Alien Breed Trilogy

Alien Breed Trilogy is one of those games that I looked at, rolled my eyes and expected something truly terrible upon firing it up.  What I got wasn't so bad but all things considered it still wasn't very good and playing all 3 games back to back was at some points, truly painful.

First let me explain why I had such low hopes going in.

Alien Breed got its start a long while ago on a home computer system called the Amiga.  Now I never owned an Amiga myself during my younger years but I had a friend who did.  Most of his games were demos but one of the only full games he had was Alien Breed (and Body Blows but we won't talk about that).  It was a top down shooting game where you had to collect keys and ammo in order to gun down aliens and get to the end of each level.  I've not played the original Alien Breed games in a long long time but from what I remember it was pretty fun.

Whenever old, obscure series like this get a reboot for the modern day they usually suck huge amounts of anus, just look at Syndicate if you want to know what I'm on about there.  Then again though, it's kind of hard to fuck up the concept of Alien Breed so maybe there was a small ray of hope.

The game follows Conrad, a gravel voiced balled space engineer with a "bad ass" attitude as he battles his way through a space ship being over run by aliens.  The story comes in 3 different games with it culminating in a battle against some guy who has assimilated with the space ships AI or some such nonsense and he's the one controlling the aliens so you have to stop him.  Despite the fact that I only beat the third game like 2 days ago the story is no inconsequential and shitty that I've already forgotten it.

Game play for Alien Breed Trilogy isn't so bad, it's kind of similar to the old games but all fancy 3D unreal engine shit.  You get a selection of about 6 guns and a big space ship full of aliens to use them on, it's fairly self explanatory.  The bullshit kicks in with the repetitive nature of the levels where you go one direction, find something broken, go the other way to fix it and then backtrack to the first point in order to progress.  Rinse and repeat this shit for 3. Games. There are also some boss fights but they all subscribe to the Doom style of design of "shoot it until it dies" and because ammo and health drops are so easy to find these encounters never hold the tension that I think the designers were shooting for.

That's all there is to say about the series really.  Everything else is so "meh" that it's barely worth commenting on.  Visuals and audio aren't awful but are nothing special worth talking about and the controls work just fine despite being a little wonky when the game starts changing camera angles on you in the third game.  In terms of revived old franchises this one has come out largely un-ruined.  The trilogy is a bit shitty but pretty bearable and if you're into this kind of top-down action type thing then it has its fun moments sometimes.  Get it on sale or something.  

I miss the floppy disk

God damn do you remember these things?!  Well we have reached an age where there are now a significant number of people who fucking don't, and that's sad.

These plastic squares could hold an absolutely massive 1.44 megabytes of data and it was the games came on for shit like the Amiga and other systems.  I never owned an Amiga myself, but I do remember having some kind of computer thing with a green and black screen that played some kind of golf game that came on a floppy disk, that was the shit back then.

Back in my old school days, I remember we used to get a free floppy disk from the library, and we'd fill it full of stupid pictures from some picture website and go giggle at them at home.  It was dumb but I have a lot of fond memories with this old file storage format.

The best thing about these damn things though was the sound it makes when you put it in the drive.  It would make this awesome kind of click sound, pushing one of these bastards in was so satisfying.  On top of that, one way to stave off boredom during the IT classes was to flick the metal bit on the top back and forth, I could do that shit for hours.

But alas, the floppy disk is no more, but I'm glad I got to experience the tail end of their existence.  Maybe one day we can have something that looks like a floppy but has shit tons of storage on it, that would be nice.

Free Game Friday: Beneath a Steel Sky

 

What the hell are you doing here?  The Steam Summer Sales are still going, shit is like $2.50, and still, here you are, looking for some free shit to play anyway.   But that's not a bad thing, because sometimes its the free shit that is really awesome, like in this case!

Beneath a Steel Sky is an old as shit point and click adventure game that was released in 1994 for stuff like DOS and the Amiga.  The plot is really good but I played this a while back so I don't really remember.  What I do remember is that you play a guy called Robert (I think) and you get taken out of your home in the wastelands to be executed or something.  Anyway, you manage to get out of that and then you and your sass talkin' robot have to find a way to escape the city!  

OK so the plot is way better than that, but I beat this back in December so gimme a break.  The gameplay is standard point and click stuff, you find items, talk to people an solve puzzles until you uncover all the mysteries.  The setting and plot is engaging, the puzzles are interesting and the fully voiced dialogue is funny and well written.

What I'm trying to say is that this game is a fuckin' classic so just shut up and go play it for crying out loud.  

This game is available for free from Good Old Games (www.gog.com) along with a load of other classic games available for free and for purchase, brilliant website.