My childhood and adolescence was marked by what various "phases" of intense, powerful almost obsessional interest in something and then having that something be replaced by something else. Oftentimes these phases overlapped--like how my Star Wars phase lasted from about 1991 up until I sat staring slack-jawed in disappointment at The Force Awakens
The Aliens and Predator phase began after my dad had on the first Predator movie when I was probably 6 or 7 (we weren't a family where my parents were remotely concerned about what my sister and I watched or were exposed to, it all was more or less fair game apparently)
Once I saw the gadgetry and how cool the Predator was, I was all in. At that point in the early-mid 90s, there had been AVP comics for ages already, and the early internet about the two were inexorably tied up together, so it didn't take me long to watch the Alien movies either (shoutouts to my grandpa--WHO HAD HBO gasp--who taped the Aliens director cut so I got to act all cool on the Newsgroups describing the sentry gun scenes).
It was in the midst of all of that fanaticism that I came to know about this game. It was all over game magazines, just like ads for the Jaguar were in general. I was 8 in 1994 and I read every single video game magazine I could get my hands on, and I was obsessed with the idea of it. But there was no way in hell my folks would buy a Jaguar--I had my Mega CD and I was happy with it anyhow.
It became kind of a white whale for me for a while, but emulation was never good enough throughout my tween and teen years, and then it fell off my radar...until like a few weeks ago. I thought "wait, I can probably just play that now huh?"
Turns out yep!
I gotta say I had a blast! I would have gotten wildly lost all the time if not for maps, but I had a lot of fun. And honestly if my child self had been able to play this it would have been all she did for like a year. Apart from the X-Com and TIE Fighter I don't think a game would have been so formative. What I'm saying is I think if I had had a Jaguar and this game in 1994 I would've turned into an FPS head probably
Ok some random thoughts I wrote down while I was playing--these are mostly Marine campaign notes but like, they apply across the board
- Incredibly how long games that don't and didn't ever need a score number kept keeping track of some arbitrary score
- I deeply love that there's just one single corpse style for aliens and you can like, stack them on top of one another
- If you kill an alien inside the elevator it disappears on the next floor loading
- The key that I'm sure the folks in 1994 probably figured out is you can kite the aliens around and not kill all of them. I haven't read contemporaneous reviews of this yet but you will have SEVERE ammo issues as the Marine if you kill every alien
- I love that there's a room FULL of exploding barrels because it tells me that someone on the team thought, "hey we should do this because of the time in Aliens where they said they couldn't shoot their guns"
- Gosh the textures in the Predator ship are some Win 95 maze screensaver stuff
- The Smart Gun is genuinely hilariously powerful. Gotta be up there for lowest fuss-to-highest-killing-power FPS gun right?
- Gotta love a game that has a section of this ostensibly real human space complex called 'The Training Maze'. Impeccable. No notes.
The Aliens and Predator phase began after my dad had on the first Predator movie when I was probably 6 or 7 (we weren't a family where my parents were remotely concerned about what my sister and I watched or were exposed to, it all was more or less fair game apparently)
Once I saw the gadgetry and how cool the Predator was, I was all in. At that point in the early-mid 90s, there had been AVP comics for ages already, and the early internet about the two were inexorably tied up together, so it didn't take me long to watch the Alien movies either (shoutouts to my grandpa--WHO HAD HBO gasp--who taped the Aliens director cut so I got to act all cool on the Newsgroups describing the sentry gun scenes).
It was in the midst of all of that fanaticism that I came to know about this game. It was all over game magazines, just like ads for the Jaguar were in general. I was 8 in 1994 and I read every single video game magazine I could get my hands on, and I was obsessed with the idea of it. But there was no way in hell my folks would buy a Jaguar--I had my Mega CD and I was happy with it anyhow.
It became kind of a white whale for me for a while, but emulation was never good enough throughout my tween and teen years, and then it fell off my radar...until like a few weeks ago. I thought "wait, I can probably just play that now huh?"
Turns out yep!
I gotta say I had a blast! I would have gotten wildly lost all the time if not for maps, but I had a lot of fun. And honestly if my child self had been able to play this it would have been all she did for like a year. Apart from the X-Com and TIE Fighter I don't think a game would have been so formative. What I'm saying is I think if I had had a Jaguar and this game in 1994 I would've turned into an FPS head probably
Ok some random thoughts I wrote down while I was playing--these are mostly Marine campaign notes but like, they apply across the board
- Incredibly how long games that don't and didn't ever need a score number kept keeping track of some arbitrary score
- I deeply love that there's just one single corpse style for aliens and you can like, stack them on top of one another
- If you kill an alien inside the elevator it disappears on the next floor loading
- The key that I'm sure the folks in 1994 probably figured out is you can kite the aliens around and not kill all of them. I haven't read contemporaneous reviews of this yet but you will have SEVERE ammo issues as the Marine if you kill every alien
- I love that there's a room FULL of exploding barrels because it tells me that someone on the team thought, "hey we should do this because of the time in Aliens where they said they couldn't shoot their guns"
- Gosh the textures in the Predator ship are some Win 95 maze screensaver stuff
- The Smart Gun is genuinely hilariously powerful. Gotta be up there for lowest fuss-to-highest-killing-power FPS gun right?
- Gotta love a game that has a section of this ostensibly real human space complex called 'The Training Maze'. Impeccable. No notes.