy spawns and which ones you are better off damage boosting through. Try not to damage boost too much though, stage 5 is not a stage you want to have to keep retrying.
Another thing I should mention is you really need to understand how jumping works in this game. You have two different types of jumps. A standing jump, where you inch forward about the same width as yourself, or a running jump. If I recall there is some degree of momentum you have and can be difficult to alter, especially on the standing jump. In fact, the standing jump is somewhat frustrating, and I would probably avoid using it. There is a lot of jumping above pits of fire and some rooms do require a lot of vertical climbing, meaning platforming along moving platforms. It can be easy to fluff a jump, and you’ll lose progress as you fall several floors down. Thankfully, no fall damage, so that’s nice. Clearly having a Queen Alien inside you means you are immune to the damaging effects of gravity.
As a kid, I remember playing this game, I have no idea how it came into my temporary possession, quite possibly we borrowed it from a local video store that my Mum used to work at and we were good friends with the store owner. But yes, as a kid, I remember playing this and it took a lot of time and effort to even beat the first stage. Even at that age, I acknowledged this was a milestone of sorts, and the password for stage 2 is forever burnt into my memory. It will be something I will take to my grave. In fact, when I first played this game again, mid-way through 2024, I tried that password again to make sure I hadn’t forgotten it. The password, for those who might be interested is Question.
Honestly, the game probably leans more to the frustrating side of things, but I found that I eventually found myself enjoying it more and more the further I got. That could be perhaps I am trying to justify my life choices and put a game from my past to bed. If you do try and pick this up, remember you are not in for an easy ride and without the appeal of RetroAchievements or my own history with this game, I probably would have gotten bored of this game once I realised that there is little difference between the stages. But the more I think and reflect on this game, honestly, the less I hate it, I don’t think there is a huge amount to hate here. Again, I am now trying to justify sinking about half a day into this game…
No comments:
Post a Comment