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'Playstation 3 media launch with Oracle' Podcast
by Yug

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22 May

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22 May

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22 May

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23 May

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23 May

Aliens.

They seem to be everywhere you look these days. I once thought I had some Aliens living in my belly button, but on closer inspection they turned out to be lint. Regardless, you can’t be too careful when dealing with the current alien threat so it’s for the best that SEGA have revived their Alien Syndrome franchise for the Nintendo Wii. Video games can turn children into killing machines and if there’s something that needs killing, then that something is unwanted aliens.

Originally an arcade machine, Alien Syndrome was also one of the few decent ports for Commodore 64. The game play was a simple top down shooter not unlike Gauntlet or Paradroid, with the variety of weapons and aliens to kill proving to be the truly interesting part of the game.




Some people say that I’m a simple man with traditional views, probably because of my refusal to use deodorant and thus I was predicting and hoping for some simple but entertaining game play from Alien Syndrome. Like my earlier diagnosis of aliens living in my belly button however, I would be proved wrong.

Alien Syndrome plays from a top down perspective using the wii nunchuk to move your character and the wiimote to aim at or stab your alien enemies. The movement part works well enough but the stabbing and aiming doesn’t really work very well at all. This doesn’t really become an issue until about a half hour into the game because you spend the first thirty minutes of the title watching cut scenes and wandering around a hanger. This wouldn’t really be an issue either if the cut scenes weren’t just static pictures with a pointless story and the hanger wasn’t an empty room filled with a hundred crates that needed smashing to find a key to the next room.

Once your outside the hanger, the action heats up as you battle a hoard of aliens who look like turds using the sloppy combat controls. Maybe I have aliens in my toilet that launch ships from my butt because these aliens look like my turds. Brown turds. The space ship you run through is grey and your player is mostly green. All of this ugly green/turd brown/grey action made me wonder what the other kids where playing these days. I’d imagine it’s probably something better than this. In between all this poop slaying there is the supposedly “Action RPG” feature of levelling up your weapons. I’m not sure if levelling up weapons makes a game an “Action RPG” but if it does then you’d better add R-Type and countless other scrolling shooters to my list of favourite Role Playing Games.




I roped in The NicoleBear™ to take the roll of the other player, who may have been a green girl or the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, I couldn’t tell, and tied another wiimote to The Dirty Sanchez Puppy Dog™ in order to try salvage some multiplayer fun from the title. The dog ended up doing better than The NicoleBear and I combined but none of us enjoyed any part of it. Some websites might say that the multiplayer aspect of Alien Syndrome is “solid” but they are lying to you because they featured the developers diary for a few months and had to say something positive. I did not find the multiplayer to be “solid” , I found it to be insulting to not only my friends, but also my dog. I also don’t like Bono from U2 or parents who let their kids run around in the shopping centre barefoot, but that is probably a more personal issue that doesn’t need explaining here. I’m not even that keen on this new EMO thing that’s going on, but again, I’m digressing from my original goal and that is to tell you not to buy Alien Syndrome for your Wii because it has a boring story, ugly graphics, unremarkable sound, repetitive game play and poor controls.

Final Verdict

Shave your chest hair, pick the lint out of your belly button and make yourself a Alien Diorama, it’ll be more faithful to the coin-op original and you’ll have a lot more fun than playing Alien Syndrome Wii.

Pros
The game loaded and never crashed once.
If you like grey and green and brown you will love the graphics.
You’ve got a friend with Frisbee.
Cons
The wiimote attack controls are unresponsive and sloppy.
The story is about as deep as the lyrics to Def Leppard's “Pour Some Sugar On Me”
The graphics look like they come from about the same era.