Alien (Commodore 64)

I first tried Argus Press’ version of Alien almost fifteen years ago and remember marking it for review if I ever expanded on the scope of this site. It reminded me of the PC version of The Terminator, as another example of how to brilliantly adapt the scenario of its movie to a freeform computer game. And despite being over 40 years old, I haven’t seen another Alien game like this. If you want to drop into the space sneakers of the film’s doomed crew and see how well you’d fare, this game acts as a surprisingly involved simulator of the movie – i.e. don’t expect to do well.

The Full Game finds the seven members of the film’s cast (minus one, randomly selected, who “births” the Alien) trapped on the three levels of the starship Nostromo, with the titular AI beastie skulking about. The Nostromo is divided into 34 rooms, with key items reliably found within. The Armory will always have weapons, an electric prod is always in the Infirmary, and your first few games will be blown on learning where some of the more specialized items are stored (such as the net and the cat carrier). These locations never change.

Your goal is to survive – ideally with as many crew as possible. You can kill the Alien with the weapons you’re given (laser pistols that, presumably, would have shortened the film’s run time) but this takes a whole lot of hits and the Alien is very good at offing your crew in the process. There are three difficulty levels that don’t seem to change much about his intelligence, but do mean he will have more health and the crew will have even less. You can theoretically drive him into an airlock and blast him into space from the control console in an adjacent room, but I’ve never been able to do this without sacrificing someone as bait. Crew deaths deduct from your final score.

The final method is to follow the film – set the Nostromo to self-destruct, beat feet to the escape shuttle, fly away to safety. This is meant a last resort. Only three crew fit in the shuttle and the Nostromo‘s computer won’t let you launch if crew are still on board – including Jonesy the Cat. This little tabby bastard can be found scampering throughout the ship, hiding randomly, and giving false readings on your motion tracker. If you pin him with a net, you can permanently scoop him up in the cat carrier; though this obviously requires the person who finds him to have these items. Also, just like the movie, hunting for the cat will likely find you crossing paths with Mr. Tin Grin.

An extra wrinkle comes in the form of the Personality Control System. Essentially, you’re in the role of an off-site commander, while the crew will balance your orders with their own well-being. Each of the crew allegedly has their own characteristics – bravery, intelligence, etc – meaning some will be more reliable than others. If the differences are truly in place as described, then these effects don’t feel tangible. Sending Lambert out alone didn’t result in her becoming a paralyzed, sniveling mess any more than sending anyone else. Instead, characters broadly seem to act based on their current morale.

Morale is listed on the main screen, from Confident to Broken. Order someone feeling “uneasy” into the air ducts alone and they may just not do it. Have someone get attacked by the Alien and they may drop everything they’re carrying and run. Much like in The Thing, they feel more confident with a weapon in their hand and no signs of the Alien nearby, while entering the same room as the bodies of slain crew will shake them up significantly. Terrified crew ignore you until you send crewmates to stand nearby and hopefully rebuild their resolve.

The ship itself can also take damage, with each room having its own damage percentage. Shooting the Alien with laser pistols or the harpoon gun damages the room (that darned acid blood!) 100% damaged rooms will be sealed off and inaccessible – cutting off access to adjacent rooms unless you brave the air vents. The Alien can also intentionally claw up the works, attacking Life Support, the Command Center, or any of the three engines on the mid deck. You’ll get warning messages along the bottom of the screen, like “Environmental Irregularities,” and if fire ever breaks out, you’ll need to put it out before it damages too many rooms. If any of the engines reach 100% damage, the game is over with a sudden bang.

To top it all off, everything runs in real time. Well, close enough to it. Your instructions aren’t carried out instantly, but the manual explains this as the interference of trying to “radio orders to the crew.” Living crew eat into the ship’s oxygen reserves at a rate of 1 unit per character, per second. This is tracked by the oddly-named “TOOH” meter (Time Out of Hypersleep), starting at 7500 and ticking down rapidly. With 6 crew jostling about, you’re looking at around 12 minutes of air.

This means a constant time limit is always running in the background – both a literal one marked by dwindling oxygen reserves, and the figurative one that is actively crawling around, eating your crew. Crew deaths admittedly aren’t all bad, as fewer people breathing slow the meter’s depletion and gives you more time. You can also order characters to sleep in the cryo room to save air. This can be a good way to preserve wounded characters, but you’ll lose that extra hand. You’ll also need to be damned sure you’re going to kill the Alien, because nobody leaves cryosleep once they’ve entered, and we established that the escape shuttle won’t launch if there’s living crew left behind. The “Short Game” gives you just 3 crew to work with (but the same air reserves as the Full) so it’s considerably easier to manage and a straight shot to the escape shuttle.

Finally, (there’s more??) one of the crew is an evil company android – again, selected randomly at the start. They’ll act normally until you notice they don’t; e.g. “hey, Parker never seems to shoot at the Alien.” They also seem to only act up at the worst possible time. In many games, they never turn. The Alien may kill them first, or no one’s close enough to winning to trigger them. Instead, it’s going to be right when you’re heading for the escape shuttle that they’ll suddenly attack you, or when you’ve trapped the Alien in the airlock but the actually-a-damned-robot by the controls won’t hit the jettison button.

There’s a lot going on here, and surprisingly, the systems work pretty well. It’s very daunting at first, but once you understand your role and how things are interconnected, the experience plays out faithfully to what I’ve described above. You’re huddling crew together while you make a plan and distribute gear. You’re positioning people with motion trackers to try and find the Alien. You’re trying to move in pairs, with someone holding a weapon leading the way. You’re panicking when the Alien ambushes a straggler, hoping you can hurry nearby crew over before all that’s left is a chunky red puddle. And you’re lamenting when crew members snap and stop listening. I’m sure I even wailed like Lambert at some point during the game – “Noooo! The other waaaay! The other waaaaaaay!”

This all sounds great, yeah? Unfortunately, Alien is a game with bigger ideas than its technology will support. I’d love to see this remade somewhere – even just adding a mouse might make everything play better. But as it stands, it’s hard to see how you’re supposed to win with the game running as it does.

The interface is absolutely the biggest problem. This is an exclusively menu-driven game, controlled by a joystick in port 2. You can only ever scroll vertically among menu options and select them with the single “Fire” button. You are ill-equipped for any chaos – of which there is a whole game full of – especially considering there’s not even a “back” or “escape” button. You have to hit the “quit” selection every time for every sub-menu. Menus are confined to a narrow column on the right of the screen, meaning lots of vertical scrolling and lots of sub-stacks to back out of.

There’s about a four second delay between giving someone an order (confirmed with a flicker along the screen border, like when you’re loading the game off tape) and them actually carrying it out. You’re meant to hop to another crew member and give them orders in the interim, otherwise you’re wasting time and air. But navigating this interface with the joystick is just too rough to do this quickly or precisely – reminding me of the failed times I tried to order individual agents around in Syndicate. The Personality system throws an extra wrench into these gears. Did they not receive the order, or are they ignoring it? Cue me sending the same order multiple times in a panic.

You have six crew spread around the ship, but you’re only effectively controlling two of them at a time. That’s about the length of ordering one person into an adjacent room, quitting out, selecting the next person, selecting the room, ordering them to move, quitting out, then selecting the first person again. You can leapfrog pretty effectively in pairs. Three or more? Forget it. And what happens to the other four characters you’re not controlling? They’re sitting on their asses, sucking up your air.

I thought about trying to position crew strategically, such as at junctions with a motion tracker, or maybe guarding the engines, but there’s never enough time to pull this off. The air vents mean the Alien can come from anywhere, so there’s no chokepoints to cut off. Every game for me came down to controlling two characters at most, hunting together for the Alien and/or Jonesy. Storing extra characters in the cryo room almost always meant my current two would die and I’d wish I’d had more crew. Maybe there’s someone with an ironclad plan, who’s fast enough to cycle through all the characters and issue orders with military precision. That person is not me.

Also of no help is that crew have no autonomy at all. If you don’t give them orders, they don’t do anything. This includes defending themselves if attacked. If you get a warning the Alien is attacking someone, you have to switch over to them and hit the “Attack” option – then keep hitting that order every four seconds. Otherwise, they stand there and get eaten. If you ever happen to have multiple armed crew in the same room as the Alien – you guessed it! – you’ve got to try to pinball among each one and order them to attack every “turn.” Three guns firing at once seems really advantageous, until you realize it’s nearly impossible to pull off.

Crew are never marked on the map, which seems like a strange oversight. You’ll have to literally go down the list and check in manually with each one to find their position. If any crew dies – even the one the Alien popped out of at the very beginning – their name is never removed from the list. There’s so much already going on that I’d forget and waste time trying to select dead crew. Maybe this is meant to convey that dramatic moment of tapping a static-filled comm line – “Dallas? Are you there? Dallas??” – but it persists and quickly just gets in the way. They could have at least had the cursor skip over the names of dead crew.

Alien AI seems erratic, at best. The developers obviously don’t want him charging directly at characters all the time, so I’m guessing he’s programmed to burn some CPU cycles on random movement or similar distractions. You can hear when doors open and when vent grates are removed, and based on this, he’s a very hyperactive boy. I never saw any pattern to his movement, except a rough tendency to go and damage rooms at higher difficulties. I don’t get the impression he’s ever stalking anyone and I think it’s pure chance when you run into him.

Unfortunately for you, the Alien almost never backs down from a fight. You and the Alien will stand there and slug it out until he kills your crew member. He sometimes flees, with the room he ran to listed as an alert, but I haven’t figured out why. My best guess is that more crew in the room increases his chances to run, but even then, there are times where he just lays out the whole room like it’s no problem. You can order crew to move away, but he almost always follows immediately in pursuit to finish the job. This feels a bit dumb and a bit hopeless for your chances, but it is how I got him into the airlock.

No more than three crew can be in a room, which we already established is more than you can reasonably handle. Unfortunately, this includes corpses. One game saw the Alien thrash three people just outside the Command Center, so the remaining crew had to use the air vents to bypass the blocked room. There are no medkits and no way to heal or revive lost crew. Likewise, you can’t repair damage to any part of the ship – not that you’d really have time for it anyway. If it’s not clear yet, this is a tough, tough game. Out of maybe 30 games, I only won 3.

The game also is no looker. This was originally developed for the ZX Spectrum, and the C64 actually represents the punched up and prettier version. From a modern perspective, it is, of course, neither. If you think of this more as a board game, you’ll probably have a better time. You’re viewing icons representing events and ideas. You’ll need to fill in the gaps with some imagination. But, if you can derive tension out of the story some cardboard tokens are telling, then you’re on the right track.

Sound is both the game’s best and worst part. The synthesizer theme, also by Paul Clansey, is a bit of a legend for the C64’s SID chip. You’ll only hear this on the title screen, though. The rest of the sounds are appropriate, but blend into a bit of a mess. As said, you’ll hear sliding “whooshes” of doors opening every time the Alien moves, and this happens so often that it’s almost the background track. There’s a pulse simulating a heartbeat every time you’ve selected a character. The motion tracker pings on any movement in a nearby room, including other crew, and keeps pinging until you de-select the character holding it. Worst of all is the horrible warble alarm when the Alien attacks. I started ordering crew to flee the room just to turn that damn racket off.

I love the ideas here and I don’t know that I’d change a thing about the systems. Even the three crew per room restriction (including corpses) makes sense for the gameplay and forcing you into tough situations. I can even get behind the speed at which the air drains with all 6 crew. I just can’t get behind the interface. The game asks you to be much faster and much more precise than you can be with this joystick, this map screen, and this sluggish menu.  Great ideas, but hardware limitations makes it too tough to bring your most daring and desperate plans to fruition.

 

The Good

A simulation of the movie that I haven’t seen anywhere else. See how many of the six crew you can keep alive while besting the Alien and avoiding the company android. Forward-thinking design (like the Personality system) that would show up in games decades later.

 

The Bad

Hard to pull off any effective strategy with the interface and controls you’re given. I’d love to see a modern interface redesign with mouse support.