Alien 3 (SNES) review "It’s when you start shooting things that problems begin."

Ever wonder why the Super Mario franchise has become the ubiquitous mega-franchise it is today? Indeed, how have a pair of running and jumping plumbers become the oasis of entertainment in an industry flooded with imitators? That's a broad subject for this retrospective review, but we can make a study of Alien 3 as an example of what does not make a fun platforming game.

But first, the premise: You are Ripley, the mother-warrior alien slaughterer of "Aliens" fame. We find our heroine stranded on a space station overrun with Xenomorphs, to put it mildly. How she arrived there and what she's doing is anybody's guess, and Probe doesn't give out hints to explain, not even an image from the movie or crimson text. Instead, the game opens up with a movie-style rendition of the title sequence and then drops us ceremoniously into the thick of it with her trademark flamethrower taped to a machine gun.

How is it that everything Ripley does in Alien is so badass, and everything she does in Alien 3 is so forgettable? Probe Entertainment helmed this massacre in 1993, and I don't think their genre choices were limited just because of the SNES hardware, as there are hundreds of examples of coding prowess on the console. It is evident to me, however, that they played to the strengths of the hardware: Overlays, transparencies and hardware-accelerated scrolling. Lots and lots of scrolling.



So, Ms. Stranded On A Space Station With Nothing To Kill but Aliens, what's next? Why, terminal assigned missions, of course! Enjoy the blue pixel art of Sigourney Weaver staring at the screen because that's all you're getting. Frankly, for all of the military greens, greys and sepias, Aliens 3 isn't actually bad-looking. Probe makes a moderate effort to give us something to look at, and Ripley – bald as the station is infested – is animated with some fluidity. Her movement physics don't reflect this at all, but the controls are suitably responsive.

It's when you have to start shooting things that the problems begin. Anything that can be hit just standing is okay for the most part, but it's those creeping face-huggers that'll be the death of you. By the time you press down to crouch, it's usually too late to slap a thumb down on the flamethrower or machine gun, and voila, you've taken a hit and lost 6% of your health. Death by inches is Probe's chosen tool of torture. The trouble is that Ripley isn't fast enough to shoot them all, and hitboxes are a mishmash of poorly conceived design. Some of this is inherent to the nature of the characters, but it just seems rushed to me.



That wouldn't be such an annoyance if they weren't randomly spawning around you all the time. Memory constraints were an unavoidable reality of the SNES because you had to pare back the graphics to keep track of all the enemies on screen, which means they could endlessly respawn. It was a common problem often mitigated by distancing enemies from each other or providing environmental warnings to the player. Play the first level of Super Mario World, and you'll see what I mean. Alien 3 employs large digitized backgrounds and platform sprites to a good but largely bland effect. Ridley's relatively smooth animated sprite dominates the majority of system RAM. So much so that you might not even notice the aliens aren't animated with more than three frames. When you do notice – you're welcome – it is an unattractive indicator of where corners were cut.

Even though ammo and health are "infinite" where they appear on the map, Probe is totally draconian about continues and extra lives. Spoiler: You only have one life to live, and continues are handed out only after completing a stage, not after each completed mission. This means after staring at the slobbering jaws of the Xenomorph that presumably had its way with you, you get to do it all again. Adding insult to injury is a sample of that private crying, "Game Over, Man!" Is that a goading they're using as encouragement?

No thanks, man. Alien 3 wasn't fun in 1993, and it doesn't have any retro charm to make it a worthy consideration for anyone other than die-hard memorabilia collectors. What is a retro charm, you ask? The short answer to that is "nostalgic buzz." Y'know, that feeling that Nintendo counts on you experiencing when they sell us Super Mario World for $12 (CDN) twenty-six years after its original release. You'll buy that, but no one is scrambling to serve this one up hot or cold in emulation on a mainstream console, and that's the point.



What Alien 3 does well is countermanded by phoned-in missions that have no impact on the stage you're playing. For instance, sealing up Medic Bay #8 is supposed to "seriously curtail" alien movement, but even after the fact, they relentlessly spawn to demonstrate Probe's idea of difficulty. Which is, in point of fact, lazy. It wouldn't bother me so much if Ripley could reliably kill 'em, but with limited munitions, a few missed shots just amp up my aggravation and lead to inevitable game over screens.

Alien 3 does not follow in its cinematic footsteps and instead presents Ripley as the female Rambo sans any motivation, leaving us with an emotionally and mechanically facile game. There's more, you say? Did I forget the grenades? No, decidedly not. The screen is too crowded to play with them, and all they do is go "pop." No bouncing or rebounding physics. In short, they're no fun, and in such limited supply, they're relegated to the weapon of last resort.



Which brings me to the conclusion that this game is also one of those, except for the music. The SNES had one significant advantage over its competitor, and that was sampled audio, though it could be put to better use here. Some of the music is energetic, and there are themes affixed to mission types, but they will slip from your memory pretty quickly. Thanks again to capacity limitations and corners cut in the name of cost, everything is muffled and lacks any attack to amp up the tension. Remember how fearsome that machine gun sounded as it tore into those not-so-kinder-suprise eggs? That's a nostalgic sound that Probe reduced to a simple, unimportant repeating snap.

But wait! There's more: Unless I misread the title, these are Xenomorphs we're killing, right? Every single one dies with what could be a cry from a very distempered seagull. Squawk here, scree-awk there. Totally unsatisfying, especially considering the frequent rate of enemy spawns. Did they think it was enough to terrorize the player with enemies who would freeze in mid-air while taking damage? The larger aliens explode with a moderate screen shake, so that's something.

If nothing else, this experience verifies why I so quickly put this title down back in 1993. This game exhibits some of the genre's worst traits mechanically and some of its best graphically. It was logical to make use of the SNES' superior graphical quality in those days, but then to slap on a survival-style mode of play without any means of survival is an unfortunate waste. There was room for subtlety here, but perhaps there was not enough time or interest in the development cycle. Alien fans can easily find a superior retro experience in the vastly superior Atari Jaguar first-person shooter Aliens vs Predator. Good hunting!

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Community review by hastypixels (October 22, 2017) Wisdom comes from effort and mistakes.