Alien: Isolation

I didn't like scary movies as a kid.  I was easily frightened, and didn't understand why people would want to feel that way for fun.  Whenever I heard about the movie "Alien", I was curious because I liked sci-fi, but I was too scared to want to see it.  I saw a doll of the creature on store shelves, and that alone was scary enough for me.  When Aliens came out in 1986, I let that pass me right by.  I remember thinking "Cool title", but that's about it. 

Then my grandmother died, and we inherited a box of her old books.  My Mom asked me to look through it to see if there was anything I wanted to read.  I found a copy of the novelization of Alien, read it, and fell in love.  I then went to the bookstore and picked up Aliens, and finished that just as quickly.  Next I rented both movies, and they immediately became my two favorite movies.  I picked up any other Alien merchandise I could find, which wasn't much at the time.

I bought games based on both movies for the Commodore 64.  The one based on Aliens was an excellent (for the time) collection of minigames, with cut scenes that take you through all the events of the movie.  Some of the minigames were better than others, but you could tell the programmers loved the movie, and really put their best effort into keeping it faithful to the source material.  It would be almost unplayable today, with the primitive graphics, but at the time it was the best movie-based game I'd ever played.

The "Alien" computer game is another story. Graphically, this game was extremely simple.  Your screen showed a map of the ship, with dots representing where different crew members were.  You could highlight specific crew members, and order them to move to other rooms, pick up items, and so on.  However, they didn't follow your orders right away, and would sometimes ignore you completely if you asked them to do something too frightening.  Somewhere on the ship the alien was popping in and out of air ducts, occasionally killing crew members.  Your job was to somehow kill it, keeping as many crew members alive as possible.  Killing the alien was no easy task, considering there were no real weapons on board.  Theoretically you could blow it out the airlock, though I never successfully managed to do that.

My preferred method was setting the ship to self destruct, then using the escape shuttle.  However, there were a lot of rules that kept you from doing this right away.  First off, it could only hold three crew members, and it wouldn't allow you to leave any crew members alive on the ship.  So you would have to wait until there were only three crew members left to use this method (there was also a mode that let you start out with three crew members).  Which leads to the next problem - the cat counted as a crew member.  So before you could blow the ship, you had to get the cat carrier, find the cat, catch it, and bring it with you.  Of course, chasing the cat all over she ship increased your chances of running into the alien.  And whenever you saw the alien, the screen would change to an animated picture of the monster while alarms go off.  The graphics weren't great, but the first time it happened it still made me jump.

The lack of action kept the game from being a hit with my friends, but I loved the psychological aspects of it.  Whenever you highlighted a crew member, you could hear their heartbeat, while their current emotional condition (stable, shaken, etc) was displayed on the screen.  If you kept them calm, they were more likely to follow your orders.  These emotional conditions were affected by factors such as whether they were currently alone in the room, if they were holding something that could be used as a weapon, their location (being in the air ducts made them particularly jumpy), and whether they had recently seen the alien.  Some of the crew members were more easily shaken than others.  Lambert was particularly unstable, and could be killed simply by putting her in a situation so scary it gave her a heart attack.  This could even be a useful strategy if you still have one too many crew members to use the escape ship.

So it wasn't a very pretty game, and it could be incredibly frustrating at times, but in my opinion it captured the spirit of the movie more than any action game ever could.  This was years before Resident Evil coined the term "Survival Horror", but Alien easily belongs in the genre.  I always wished the game could be remade with modern graphics and controls...

...And here comes Alien: Isolation, scheduled to be in stores October 7th.  I have high hopes for this game.  It takes place sometime between Alien and Aliens, with you controlling Ripley's daughter as a member of a crew investigating the disappearance of the original ship.  Predictably, they end up getting an alien on their ship, and the plot runs similar to the first movie from there.  But the big difference between this and the 50 or so other Alien-related games that have come out in the past couple of decades, is you're not blasting waves of aliens with a machine gun.  Instead, Isolation is a tension-filled game of hide and seek, similar in some ways to Clock Tower.  You have to look for different hiding places, from which you might see parts of the alien as it hopefully passes by.  You even have a button to hold your breath so it doesn't hear you.

And they've even announced some DLC that adds scenarios based on the first movie.

This sounds just like what I've hoped for since the C64 game.  I can't wait to try it out.  Please-don't-suck-please-don't-suck-please-don't-suck...