Saturday 18 October 2014

DAY 291 / GAME 291 Alien 3 (SNES)

DAY 291 / GAME 291


Alien 3 (SNES)


      I've been playing a lot of Alien: Isolation since it's recent release a couple weeks back.  I could go on and on about how great a game it is, which is exceptional since there hasn't been a very good Alien game for a long time.  But I also haven't finished it yet, in fact, it seems to me I'm not even half-way through it.  Thinking back, there weren't very many good Alien games.  A number of them that were pretty good, but most all of them either tried too hard to create an action game out of of Alien 3, or were technically terrible.  I've already posted about Alien Trilogy on the Sega Saturn / PlayStation, as well as Alien Infestation on the Nintendo DS.  Two of the better titles to come out of the property.  I also posted about Alien 3 for the Sega Genesis, which was pretty good, even if it had little to do with the movie was based on.  I've yet to bring up however, the Super Nintendo version of this game that was released at the same time.


      Usually, when two consoles are as similar as the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis, you don't see two different versions of the same game built for each system.  Though it does happen, it's usually due to some inside baseball that gives one company the edge over the other.  In this case, I can't seem to find why the two games were so different.  In fact, it appears that the version of Alien 3 I played on the Sega Genesis was released the same year as the film.  It's also the version that is ported across most platforms, including the NES, so it doesn't even seem to be a Nintendo vs Sega thing.  Both the 1992 and 1993 Alien 3 games were developed by Probe and published by Acclaim, so why the two games were so different I have no clue.


     Though I fully enjoyed the Sega version I had played, Alien 3 for the SNES felt like a more thorough, thought out game.  The Sega version was fast paced, there was a strict time limit on each level and you had to run and gun through the entire game, memorizing each level or risk getting lost and running out of time.  The SNES title however was much longer and required the player to complete a number of smaller missions in order to complete the larger level.  There was 6 levels in total and looking back, the first one took a whole hour to complete.  That's a tall order for a console that doesn't let you save mid-way.  


    Probably since it released a year later and was developed specifically for a 16-bit console, the SNES version of Alien 3 featured richer graphics.  The visuals appeared to contain a higher range of colour, producing better gradients and much nicer weapon effects, the flamethrower in particular.  The game still has little to nothing to do with the movie, a movie where no-one had a gun and here Ripley is running around with the same famous loadout she carried in the end of the Aliens film.  Also a movie with one Alien, and of course she fights screenfulls of them in the game.  It seems to me that Alien: Isolation, with it's -being stalked by one alien the entire game- approach would apply quite well to the Alien 3 story.  Of course, even if it was a thing back then, (Clock Tower was the closest thing to it.) good luck convincing Fox to hand the rights to a non-action game.


    I never got very far in Alien 3.  I never owned a copy and always only played a friend's or a rental.  Not to mention, it was a super tough game.  It's one of the many SNES games I had wish I'd got a copy of and certainly one I'd buy in a heartbeat if it were published on either the 3DS or Nintendo Wii-U Virtual Console.  I'm still waiting patiently for the day.

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