Originally released as Halloween Harry, is a side-scrolling platform game developed by Interactive Binary Illusions and SubZero Software, and distributed by Apogee Software. The game features 256-colour VGA graphics and background music in MOD format. Alien Carnage is composed of four episodes. The first episode was released as shareware, and the rest were distributed commercially. In May 2007, John Passfield and 3D Realms released Alien Carnage as freeware. In 2014, the game was re-released with Windows support.
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This game is surprisingly jank. The movement is very weird with how you run pretty fast on ground but start flying and you lose all momentum and your horizontal speed in air never matches what you can do on foot. The collision detection is really bad with Harry pushing into walls inconsistently and the rules of what he can and cannot fit through change depending on if he’s flying and other obscure factors.
There are these monitors that you pass that seem like they are supposed to behave like checkpoints but they never did anything checkpointy. Did I not know how to use them properly? Sometimes the amount of hostages saved would carry over between me dying but only rarely.
My motivation to revisit this one was nostalgia. This is another game from my childhood shareware memories. The image of Halloween Harry and some Debbie Harry type on the front of CD jewel case is graffitied on the wall in the alleyways of my mind. I remember enjoying it and maybe appreciating the game’s weird qualities. The loop of slaying enemies for coins and then buying weapons was a neat quirk that holds up on replay. While there are health pickups, nothing heals you quite like rescuing hostages and tying survival to completing one’s main objective of saving hostages was a good choice.
Weird, though: the shareware episode ended up being episode 3 in the final product, and it’s easily the best one in the game even if standards are low. The actual first episode Sewers is frustrating with poor level design and a brutal difficulty curve. I got so annoyed with 1-4 that I skipped ahead and skipped past a majority of the game’s final leg too.
Ultimately, even if parts of the game didn’t come off as rushed or unfinished, I don’t see the hypothetical polished product being that good. Levels are labyrinths lacking in personality and you see a lot of what the game has to offer within fifteen minutes.
There are these monitors that you pass that seem like they are supposed to behave like checkpoints but they never did anything checkpointy. Did I not know how to use them properly? Sometimes the amount of hostages saved would carry over between me dying but only rarely.
My motivation to revisit this one was nostalgia. This is another game from my childhood shareware memories. The image of Halloween Harry and some Debbie Harry type on the front of CD jewel case is graffitied on the wall in the alleyways of my mind. I remember enjoying it and maybe appreciating the game’s weird qualities. The loop of slaying enemies for coins and then buying weapons was a neat quirk that holds up on replay. While there are health pickups, nothing heals you quite like rescuing hostages and tying survival to completing one’s main objective of saving hostages was a good choice.
Weird, though: the shareware episode ended up being episode 3 in the final product, and it’s easily the best one in the game even if standards are low. The actual first episode Sewers is frustrating with poor level design and a brutal difficulty curve. I got so annoyed with 1-4 that I skipped ahead and skipped past a majority of the game’s final leg too.
Ultimately, even if parts of the game didn’t come off as rushed or unfinished, I don’t see the hypothetical polished product being that good. Levels are labyrinths lacking in personality and you see a lot of what the game has to offer within fifteen minutes.