Retro Roulette #101: Alien 3 (NES, 1993)
It was only a matter of time before the horrible rainbow of LJN made its return.
I’ve talked before about my disdain for LJN, the company behind this week’s game – they specialized in two things: poorly made adaptations of popular IPs, and getting kids killed (for real – check out the details in that link). An adaptation of Alien 3 is exactly the sort of thing that LJN would do, and, well, here we are. I honestly know nothing about this one specifically.
The game works like this – in each level, there are some number of prisoners that you (Ripley) have to find and rescue, all while hopefully not getting killed by a xenomorph or whatever. Each level is fairly labyrinthine, and the prisoners can be fairly spread out. You’ve got a variety of different weapons at your disposal, and just need to platform your way through before the time runs out. Oh yeah – and there’s a timer.
I hope you think this image is really cool, because you’ll be seeing it a lot. For whatever reason, the timer in Alien 3 is incredibly unforgiving. Did you skip a prisoner on an otherwise optimal path, or go to a dead end mistakenly? There’s a decent chance you’re just screwed. If you’re on a level you’ve never played before, there’s a decent chance you just have no shot. Helpfully (and I use that word somewhat loosely), when you die to the timer the game pans around to show you the locations of the prisoners you missed…and then shows you their deaths.
Alien 3 isn’t all bad, to be fair – the environments are solid, the soundtrack is surprisingly good, and the character animations are impressively detailed. For example, Ripley has a tumbling animation that literally made me laugh out loud:
I found that once I had a really good feel for where all the prisoners were in a level, trying to safely and efficiently rescue them all wasn’t so bad of an experience. If the game offered up a more helpful map (there’s a radar thing, but it’s pretty useless), this would be a considerably better title. Of course, this is LJN, so naturally we can’t have too many nice things.
I feel like LJN had a remarkable ability to makes games that would seem good. Their graphics and sound were typically passable, the gameplay was often functional on the surface, and they made stuff based game based on [insert popular thing you like here]. I guess when you’re making a game based on a big franchise, seeming good is all you really have to do to make it sell. Well, that and crawling through vents like the cool hero you are:
It’s hard to recommend this to anyone but the most die-hard of Alien and/or Sigourney Weaver fans. The NES has a bunch of great action games with varying degrees of people rescuing and time restrictions, and this isn’t one of them. Code Name Viper, Contra, etc. Play those.
Next week’s game is a turn-of-the-century racing title that will certainly make me feel like a high schooler loser all over again. I can’t wait.
