Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure

Despite being able to put bold checkmarks next to enjoying videogames and movies in the “geekyness” column of my personality, I never got into comic books. Not sure why, but I do know that for a long time I fell prey to the old stereotype that comics, even today, consisted entirely of hackneyed plots and spandex written for young boys in the 1950s. I’ve since read a few that are properly grown up for my tastes (like Watchmen or The Killing Joke – but are those more “graphic novels?”) but I still can’t bring myself to read a proper series or catch up on old superhero classics.

Meanwhile, I take an active, loathing stance on licensed comics. I’m all for exploring new angles or expanding a rich universe beyond the two or so hours seen in the cinema, but most comics take unapologetic shits on the source material to do so. The key principle of The Terminator was that the time machine was a prototype and a last-second effort by SkyNET. By the time the series got through Malibu and Dark Horse, SkyNET could send Terminators back at its leisure, execute robotic death warrants on just about anyone alive in the 1990s and remotely connected to the future war, and even wire a chip into some guy’s head for a short man/machine series that was really just fucking banal. Or Star Wars. Every author wants to write about a Jedi, so the “expanded universe” means that instead of having a maximum of two Jedi in the entire galaxy, now just about anyone has a better-than-average chance of feeling a special little tingle in their brain and uncovering their latent mastery of the Force.

Similar story with Aliens. The aliens in the comic universe are about as common as soap scum in your shower. Entire Marine battalions exist with the purpose of shooting apart bugs the moment the next backwater colony’s transmitter drops. Character backstories are based on horrific alien encounters, and when you put a shipful of people with such individual histories together, it’s about as powerful as watching them trade stories about going to the store. It’s a far cry from Ripley trying to convince people simply that the aliens exist. In the new universe, if you were to mention to someone that aliens stowed away on your ship and attacked your crew, their response would be “Oh? How many did you frag?”

Defanged, castrated, put on exhibit; call the franchise what you will (and all of those have been done to aliens in these comic tales; all in the name of science, of course!) but don’t go into this game expecting horror and suspense in line with the films. Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure is actually an acting sequel to Dark Horse’s Aliens: Labyrinth. Somewhat similar to Jurassic Park for the Sega CD, you’re coming in after the events of that story; seeing the aftermath and somewhat extending the plot. This isn’t without some sacrifices. The events of Labyrinth have now been moved from a space station to the surface of a planet, the base’s layout changes, portions of the story are rewritten, but the essential backstory and characters (Crespi, Church) are left untouched. Of course, you’re coming in after the events of the comic, so you won’t actually meet them. In fact, the best action has already happened, and Labyrinth readers will already know the super-secret reveal. It’s a little pointless when you think about it, and you’d probably be better off coming into this game cold. But at least here, unlike the comic, every other line won’t be prefaced with “Colonel Doctor.”

The game itself tries to give dual nods to the first Alien and the comic book universe, and manages well enough. You’re the commander of the USS Sheridan; a small, four-man frigate whose standard mission is never really explained. You’re re-routed from cryosleep to answer a distress beacon at a distant mining colony. You play as a troubled ex-Colonial Marine named Hericksen (that’s “HAIR-EK-SEN,” not Heinreksen – though the hat-tip to Bishop’s actor is obvious). Your past isn’t particularly clear, except for a story you tell about watching aliens rip apart your squad, and a pathetic need to ask everyone how they feel you’re doing as a commander. You can also vary your responses between the two extremes of compassionate and meathead, though you’re ultimately still restricted to a very narrow character in the few areas where characterization even applies.

Under your command are a prickly female medic with apparent men issues, a combo pilot/engineer who’s called upon to fix or construct things, and an aloof science officer who fills the “he’s going to betray us for a shot at studying the Aliens, isn’t he?” role adeptly. You can speak with them while you’re on your ship, though this is primarily prologue as their comments and topics don’t expand as the game goes on. Once you’re out in the base, they act as characters in a typical RPG party system, and you have the ability to trade among them or select them to perform specialized tasks.

Exploration and eventual escape is pretty much the goal here, and it follows adventure conventions without much deviation. Controls are broken or doors are locked. You search for items or keys to use on them. Dialogue interactions will be limited, and puzzles pretty basic. Most get no harder than requiring you to spot small objects just out of clear view, though you will have to synthesize some chemicals (and figure out their formulas) and crack challenges based on Othello/Reversi.

Graphically, it’s fairly gorgeous, and they manage to get the atmosphere and lighting right. You’ll see it in Nostromo-esque hallways of pipes and shadows, or in labs that match the lived-in tech of the second film. Rooms are still images of 3D computer renders. You get transition cutscenes early on, but these start to drop off and leave you with a slideshow as the game progresses. Characters are hand-drawn 2D art inside the world, and while they don’t really match, they don’t look jarringly out of place either.

Their implementation is actually rare. Your crew abandons this look as soon as they step out of the ship – instead walking around the base inside 3D mech suits. I don’t know why this is necessary (again, more comic/extended universe bullshit) but it allows them to be rendered and animated along with the rooms they’re in. Aside from looking a bit too shiny, I can’t really complain as the entire mise en scène (power armor and all) looks moody and striking. Though I do want to know why the medic’s robot suit has to have a smaller “girly” frame and tit domes.

Sound deserves some praise, with quality MIDI tunes coming out of the SoundBlaster. Instruments sound as they should, the design goes in a different direction than the movies did, but still sounds appropriate. There’s an astounding number of songs too, across at least three in-game soundtracks (8-10 tracks each) you can collect and play at in-game CD players. The only issue is that these music CDs take up character inventory. I haven’t been able to figure out how to drop them (if you even can), and they became three slots I would have liked to had back toward the end of the game. One sour note: as you might expect, dialogue is fully voiced. And as you might expect, the acting is not even worth discussing.

Now if you’ve peeked at the score, then you’ll know it’s all downhill from here. A “comic book adventure” is a fine idea, but this story, expanding poorly on an old four-issue stand-alone comic, feels forced and pointless. Following close behind is no shortage of bugs and questionable design. First is the issue of time limits. You will always be timed, with a new crisis appearing as you progress. Taking too long to explore (which, in my opinion, is pretty crucial to an adventure game) results in death by cutscene. If you take just a minute or two longer than you should to land the ship, it will be caked by asteroids. Toward the end, take too long exploring a new section of the base and the planet will literally blow up. You will inevitably die along the way and have to use the knowledge you’ve gained to do it all again, but faster.

The interface is a little off as well. In terms of control, it’s fairly simple as you navigate entirely with the mouse. No keyboard key has any use here. You roll a cursor over the screen, and text will appear if you can interact with an area (such as “look” or “turn right”). The right mouse will bring up a dialogue to quit the game. In your status screen, left clicking selects items and right clicking drags them onto other characters. Each member of the party has only eight item slots, so you will need to do some inventory management throughout the game.

However, you’re given precious little information on what’s going on. The manual is a pathetic little thing (I bought it off Ebay just to be sure). Text takes up only 1/3 of each page (the rest is blank space), and instructions do little more than teach you how to install the game and click the mouse. Crucial portions of the interface remain unexplained. “Morale” is vague. Saying what you think a character wants to hear doesn’t reliably bring morale up, and low morale doesn’t appear to have an impact in the field. “Armor Level” and “Fighting Power” sound important, but I have no idea how to raise them. “Life Level” seems pretty clear, and you have a medic on staff, but I couldn’t figure out how to get her to heal anyone.

The biggest offender is “Hunger.” When the bar is full, nothing happens. When it starts running low, characters interrupt the game to tell you how hungry they are. That’s it – that’s all the bar does. You remedy this by going to the ship’s kitchen, selecting food from a vending machine and then dragging it onto the portrait of the character holding the food. Trick is, you have to feed them four or five meals before they’re full. And each meal has to be “ordered” individually, complete with rendered cutscene as the machine dispenses it. When it reaches zero, nothing happens – just constant fucking “HUNGRY!” messages, which alone are enough to make it worth taking the time to cram four turkey dinners into everyone’s face. Why couldn’t they have just wiped out hunger with one meal? Why have this at all? Is it supposed to be another time limit?

And then there’s the “Hmmm…”s.  As you travel around the base, your arrow will briefly disappear and you will hear a sound clip of “Hmmm…” Sometimes there will be a few in rapid succession. They’re rarely more than 5-10 seconds apart. It doesn’t seem to matter what screen you’re on. It doesn’t seem to matter what you do. I took it as some crew member trying to tell me something – like an indication that they have an opinion on an object in the room, or can be used there. If this is the case, what should happen next isn’t remotely obvious. Or, it could just be a bug on a already long list of them.

There is combat, but it’s pretty sparse until the very end. At a few key points (and after a cutscene introduction), the game will switch to an isometric view of you and your opponent. Left-clicking moves you along a grid. Right-clicking swings a punch or activates a ranged weapon (if you have it, and have it selected). It’s not particularly thrilling, though you can get outnumbered and are forced to move around strategically. Also, as said before, I can’t figure out how to get the medic to heal any damage you take here.

The grand prize winner is the game’s shoddy implementation of 2 CDs. It’s fine by me that the game needs multiple discs for all the art and movies. Problem is, swapping is handled atrociously. Whenever the game starts, it will always ask for the first CD. If you have a save on CD2, you’ve got to start with CD1 and swap immediately after loading the save. If you’re on CD2 and want to quit the game, you actually have to put CD1 in just to get to the main menu with the “quit” button to get back to DOS. Otherwise, you’ve got to do a hard restart.

Saves are equally annoying. You can save anywhere to a set number of slots, but you will always start back in the ship when you reload. Your progress and items will be retained, but you’ve got to go through loading up the mech suits and schlep back to where you left off. If you’re on CD2, thankfully, you start in the first room of that disc. But what happens if you’ve made a mistake and need to reload a CD2 save? Well, you have to take out CD2 and put in CD1 to get to the main menu, load the game, take CD1 back out and put CD2 back in. This includes whenever you die or run out of time.

It’s things like this that make the game feel rushed, and even after patching to 1.03 (which apparently squashes some game-killing bugs) you still have everything above to deal with. What seem like translation issues also crop up (Cryo is French, so it’s likely that’s the original language), as well little oversights like a door sign entirely changing what it says between the still frame and the rendered “walk-up” transition movie. I had frequent visual bugs as well, where animated portions of the screen turned into colored lines. I’m willing to believe this is DOSBox’s fault and not the game’s, but be aware. On a different setup, the music would step on the digital sound’s channel until the MIDI finally crapped out into the trademark sustained wail. You may collect a different set of issues depending on your hardware, but each system I tried had some form of problem running this game.

Even without the technical issues, the game is disappointing all around. The story doesn’t need to be told, the discoveries you make probably aren’t canon and aren’t real revelations anyway. The four main characters here feature only in this game, so this isn’t backstory for a comic series – you can skip it without missing anything. Action and puzzles are both limited. The CG art looks great, but as far as letting you explore the world of Aliens, clicking through the Myst-style still images is no more immersive than reading a comic book. Definite pass.

 

The Good

Excellent visuals and music.

The Bad

Weak story, weak gameplay, more bugs in the game code than even a Colonial Marine could handle.