Captain America and the Avengers (Arcade)

Who and who?

As far as the realisation of comic books into video games goes, there's far worse ones than this. Captain American and the Avengers is a healthy mix of the more colourful ear of comic books before they become darker and more gritty and suffered a series of ongoing reboots. So expect the bright colourful spandex, the ink-draining colour schemes as if bubblejet printers had carte blanche to print EVERYTHING possible and some of the fruitiest plots and excuses one could imagine.

With enough credits, yes I can.

In this particular game, Red Skull, the nemesis of Captain America, is going to put a laser on the moon so he can blast the Earth for what can only be for "Shits and giggles" as it's established in the intro that he has PILES of gold (no, seriously, he's shown standing next to more gold than one could carry and it's as tall as he is) and offering it to various villains on condition they become brain washed to fight the Avengers, so he can build this laser.

Where's the fairy come from? What do you mean 'which one?'?

I don't think I'm supposed to bash apart the plot holes in this plan, or maybe in the 80's and early 90's this was considered to be award winning comic book villain plan material... But this is what captain American and the Avengers have gone for. I also just realised this is one LONG title and won't really fit into the website but oh well.

...Translatorman was fired after this incident

So cue our four intrepid heroes, Captain America being one, Android (Who? Enlighten me please), Iron Man (pre Robert Downey Jr) and Hawkeye before he traded spandex for black leather and an attitude problem. All of which will run the gauntlet of levels offered by the game and punch out anything dressed worse than they are. But this isn't a fashion critique (I do that on weekends) but a game assessment and as such, it seems to fit in rather well with the Saturday Morning Cartoon Club approach to comics and video games. Bad guy does bad stuff, go kick arse off.

Starting to lose track of what's going on here

Each character in Captain America and the Avengers has a reasonable arsenal of attacks, ranging from standard melee, long range beams and shield throws, jumping attacks, a shield/barrier if one holds the attack down to reduce damage and can also pick up and hurl cola cans, spanners and enemies before hurling them into the stratosphere, or another enemy. Using your jump button and attack button, you can quickly exhaust all the moves within the first few seconds of the game and learn most of the more effective attacks. Each character utilising their trademarks within their moves, so Hawkeye shoots arrows, Iron Man has his repulsor beams, Captain America has his shield and Android pulls out a mobile phone... Or shoots lasers or something.

Ah the old "WABOOM" a perfect reason not to use good sound sampling

The levels within Captain America and the Avengers run from being the usual walking, scrolling brawling variety to the flying and shooting variance every few levels or so. Allow for an air battle, undersea battle and space battle and for a welcome change in gameplay every so often to keep things interesting, while running battles tend to be the type that is, 'walk forwards, fight some dudes, walk forwards, fight more dudes, fight mid-boss, walk forwards, scene change, fight more dudes, fight boss' and while it's fairly formulaic there's something about the delivery here that makes the game somewhat of a chore to play through.

Yes, where inded IS Sting these days?

Combos against enemies within Captain American and the Avengers, are difficult at best. The standard enemies tend to be able to interrupt your moves with their and your health will steadily dwindle down from your starting 100 points to zero very quickly unless you slap in a few credits or you play keep-away by jumping and hitting from a distance (avoid being Hawkeye and Captain America for this...) though this doesn't really lend into the idea of being gung-ho heroes and the best cure for villainy is a punch to the face.

Please let it be over soon...

All things said, the gameplay is quite fluid, the graphics a little on the simple and small side for what other games are offering but this gives the wonderful trade-off of allowing more on screen to happen at once and with that, feels like a lot of action is happening, which also leads to some fights being nothing short of overwhelming and the arcade becoming nothing more than a pocket vacuum sucking up your credits. It's ok, but there's a lot better out there doing a lot greater things.

Alien 3: The Gun - Arcade

Thankfully, more monsters than in the film.

It's an odd circumstance when you take a film that doesn't have much in the way of action and try to fit it into the sphere of gaming that is an arcade game. Players are not likely to pump money into what is basically "Space Monster BOO!" and you can expect even less for them to be entertained by it. It needs a challenge, it needs action and it needs to be unfair enough to force people to keep playing but not too unfair that people give up on the grounds that it's just a sink for credits and cash.

If you can't work this out, you're going to lose, fast.

Alien 3, as a film and basis of this game, does not provide the suitable backdrop for the arcade game. So a little (read: LOTS) of artistic license has been used to work this game. For a start, there's more than one alien (hooray!), there's multiple types of aliens and enemies such as robots, tanks, droids, cyborgs and most of this was never in the original film.

There's quite the myriad of monsters, body parts and action here.

Plot wise, you do follow SOME of it. You're two surviving marines from the 2nd film that have remained on the original ship, except it's been overrun and infested with Xenomorphs. Grab gun, infinite basic ammo and some "kill all" grenades and let the acid-blood-bath begin! Or we would if the game was that fun to play. While battling aliens and other enemies, you get to see set pieces from the film, run across the surface of the planet, see the factory installation of Fury 161, run the gauntlet with the other prisoners and then finally battle the "Plot" Alien boss and dunk it in liquid metal before a showdown with the Bishop Android/Man.

"We'll help!" By which they mean 'Get in the way ALL the time'

Your bosses and enemies are Aliens based, apart from the robot ones which seem to be thrown in there at the last minute and take their cues from Revolution X for annoying boss tactics. Including "Not being hurt when the game wants you hurt instead" and the more annoying "Only one part of my body is vulnerable and you're NOT seeing it any time soon" types that can't help but give you a beating before teasing you briefly like a cheap stripper in a backwards club.

Anyone remember this in the film?

The music cannot really be commented upon, as it is barely heard during multiple playthroughs, the balance seems very one-sided towards the sound effects which come through rather 'tinny' and the odd speech sample makes it sound like ALL the voices were done by one person irrespective of whomever is talking, be it player characters or NPCs. Bullets sound far too metallic and aliens have that odd rasping noise synonymous with plenty of other monster games as if it's been taken from "Bad Sound Effects volume 82 - monster edition"

Or that part where the robots ran around shooting people? That in the film either?

But what of the gun? It's a bulky lump but does feel almost like you're holding something worthy of blasting aliens, but doesn't seem to match the damage inflicted upon the monsters within the game. Mainly because each time you down them, there's a chance they get back up but damaged and attack in a different way, then they could be shot AGAIN and wait a little longer in writhing agony but if you get too close (because you're in an on-rails shooter no less) they might lunge yet again. You have to keep hitting them until they're dead. By dead, we mean they've changed colour and stop physically moving. However the gun is large, meaty looking and has two key functions; the trigger for shooting and a button for hurling out instant-death to most enemies and significant damage to bosses.

Grenades and flamethrowers add to your weaponry, sadly not too often enough.

Items and power ups are far and few between. You might be able to find some health, perhaps a few extra grenades and very occasionally a flame thrower that instantly kills whatever it hits, but will never last long enough for you to make significant progress and the delay between trigger pulling and impact is longer than the bullets so you're likely to be slapped about by the aliens anyway for a while you adjust to the delay.

Red vision, or how to make the game harder by doing very little.

That said, there is some replay value in the game, in that there's multiple routes one can take through a few of the levels and trying to get better and better scores is always available for the competitive streak in some people, but the annoyance and unfairness of the aliens and some of the attacks hitting while ignoring the damage you're dealing, will turn many people away from this game.

Typing of the Dead - Dreamcast/PC

That's right, TYPING of the Dead.

UltraKey, Mavis Beacon, Typing Instructor, all popular and famous typing tutor programs that people have used through the years. Programs that deal with accuracy, learning the home keys (asdf and jkl; for those interested) while also there's the lovely aspect of online competition for some programs that allow for people to duel off at writing up pangrams, anagrams of pangrams and words that consist of either the left hand, right hand, or specific rows of the keys like Typewriter (Top row only on QWERTY). But did anybody really consider we could use such a program to kill zombies?

Viciously villifying vocabulary there.

Typing of the Dead, a game that takes Hose of The Dead 2 from the Dreamcast and gives you a keyboard instead of a light gun and sets you up to type zombies to death. It is as impressive as it sounds. Though it's on the PC, it's clear that this is a conversion from the Dreamcast as you can see that the characters are carrying keyboards, with Dreamcasts on their back with a GIANT BATTERY atop that. Which also explains why you cannot quit out of the program and have to switch to the Task Manager to get out (or alt-tab) as the Dreamcast would have just switched off.

Dreamcasts and keyboards!

The game is essentially the same, same levels, same bosses, same secrets and bonus routes but there's more. Oh so much more in this game. Firstly, there's a whole tutorial session that lets you practise to improve your skills, there's Arcade mode which is just straight forward typing at enemies and bosses, Original mode that gives you bonus items and power ups from Molotov's that kills all on screen to golden hands that auto type the right keys regardless of what you type. You can also go the route of the tests and boss runs or even play against the CPU (how's that even fair?) and Network modes.

No, it's not Cell phone.

But the gameplay is what really sells this game. The first level will run you with words like AD, R2 and D2 (and not unintentionally I should add) while some of the bonus areas will have things like defeating 10 or so zombies without getting hit, while the words will be specifically focused ranging from all of them having double letters, or all themed on animals, or themed on greetings for a date. The topics and selection of words is very ranged and varied to the point of being outlandishly obscure such as "Everyone's a Schoolgirl". You just have to type the word in the box (spaces are optional) before the monster hits you. Some will be huge sentences, some just words, and the quick fire ones will be a single character from A to Z, symbols and numbers.

"Wasting my life writing shitty articles" isn't an option?

The real gem in this is the outright ridiculous humour and wordplay that comes in the last few levels. Bosses that require you to type out answers to questions. Questions like "What can you not buy in a shop?" and of the three responses, "Body parts" should be your answer. Other questions have all three answers as viable and yet crazy to the point where I've lost hit points as a result of laugh my arse off at the options. Though you can take hits from enemies, it should be noted that with every perfect response (no typos), you build up a refill bar, once that's topped off, you get another free life point. You can also pick up lives from saving people and being quick enough to hit the keys when you're passing boxes and crates with items within them.

You won the game, now type out the credits.

Having to answer the question "What do you do in bed?" and being treated with answers like "Make a bed fort", "Pretend to be sick" and "Have a wan-" ok maybe not that last one, but it's almost as close to the mark as some of the options available to us. The game itself modifies from the original in that zombies will hold back as long as you're typing their words consistently, inaccuracies will cause you to drop score ratings on those enemies while bosses are a lot less forgiving. It's a fascinating idea and the humour is rife through the game with how it's delivered. Play it, if only to laugh at the humour, laugh at the risible notion of a typing tutor that fuses apocalyptic zombies scenarios and keyboard accuracy and laugh at a game that pokes as much fun at you as it does at itself and western society.