Xenophobe - Arcade

The crazy split screen... It's only going to get worse.

I imagine a meeting at Midway's office.

"Yes, let's ride the success of Aliens (the film) the idea of huge monsters that kill humans very easily and very rapidly running around space stations and planets, nomming down people like candy and causing something to burst from their chests in that odd parody of pregnancy and birth that results in the vasectomy rate going up each time this film comes on for some reason. Let's take that idea, not buy the actual license (Because Konami has it anyway) and make a game that is basically a big send up of the original material."

Game over? I'm FREE! YES!!!

"However, lets royally fuck up the control system and make it as awkward as hell, unplayable by those casual gamers (you know the ones I mean, people that have never played before and expect arcade games to be intuitive and easy to use while real skill comes from experience) and overwhelm people with this abysmal mess and scare them off because we've already got their credits so what the hell do we care after that."

And they were applauded and given a raise and they made this game.

The controls... The horror... But all because of the controls.

I'm not being entirely fair though. So let me break this stuff down.

In what is supposed to be a 3-player game, Xenophobe can allow up to 3 players to play through the game at once. Each one can wander the space-station corridors, meet up and play together or go solo through the space station in search of the key components to beat the mission. Or play until time runs out and the place blows up. Your main mission being to kill every single alien in the space station before the self-destruct kicks in.

So I'm an alien, fighting other aliens, in a game titled "fear of aliens"...

That being said, the levels wrap around themselves so if you keep heading in one direction you'll end up back where you started, but the aliens can move around too. There's multiple weapons to find and keep for yourself in which you can use to kill the aliens from different guns like the laser, gas and lightning, as well as grenades but you're more likely to blow yourself up with those and the aliens tend to attack from most places. Creeping little critters that look like shelled face-huggers, mid aliens that crawl and pounce, big aliens that spit acid and use their mass to attack and other undesirables along the way.

Sadly, you never blow up on ship, you get teleported out. So you can suffer some more.

The biggest problem in the game is the completely unintuitive control system. You've an attack button, and two actions buttons. One used for getting up and jumping and interacting with the backgrounds, the other for crouching, throwing off enemies, picking up objects and throwing grenades. That's right, one button crouches, the other jumps. At times it's simply easier to just crouch, let the aliens come to you and blast as many as you can before the timer runs out in Xenophobe. Speaking of which, if you find switches and buttons, you can find out how many aliens are left and how much time is left before it all blows up. Usually around 100 or so are in most levels, more in the later ones but with the controls how they are, players aren't going to be keen to find out.

Forget the timer, where's the "Blow it the fuck up now!" button?

Add to this an ever diminishing health count and unfair attacks from monsters you simply cannot avoid and monsters that can shrug off damage JUST to hit you (seemingly, but almost always happens) and you end up with an largely unplayable mess that most players will blunder their way through until they get bored or their credit runs out of health. Usually the former. Steer clear of this chaotic mess of a game.

Altered Beast - Various

Save your time, play something else.

There's a lot of nostalgia factor with this game. Many will look back, or vaguely remember this game, rather fondly along the lines of "Oh yeah, that was awesome you could punch zombies and turn into a wolf thing" and the oft quoted speech "Wise fwom wor gwave" which only goes to show that they never got past the first level and I don't blame them for that.

"Wise fwom wow gwawe"

As an arcade game, it runs along the lines of the ancient story of girl gets kidnapped, God raises the dead to fight through Hell to get back girl, fighters turn into monsters and beat up a demon. The same old story. Being an arcade game there isn't much in the way of real substance here from "Move right and fight" although the addition of a pseudo-cutscene between each level is an interesting addition to the idea of a developing plot but really is just a monochromic powerpoint display.

Looks cool, isn't.

You start as a simple undead/rather-fleshy soldier that burst from his tombstone and begins immediately by punching, kicking and jumping your way through the level, taking on some rather disfigured enemies. However you will find yourself hopelessly outmatched unless you kill specific white double-headed dogs that release power orbs and allow you to "POWER UP" as the game happily announces. Each one making you more buff, harder to hurt, more physically imposing and doing more damage until you reach a third orb and then you turn into a monster with much a much more powerful moveset and the only real way you can even attempt to fight the boss of each level.

Snail...Dragon? Snaildragon? This become pokemon suddenly?

If you're unable to transform in time, you will fight the boss in your weaker form and that's on the assumption you even get that far. There's 3 chances to acquire the orbs at each stage of the level, but after the end of each stage you WILL be swarmed repeatedly by enemies you cannot realistically hope to defeat unless you transform at the next available instance. These white dogs are almost gleefully lampshaded by the game with the preceding brown equivalent dogs that will leap in first, usually knocking you to the ground, before the white one leaps in and past you while you get back to your feet.

This... is just shit.

Woefully unfair, the game pounds further with the idea of absolutely NO mercy invincibility after being knocked down. So each time you get back up, you can be on the end of a fist of pain and knocked down again, and again, and again until your meagre health bar is depleted and you're cursing at the arcade for being cheap. Coupled with almost entirely unavoidable boss-fight patterns, you'll soon find your safest route through the game is to walk away.

Yep, chickenleg is in Golden Axe. Go play that game instead.

But the fun doesn't stop there, your human character has barely any reach in fighting and only really becomes any actual use when they transform. Upon which your move set changes and you have to quickly learn the new controls and moves and how to use them effectively while still being attacked by your enemies. (Lovely bit of thinking on your feet really). While to add further misery, your move set's effectiveness is heavily dependent upon the creature you become. The werewolves have a fireball and fast kick move that serves very well against everything but airborne adversaries, the dragons have lasers and electric fields but are huge targets and move too slowly to avoid attacks. The bears are almost entirely useless having no range attack, just stone breath and a spinning jump that puts you next to enemies if you miss. The tigers have a vertical kick attack similar to the werewolves and a fireball of sorts before the last level gives you back the werewolves and by this point, you'll be very grateful for it.

Artsy, but nobody really cares.

It's hard to pinpoint why so many people like this game when really, it's a rather difficult and unplayable mess of a game, hampered by its own controls and almost deliberately infuriating the player to the point of them walking away from the game itself in sheer maddening frustration at once again being butchered by simply not being as powerful as the game wanted or by not realising the limitations of the characters brought about by the oddly coded movement and combat engine.

Hurry up and kill it, I'm bored.

The audio in the game is a mixed bag, while the slightly muffled sound samples are amusing to hear, the rest of the game's effects and music are rather drab and uninspired. It's also quite likely you won't hear it anyway as you'll be too busy shouting at the inept control system, confusing set up of directional attacks (Down and kick, kicks upwards?) and realising that level 3 is such a pain in the arse to contend with that you'll likely not bother and go play something else.

Why do I even bother...

Surprisingly, that sums up this game. Remember it fondly but don't go back to it, go play something else and leave this tired mess alone in the days where people forgot how to rate games appropriately.

Dark Star - C64 (...run away)

Suicide mission is right, just not how they thought it would be.

Time to cleanse myself, time to sit back and look at another game that helps me realise what makes a good game and what makes a great game and basically if they're not doing what THIS game is doing, it's got to be worth playing more so than this heaping pile of slag.

And it looks like I just ejaculate shots at the enemies... awesome...

Dark Star. Two words thrown together that may or may not incite fear and horror in many a Commodore 64 player. A game so bad it gained a level of infamy despite it coming from the Mastertronic which had a shaky record of releasing good and bad games over the years as a result of their policy of basically publishing inconsistent works for a myriad of bedroom programmers (me too, but was too young at the time to actually publish anything).

Dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull...

So what do we have here? Dross. Shit. Pile of wank. But it's all very easy to band around amusing names (fuckpig) but what we need to do is assess WHY it's a bad game. First off, the graphics are piss poor for most games released around that time on the C64, enemies are dull and unimaginative while the level/game is based rather largely on the trench run from Star Wars but if you want to see that idea done well, go play Death Star Interceptor (Actually I might in the next review), while in this game it's drab, dull and boringly repetitive.

On one hand, I screwed up. On the other hand, this is the best thing to happen to me since starting the game.

Controls are ok, a little unresponsive at times but the scrolling of the levels judders and as such it's easy to hit... ANYTHING and be killed, instant game over and you suck harder that a Dyson in Vacuum (might need to test that idea, add it to NASA for next launch). One Hit Wonder at its finest (or worst to be fair), touch a wall, enemy, bullet or anything that isn't the black background and you're dead, game over.

Yay... Spikes.

The sound... Switch it off and play a horde of babies screaming while using an orchestra of pneumatic drills, it'd be far more preferable and wouldn't repeat as much as the music in this game does. The same few bars of poorly composed, unimaginative, bland and flat music will assault your auditory senses for the duration of the game until death finds you and gives you temporary release from this fucking BLIGHT of a game. (Yes the more I review it, the worse I feel about it). Though even the shooting and dying noises are abysmal, actually... not the dying noise, it signifies the end of this game! Such blissful release!

Whoo... I avoided death again. I envy the dead.

But the game itself. You travel down a trench and every now and then you have to make a choice to go either left or right. The right choice leads to another choice, the wrong choice kills you. You have to progressively remember the right route and make sure to take it like some utterly unfair and backwards game of Simon Says where you have to guess what Simon Says BEFORE SIMON SAYS IT!

Or switch the machine off, DO IT!

Avoid this crap by all means and if you see a diskette or tape of it, I'm officially issuing a TEP on it.