Best of the Worst

There's a Youtube channel called Red Letter Media that semi-regularly features a series entitled "Best of the Worst."  Essentially, in each video a group of friends select three bad movies and try to decide which is the least unbearable of the bunch.  I'd like to do the same sort of thing here except for video games rather than VHS tapes.  Also, to keep a theme going for this month all three titles are from the same IP.

The Aliens franchise has a vast collection of licensed video games spanning nearly four decades from Alien for the Atari 2600, in 1982, all the way to Alien: Blackout in 2019 for Android and iOS.  Needless to say I had a lot of titles to choose from, but to make things as interesting as possible I selected one old game, one new game and one roughly somewhere in the middle.  Here are my three picks:

• Aliens: The Computer Game by Activision
• Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure by Mindscape
• Aliens: Colonial Marines by Gearbox Software

I actually played the first one on the list when it came out way back in 1987.  The version I had was for the Apple IIc, but based on some gameplay footage I watched the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum versions that came out the year before are basically the same save for some splash screens and graphical tweaks.  As the title implies, the game is a direct adaptation of the film based on iconic scenes.  There are some quotes in text form sprinkled in like cutscenes, but the actual gameplay begins with the player having to identify various pieces of equipment used by the colonial marines.  After that, there is a dropship piloting challenge which seems to have given a lot of players way more grief than it ever did me.  Following that is an escape from the hive segment wherein the player must try to get four marines to the APC while fending off periodic xenomorph ambushes.  Next is a delaying action.  The player must repel waves of aliens using a flamethrower while marines cut through the locked exit.  Then comes an alien infested maze of air ducts that must be navigated through, followed by Ripley's rescuing Newt in the atmosphere processor.  Lastly, there's a showdown between the queen alien and player in a power loader.

Moving on, Aliens: A Comic Adventure is a weird hybrid of pre-rendered 3D backgrounds and 2D character art.  The player leads a team of four in a RPG/Puzzle/Adventure game that feels vaguely reminiscent of Myst...possibly because both were early CD-ROM titles.  The game has voice acting - really bad voice acting, and not in a funny original Resident Evil kind of way.  It's also extremely buggy.  The combat takes place on a grid and has a crude almost MOBA-like feel to it.  Encounters typically consist of only a few enemies such as a couple of facehuggers, a pair of adult xenomorphs, or a madman in a suit of power armor.  Speaking of power armor, each of the four marine characters wears a distinct suit of power armor that all look like smaller versions of the loaders used in the second film.  Even though the team is made up of four individuals, the player can only control one of them at a time.  As such, only one of the four participates in combat encounters.  I guess it's safe to assume that the other three are fighting additional threats off-screen, but it still comes across as a strange design decision.  Thankfully, the player doesn't have to worry about experience points or leveling up.  On the other hand they do have to keep each member of the group well fed.  Seriously...it's possible for a character to die of hunger which is another head-scratcher from a design perspective.

Finally, we come to a fairly recent game, Aliens: Colonial Marines.  Oh boy...where to begin?  The visual downgrade from trailers and preview footage rubbed fans the wrong way immediately after launch.  Glitches and bugs added to the outrage.  The xenomorph AI also had a lot of problems, some of which could have been somewhat corrected simply by fixing a typo in one line of code.  The biggest offender though has to be the story.  Unlike any Aliens game to come before, not one but two of the original cast members reprised their roles in the form of voice work...and it's a complete waste of their talents.  According to Michael Bean (A.K.A. Corporal Hicks) Gearbox  representatives were not very enthusiastic about the game they were making.  Not to mention the reason for his character still being alive is possibly some of the most contrived writing in video game history.  The gameplay is standard FPS stuff to the point that the player spends a lot more time fighting humans with guns than the xenomorphs.  As for original material, the only notable addition to the Aliens IP is some short sections of gameplay featuring irradiated xenomorphs that are blind, slow, and covered in tumorous growths that explode...for some reason.

So, which is the best of the worst?  Well, I'm going to have to go with Aliens: The Computer Game.  As far as movie tie-in games go it does try to recreate the story beats of the film admirably given the severe hardware limitations at the time.  Even so, it does suffer from the collection-of-mini-games problem in that none of the gameplay segments have much in the way of depth.  In all honesty this game isn't bad - it's just a bit dull.  Meanwhile, Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure is awful in almost every way, including a number of technical issues.  Unsurprisingly, it is largely forgotten along with a lot of other early CD-ROM shovelware games.  Gearbox is the worst though in that they had all the support they needed to make Aliens: Colonial Marines good, they just dropped the ball, and lied about it to boot.  Congratulations, Randy Pitchford!  Unlike like the dev teams behind the other two Aliens games mentioned here, you will be remembered...as the Carter Burke of video game developers.