Alien vs Predator (Jaguar)

At least from a U.S. perspective, 1993 to 1995 were confusing, cluttered times in video game history. I personally had just gotten a Super NES in 1992 and was merrily exploring its catalog through Blockbuster rentals. But in the gaming rags and on the shelves of Babbages, it was clear that a lot of new companies now wanted to muscle in on my pastime.

Aside from a dim “oh, Atari’s back,” alI I knew about the Jaguar was that it could run Doom. I remember in-store videos of Cybermorph, but I’d seen store demos of PC flight sims with similar polygon graphics – not to mention StarFox on the SNES. Jaguar just went on the mental pile of other, expensive pretenders to the console throne, like the CD-I, 3DO, and CD-32. There was Nintendo, there was Sega, then there was a muddled mass of “the rest.”

Then AvP showed up and it became my life’s mission to own a Jaguar.

See, now you were speaking a preteen’s language. I had worn my taped copy of Aliens into magnetic dust. I had the Kenner action figures and the little Dark Horse comics that came with. I even bothered to own Alien 3 for the Game Boy. Xenomorphs were my jam. In 1994, I was equally excited about first person shooters becoming a completely new way to play video games. And now, here comes one that looks better than Doom (at least in magazine stills), set in the Aliens universe, with all the coolest weapons, and lets you play as the Alien and Predator to boot. No one else had all three cinematic badasses in a killer next-generation game – but if you wanted them, you had to live in Jaguar Country.

Alas, I was still a kid. If I could have bought a Jaguar with a pocket full of nickels and dirt, I would have traded all I had. My parents pointed to the Super NES they bought last year and made it clear they weren’t buying another system. All that was left was for me to re-read the same magazine previews and dream. Until the present day, when I have become a big enough boy with no one in a position of supervision to stop me. There will likely be more reviews for Atari’s final console in the future, but for now, let’s take a look at the game that would have twelve-year-old me streaming tears of joy, and others to seek out their own Jaguars on various auction sites.

AvP documents a disaster at a distant Marine training station from the perspective of the three “heroes.” The Aliens arrive first, attacking a station full of unsuspecting soldiers. Then the Predators respond, where a young Pred enters the station alone to earn his stripes. The Marine’s game comes last, allowing him to wake from cryosleep as the last human on a station overrun with Xenos. None of the events in one game make a difference in the others – don’t expect any Resident Evil 2 style crossovers – but it serves as a decent explanation for why you’re going through the same levels fighting different opponents.

The Alien game is the least complex of the bunch. You start in a docked ship reminiscent of the derelict in the first film. You must find and free the Queen, held by the Predators five levels up. You’re quite fragile and cannot leap, climb, or crawl along walls, but you do have the fastest foot speed in the game. You can slash to open most doors, but cannot use elevators. You can only progress to new station levels by using maze-like air vents. The station is mostly filled with Marines, who loosely patrol and can shred you from a distance. Most of the strategy here relies on using your speed to strike, then rounding corners quickly to avoid hails of gunfire.

The full arsenal of Alien weapons is available: a slashing claw, a stunning tail, and the insta-kill inner teeth attack. Each is mapped to the A, B, or C button for quick access. Each attack decreases in power if you hold down its button, which has the effect of pacing out combat and forcing you to be smarter about when to strike. Marines often end up in groups, and you just won’t have the stamina (or the life bar!) to kill them all at once. While there’s no official “hiding” mechanism, the effect of scurrying off and waiting in ambush still sort of comes across here.

The Alien cannot heal itself, but it can cocoon any Marine, anywhere, with a claw-tail-claw combo. Once a cocoon is set, it takes about three minutes to become ready (you actually watch the cells divide into an embryo on the left side of your HUD), at which point the cocoon will hatch when you die. You’re limited to three cocoons at a time, which works as a system of plantable checkpoints. Through proper cocoon management, you can never truly die. Cheesing this system is how you’ll actually get through the Alien game, since the Marines’ firepower and overwhelming numbers mean one drone won’t last for long. Remember, the Alien in the films only tore hell through a bunch of unprepared space truckers and unarmed convicts, while its lifespan against a burst of pulse rifle fire was measured in fractions of a second.

I don’t like that Aliens can’t climb walls, but I guess that’s to be expected. I don’t like that they can’t really hide or ambush – just kinda run around corners – so you’re still just playing a first person shooter with no guns. I don’t like that you can’t trash old cocoons to make new ones – you’ll go all the way to previous levels when you die and must use up old checkpoints before you can make new ones. However, your speed and essentially endless lives both let you control the hunt enough to feel like you’re a stalky badass. You might not be leaping at Marines from shadowed ceilings, but you can clear an entire level of them by yourself, and that’s something.

The Predator’s game starts in their docked ship, similar to the design in Predator 2. Your task is to find and kill the Alien Queen somewhere at the station’s lowest level. You’ll mostly face Marines in the upper levels and Aliens in the lower, but the occasional Alien or facehugger will still pop up to keep you on your toes. Four weapons are available – the wristblades, a staff, smart discs, and the shoulder cannon – but you must earn the last three through a system of “honor points” (read: your score). I respect that the developers don’t make you hunt around levels for Predator gear, plus the Predator putting restrictions on himself in the name of honor seems pretty on-brand. It also means this game really does play differently from the other two. While both Alien and Marine will be looking to avoid fights, you want to scrap as often as possible as the Predator.

Pred-o’s weapons act just like the Alien’s. There’s no ammo to worry about, but each attack weakens if you spam it. You won’t get a long-range weapon until you unlock the discs at 350,000 points, which will be pretty far into your journey. So, similar to the Alien, pacing yourself and using hit-and-run strategies will be key to surviving. Initially, you’ll have to pursue lone Marines and dispatch them up-close with your blades. After you earn your stronger toys, you’ll be quickly picking off squads from afar and raising the kind of confusion in their ranks as seen in the films. It’s perversely enjoyable to see them accidentally shooting each other in frantic attempts to draw a bead on you.

The biggest challenge to the Predator’s game is that there are a lot of Marines and they will all dump their guns into you on sight. The Predator’s a brick shithouse in this mode, but he’ll still get worn down by the sheer number of grunts wandering the station. There’s no way to lure them around – with recorded promises of candy or otherwise – so much of a successful Predator’s game is watching the patrolling AI for safe opportunities to strike and fade away. It’s about as close to hunting as you can get inside a space station with a ceiling.

The Pred does have the ability to heal, by collecting human medkits (the only pickup in the Predator’s game) that combine into a single “use anywhere” kit on the “5” key. Finding these kits is critical to making it through the campaign. Crowds of Marines will accumulate a lot of damage, so how long you’ll draw the Pred’s game out is dependent almost exclusively on how many medkits you’re finding as you skulk around.

Key to skulking around is the Predator’s famous cloak. Pressing the “Options” key renders you invisible to Marines (Aliens see right through it). At a distance, you can move around unmolested. However, if Marines get right next to you, they’ll see through your ruse and start shooting. The cloak is smartly tied to the honor system, forcing you to decloak to gain points. If you make a kill while invisible, you’ll lose points. If you go below the point threshold for a weapon, you’ll lose access to it. Still, there are times you might have to make dishonorable kills to survive, or to thin the numbers before making those points up for an overall gain. The choice is yours, but you will definitely want better weapons than the wristblades to take on the Aliens down in the basement.

The cloak has no depleting charge or time limit, but you’re forced to use the Pred’s vision modes while it’s active. There are six filters to choose from, all of which just swap one color for a drastic, neon replacement. None of them highlight enemies, so there’s no thermal mode to make Marines stand out. In fact, they’re all a bit obnoxious, in what I assume is a combination of technical restrictions and wanting to put some penalty on the cloak. However, since each filter just mixes up nearby colors, you’re cycling through them to find one that makes your current surroundings easier to see – just like in Predator 2. It’s a neat, authentic touch.

Let’s break here a minute and talk about the AI Marines. Every single Marine carries both a rifle and a flamethrower, cycling between them when they shoot. Thankfully there are no auto-targeting Smart Gunners or such, but it means that every one of them is surprisingly deadly but equally bland. Literally every Marine you fight is the same. They will beeline toward gunfire or similar commotion, so it’s annoyingly common to see four or five clones advancing down the corridors after what you thought was a quiet kill. Or, they’ll appear suddenly from around the corner, announcing themselves with the screen flash you get when taking hits and sending you spinning to find them.

It’s hard to call them advanced, but they are doggedly persistent – showing no fear once you’re spotted, while chasing and shooting you even if you recloak. You can never shake them once they’ve seen you. Yet the greatest sin is that they can never be surprised. Yes, you can creep up behind one, but he will instantly – in the next frame of animation – turn 180 and fire. I rarely killed a Marine without taking damage as either the Alien or Predator, which knocks the feeling of being one of cinema’s most legendary nasties down a few pegs.

On to the Marine game, which is clearly the focus. It makes the most use of the levels, deep exploration for pickups, and the most-involved objectives. The Alien and Predator games feel like side bonuses or afterthoughts by comparison. You play as Pvt. Lance J. Lewis – I’m guessing a Rebellion in-joke – who has just come off an automated sentence in the cryo-brig for punching an officer. It’s a familiar plot device that, I assume, is meant to make you a bad-ass lone wolf who doesn’t play by the rules (though your punishment is… a nap?). It also conveniently leaves you as the last human alive on a station full of extraterrestrial meanies.

You find a shotgun about two steps from where you start, then must find the rest of your gear hidden around the station. Unlike the other two games, Marine weapons absolutely require ammo. Even that initial shotgun takes it, while you’re completely defenseless if you run out – there’s no knife or fists to fall back on (the xenos would probably laugh such attempts off anyway). The search for supplies is most of the Marine’s game, making this much more of an entry into the survival horror genre – which actually fits the films as tightly as a facehugger on a blue collar worker.

The Marine can find useable computer terminals whose messages leave breadcrumbs to the next area. As jammed doors or Alien hives block the normal path, you’ll use computer maps and air vents to find alternate routes. Listings for “Armory”s or “Med Bay”s give you places to look for gear and directions to get there. And of course, the entire Marine game is one big scavenger hunt. Winning means you must find three additional weapons, ten security cards to raise your clearance level, make it back to Operations to set the base for self-destruct, then race to the escape pod four levels down before the station detonates.

Or, it’s a training simulation, so you probably just get a stamp or something.

AI for Aliens and Predators is a bit more brainless. Aliens just run and attack. No sneaking, no “coming out of the walls.” They move silently and big groups may surround you, but in general, any jolting surprises are just happy accidents. Their best move is a zig-zag pattern that throws off your aim as they run down a hallway. They’re also smart enough back up to the edge of an intersecting hallway and wait you out – they’re not always going to charge blindly after you. In these cases, they’ll wait for you to make the dangerous first move toward them.

Their greatest threat is acid blood. It will hurt if you kill one at close range, while corpses leave a burny puddle on the floor that damages you every time you walk over it. These puddles never goes away, so you’ve got to consider when to shoot – such as first drawing them away from doors or similar bottlenecks. Speaking of doors, AI Aliens can never open them. While you can’t weld anything shut in this game, tactically opening and closing doors has the same corralling effect. Many a time I’ve had a wonderfully tense moment as I rushed through a doorway, smashed the action button, and watched the doors come together to seal off a horde of them in pursuit.

Meanwhile, AI Predators are just a disappointment. They’re big, tough, and love to toss out deadly plasma balls, but are anything but smart. They fade in and out of cloak seemingly at random – at best, it just throws your aim off. You can always spot and follow them with the motion tracker, keeping weapons at the ready. They will play recorded taunts so you know they’re close, but you won’t get any sense that you’re being hunted. Mostly you’ll roll your eyes because now there’s a big, dumb distraction you’ve got to waste a lot of your best ammo on.

You get three save slots for all three game modes. There’s no restrictions on how to use these and you can save your game from the Pause menu at any time. However, owing to the limits of cartridge technology, you only keep data like your score, weapons you’ve unlocked, and Marine security level. Enemies stay dead as long as the console is on, but every last one will return when you power off or reload a save. It makes coming back to the game a little more exasperating than it should be, but as long as you’re aware of the limitation, you can plan your saves and sessions around it. You can also abuse it to high hell, saving right next to a stash of medkits or ammo that will return in full when you reload. Though if you’re unlucky enough to save next to a nest of Aliens, you’ve probably just ruined your entire game.

Graphics are impressive for the time, solidly beating out Alien Trilogy, released for the PC and PlayStation almost two years later. There’s pixelation, but there’s also a nice amount of detail in the wall and scenery textures. I remember reading that the developers photographed models and miniatures of the characters and station for their bitmaps. The walls look detailed enough to make this a possibility. The Alien Queen certainly seems to look like dashed-together frames of an action figure. Still, they fall in perfectly with the look and tech of the Alien films without being direct copies, while the respective Alien and Predator ships are immediately identifiable to their movie counterparts. The only disappointment is that there are no lighting effects or Doom-like strobes and flickers. Everything stays at one default level.

Weapons do not sound like the films. The pulse rifle especially sounds like a puttering BB gun. This is a disappointment, especially considering other sounds (like the Alien’s screeches and Predator’s equipment) do sound like they came from the Fox library. There’s no music, so it’s an appropriately quiet game overall. You’ll spend most of it listening to the steady hum of the station’s reactor, the mechanical whine of doors opening, or any pulses from your motion tracker. Otherwise, it’s quiet – too quiet – as said, the Aliens make no noise as they approach.

I only have a few major complaints. First and most obvious is the sluggish framerate. The game does look fantastic in stills – however, it’s a lot more chunky in motion. The Alien runs and turns at about the speed of any other early 90’s FPS hero, so I know the Jaguar technically can crunch the frames. Yet the Marine and Predator clunk along at an estimated 15 fps. Perhaps it’s because they have extra stuff running in their games (motion trackers, vision modes, etc) but more likely, it seems that the developers turned down the speed for these characters to make them slower than the Alien, rather than being able to have the Alien run faster than normal. It’s never unplayable, even with tons of enemies on the screen at once, but it is certainly jerky. It’s also worth noting that the state of Jaguar emulation is not great, so the physical hardware runs noticeably better than something like Virtual Jaguar.

I didn’t care much for the level design. Though I have to give them credit for attempting to assign a clear purpose to most zones (relayed through signs and computer maps), much of the station looks exactly the same and plays like a giant maze. Whether it’s because Aliens have blocked off some lower passages with their hive, or because the fourth level is literally called a “Training Maze,” it results in a lot of exploration that will probably end in hand-drawn maps and notes. The Marine game especially is going to depend on following clues from the computer terminals and making note of what door on what level needs what security card, because you’re absolutely coming back to it later and the game won’t mark this down for you.

There’s an automap feature that’s infinitely useful, but it resets itself every time you move between levels. This is awful for the Alien, as it also resets after each cocoon hatches. You’ll come back to life with no idea where you are, often at a previous level entirely, and have to rediscover your way back. Again, I wish you could dismiss old cocoons to plant new ones on your current level. The same reset also happens when any character enters or leaves an air duct, pretty much forcing you to reference permanent maps (either drawn yourself, or taken from 90s game magazines).

Would I have been satisfied if I’d gotten a Jaguar and this game in 1994? Given that I’ve always had little tolerance for mazes and no acceptance of drawing my own maps, it’s harder to say. Some of the areas definitely drag – especially when you’ve killed all the Aliens on the level and are just wandering around, lost, looking for a keycard. But the fact alone that there was nothing else like this at the time, plus the bonus of being based on two of my favorite movies, I think it likely would have become a beloved part of my collection. No question I’d beat all three campaigns at least once (because I already have!) and any technical issues with framerate and the like would be more easily forgiven with little else to compare it to.

These days, it’s a harder sell. That framerate chugs, while technical limitations (like the resetting automap and saves) are grating. I’d also argue that permanent maps are a requirement, while needing external “game guides” is a foreign concept now. It was a perfect use of the licenses for the time, with a few forward-thinking ideas as well – namely a non-linear setting and the fantastic execution of “survival horror.” No AvP game since is like this. It’s NOT worth picking up a Jaguar exclusively for, unless you simply must play some other Jag games or get a killer deal, but curious fans of the films will definitely find it worth playing if you get the chance.

 

The Good

First of many first-person AvP games, still unique from all of them. Nice, thematic take on “survival horror” and fun representations of the three characters.

 

The Bad

Too much “explore the maze” gameplay. Some disappointing sounds. Representations aren’t perfect – (Aliens aren’t sneaky, Pred can’t highlight humans with thermal vision, the discs, plasma cannon, and Smart Gun don’t track). Some “floaty” controls. Reference maps a near requirement.

 

What on Earth gotta hold a this guy?” – Pvt. Lance J. Lewis