Tuesday 15 December 2009

Alien Breed (Amiga)

Alien Breed is out tomorrow on XBLA, apparently. Big deal - I've got every Amiga version of Alien Breed upstairs. My mate was obviously a big fan. So, what better timing than to play the original version for my blog than right now?

I was quite excited when I opened the box... in something of a novelty, not only did the game come with two game disks, but also a story disk. A nice touch, I thought, and popped it into the drive to have a look-see before I played the game. Pity, then, that the disk suffered a software failure. Bloody old tech!

Oh well, not to worry. At least the game works... something which, after play, I am glad of.

I think it's pretty fair to say that Alien Breed is pretty much "Gauntlet... iiiiin SPAAAAAAAACE!". It's got more or less exactly the same mechanic... wander around mazes, using keys to open doors, collecting health and then getting the hell out of there. Luckily, there's a little bit more to it than that... there's more of a story and an objective than in Gauntlet.


Die, alien scum! Funny how they explode when you shoot them...

Also, things are broken up a little by the fact you can access a computer at certain locations, which is handy for all kinds of things. Best of these is the shop, sorry, weapons upgrade facility. There's quite a range of firepower... which you WILL need. Or if you're just bored with blasting aliens, you could have a nice relaxing game of Pong...

Alien Breed is, indeed, a spacey version of Gauntlet. I thought this might be a problem, as I get bored with Gauntlet quite easily. I did find myself drawn into Alien Breed, although with such a big game, the need to start from the beginning with each game can irk after a while.

As something of a Stop Press, I've now played the demo of the 360 version (thanks to the wonders of only half-finishing blog posts). It seems quite promising... there's a lot of darkness, which leads to some jumpy scares. I expect I'll buy it over Christmas, although 800 points for the first part of a trilogy seems a mite excessive. Maybe I'll just stick to all my Amiga versions...

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