Alien Terror
by Binary Magic
A fast-paced action game. Kick some alien butt!
| Earth has been invaded with green, hungry aliens. The army was supposed to eliminate the aliens, but most of them were eaten or placed into alien food storage. You were the only volunteer soldier left, so you are Earth's only hope... |
|
| This game really shines in the QBasic community. The concept is simple, and many games can be made in the same design. In fact, many have. The idea is to just shoot until everything stops moving. The aliens move towards your character relentlessly. The AI is actually ok, since they just won't move towards you regardless of their location. They must actually be near you before they attack. Otherwise they move around aimlessly. The game is quick, depending on the speed setting you chose, and you have 3 lives to get through 10 levels. There is no variation to the game though. You basically move around, and you shoot at the aliens. The method of controlling the character is interesting to note, since you can aim the gun in a direction while moving in another. The only major problem I have with it is that when you lose, the program ends. You don't get to go back to the menu screen. It just ends. So if you want to try again, you will have run the game again. UPDATE for version 1.3: Now you return to the main menu if you exit the game, but it still ends the program when you lose. |
|
| The entire screen is filled with DirectQB powered graphics. You either fight in the forested areas, the snow filled areas, or the city streets. Eventually you get to Alien HQ(which I found kind of cute). Each level is one screen filled with rich colors. The animation is decent, with the animals and aliens moving around and the gun actually looking like a machine gun would. The graphics aren't top notch, but they do this game well, and the pixel by pixel movement works really well also. The aliens have really no variation until you reach the end. Then robots appear also. But other than that, there are no differences between the aliens you meet at the beginning and the ones you face at the end. Still, this game looks fairly good, and I thought it was pretty nice looking, especially since the aliens leave a trail of green blood behind them when they get shot, and you leave red blood when you are attacked. NOTE: This game is not terribly gory, yet it contains animated violence/blood. | |
| You move with the arrow keys, and shoot with ALT. You can also aim with CTRL, but it requires you to be facing in the direction you want to shoot, which can be terrible when you want to move away from the 15 aliens coming at you, and you don't want to move closer to them in order to aim at them. Still, the control is superb, since the game never seems to "make" you do anything or prevent you from moving correctly. If anything negative can be said about it is that there is no option for the user to specify which controls to use. Some people don't like to use the default key configuration. But in this game, you can forgive it since the controls are not too complicated. | |
| While there is no music, this game does have a few sound effects. The gun sounds like it is being used to shoot alien creatures, since you can hear the gunfire and the groans of the aliens as they get hit. You can also hear the splat! as the aliens die. No music, but it is QBasic so we don't expect too much, and the sound effects were more than meeting those expectations. Just a side note, one time I was at work, and I scared quite a few people since it was very quiet and the sound effects were quite loud. B-) | |
| While the game's mechanics are simple enough, the levels become more and more difficult as you go since more and more aliens are there. If you get more than four aliens coming after you, it might get difficult. 10 or more, and you might get lucky. It can get frustrating to lose all three lives when you make it so far because you find out that there is no continue feature. Even more frustrating is that program ending. Having to rerun the game in order to play again is no way for a game to treat its users. Still, the game itself is quite nicely balanced between challenge and ease of use. | |
| I found this game to be quite fun when I played it the first time. Then there was a challenge at the QB Expo that asked what the ending of this game was, so I played it until the end. It took me a few tries (frustrated tries, mind you!), but I managed to get the ending. I was not able to get the challenge point though, because there were two games to play, and I was not able to get to the end of the other one. Playing this game provides fun even after you beat it since it is so challenging. Even though the game doesn't offer anything new, it is easy to pick up and fun to play. Sort of like Tetris, only not as addicting. | |
| Basically, this is a simple shoot-em-up that has some potential(there is a sequel in the works, which I hope adds something to this game). I liked the game overall, with only some design issues that didn't really pose too many problems. The game itself plays well, and I suggest it to anyone who wants a quick game of fast-paced action. | |
| .zip file: 168KB download | |
| V Planet |