ALIENS - A Comic Book Adventure (IBM PC CD-ROM)
                     Mindscape - œ34.95

                Reviewed by Richard Hewison

Anyone who has the slightest interest in science fiction should
already know about the Alien trilogy of movies. So far there have
been three licensed computer games based on them over the years.
In the early 1980s Argus Press Software released 'Alien'. This
was a simple but effective strategy game based on catching the
cat, killing the alien or setting the self-destruct and escaping
in the Narcissus before the Nostromo explodes.

In 1986 Electric Dreams (Activision) released two games based on
'Aliens'. The first was a first-person perspective shoot 'em up
where you explored the base on LV-426 and tried to kill the Alien
Queen. The second game was a mix of basic arcade games based on
certain scenes from the movie. In 1992 Acclaim released the game
of Alien 3 and turned it into a platform shoot 'em up, even though
the film itself featured no weapons at all! (I will admit at this
point to being involved in the early stages of this game, and we
couldn't come up with a game design based solely on the dour
script that was filmed).

Now Mindscape and the French developers Cryo have decided to have
a go at the license. The difference is that this is a game based
on the Dark Horse comic books that follow on from the second film
'Aliens'. You could say that it's a license of a license! Anyway,
Cryo are well known for producing very slick looking and sounding
CD-ROM games. Unfortunately they nearly all suffer from a severe
lack of game design and often their 'adventures' turn out to be
very limited and linear. However, this is the first alien game to
be written for CD so it should be good shouldn't it?

Aliens - A Comic Book Adventure comes on two CDs, although from
what I've seen so far CD 2 has only been used to run the
Introduction. Anyway, the installation process takes quite a long
time to complete and it ends up dumping nearly 20 Mb of data onto
your hard disk. Unfortunately, the program doesn't allow you to
specify the directory you wish to install the game to.  I always
install games into a sub-directory called games (no surprises
there really!) so I wasn't too pleased when it created the Aliens
directory in my root directory. There's no real excuse for such an
unfriendly install program so the game got off on the wrong foot
with me and I hadn't even started playing it!

Nearly all of Cryo's previous CD adventures have involved
portraits of characters and multiple choice style communication.
More often than not you have to say the right thing to the right
person at the right time if you are to make progress. Aliens is no
exception. In fact, the start of the game involves a limited time
scenario where you must get the co-ordinates from the main
computer before the ship is hit by asteroids. To succeed you need
to quickly explore the ship, take a few items and speak to a few
of your fellow crew members before you can get the co-ordinates
and hand them over.

When you wander around the ship you get lots of static views
linked once in a while with a quick 3D Studio style animation. For

example, you get one of these when you walk up a staircase or
maybe when you open a particular door.

The portraits of the crew members are okay I suppose, as long as
you try and remember that this is after all a 'comic book
adventure' so they are bound to be drawn in that style. When you
speak to them, they don't animate as such.  Instead you get a
collection of different portraits depending on what mood they are
in. Effective this is not (as Yoda might say).

The dialogue in the game is fully digitised and it also appears
on-screen.  I know that the developers are French, but their use
of English is terrible.  Imagine the worst soap opera in the world
(e.g. Crossroads or maybe even Acorn Antiques!) and times it by
ten. Often what is said is dis-jointed or it makes no real sense
what-so-ever. It doesn't help when the MIDI music in the
background is playing an O.T.T. dramatic piano tune that wouldn't
sound out of place in "Sons and Daughters..."! Terrible is too
polite a word for this. At one point I asked one of the other crew

members if she was alright, and she started blathering on about
her ex-boyfriend and men in general!

I've not got very far in this game, but you can probably already
tell that this is a pile of drivel. The long gaps between CD
sequences (even on a quad-speed CD-ROM drive) manage to kill off
any chance of any real atmosphere and the terrible dialogue
cheapens it even more. I've also already spotted a bug (graphic
colour palettes going screwy for a while) which makes me feel this
one was rushed out for Christmas. They shouldn't have bothered. I
was quite looking forward to the game, knowing that it would look
and sound good if nothing else. Unfortunately it doesn't. It's
slow, dis-jointed and the dialogue is painful. This is one major
disappointment. If you want a taste of what Cryo can do, try the
CD-ROM version of 'Dune' from Virgin, 'Commander Blood' from
Mindscape, or 'Lost Eden' (which I know Sue liked!) also from
Virgin. They aren't great games to play (although Dune is pretty
good) but they look and sound excellent.


(A Doom style game called 'Alien Trilogy' is on its way from
Acclaim in 1996. This game has been in development for over two
years so it might be worth keeping an eye out for. It's sort of
based on all three movies, but it seems to be mostly influenced by
'Aliens').














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