It's the fundamental for fear. Your mind can get you quicker than anything lurking in the shadows. Argonaut didn't so much make a game with; it built a sky-high wall of tension, then pushed it down onto players standing underneath and screamed 'Look Out!' There's no way to escape its barrage, quick as you may be, and that's the problem with the game. It's designed to crush you, and gives you no means of battling your way out.
On its feet, it's an incredibly frightful game that nails near-perfectly the sudden onslaught of action and, better still, breathless vacant moments of anxiety that compose the best moments of the Alien films. But in a firefight, panic sets in. In real life, adrenaline flows, your muscles tighten, and your sense sharpen. You must be up to survive. Alien: Resurrection is so steeped in atmosphere and tension that it snaps on your abilities when you need them most. According to the gameplay in crisis time, your senses stop, your vision and hearing suddenly overload, your aim goes horribly off and erratic. Failures with this project are heavy heartbreakers, because every Alien game prior to -- and occasionally I still argue even including this one -- have been very good.
Never great, but certainly decent and well-rounded bug-hunts. This is a franchise that even spawned a good Atari Jaguar game.
The key has always been proven and precise control schemes and panicked but thrilling gameplay. This latest PlayStation version works spectacularly on many levels -- incredible sound, chilling environments, explosive encounters -- but when the tension breaks, your vital weaponry conk out and leave you unarmed and defenseless. Control What could possibly go wrong in a terrifyingly paced, tension-filled, visually gruesome Alien adventure? After all, all of the essential elements are here.
Amazon.com: Alien Trilogy PS1: Video Games. Alien Resurrection Sony. Alien Resurrection PlayStation. Oct 05, 2000 Alien Resurrection Review. In the space between the final days of the PlayStation and the launch of the PS2, no one can hear you scream. CoolROM.com's game information and ROM (ISO) download page for Alien Resurrection (Sony Playstation).
The beasts are back, and so is the bitch. Playing on the overwhelming fear factor of the horror films, Alien: Resurrection is a scary game that even tells you ahead of time: 'This game is best played in the dark' Your ammunition is limited. Your weaponry is primitive and ineffective.
And with every new scientist and marine that steps aboard the ship hoping to capture Ripley for her xenomorph-spliced DNA inevitably comes a new alien creature hunting you and your band of survivors. Equipped with little more than a pea shooter when the fit starts hitting the shan, you (as Ripley) make your way out of the prison-like facility in an attempt to shut down all self-destruction mechanisms and overloading systems in an attempt to get out alive.
That's the plot. The play, of course, is alien encounter after alien encounter.
Ruthless and deadly, these creatures kill in all of their forms, and only with split-second timing in every instance does Ripley and her companions (all of whom eventually have levels where they are playable) stand a chance of making it out alive. And suddenly, it's as if the gun goes dead in your hand. Horribly inaccurate gunplay and gameplay trips the aiming hairs over your target. The problem isn't exactly the direct fault of the game itself -- the DualShock and digital PlayStation controls are just not nearly as accurate as a PC mouse -- but without compensation on the programmer's fault, it's still a lethal blow. Tapping on the digital pad almost always slips too far, so even when shooting sitting ducks, aiming is still frustrating. And though the DualShock control pad works miracles in comparison, keeping a lock on the airborne aliens and squirrelly face-huggers is incredibly difficult.
The control just doesn't swing smooth or fast enough to keep up with the incredibly agile aliens, and by the time you draw a bead, they're upon you. Even with the PlayStation mouse, which again ratchets up the accuracy, aspects of the game fight against you. Battling the menacing aliens is made much more difficult by the fact that they do not have kill zones. You can not take out their legs or score a head shot. Not only does this make gunfights truly difficult, since you cannot cripple the beast that is genetically superior to you, but it also takes away much of the strategy and fun of battle. Also, enemies tend to sneak up behind you, and by the time you've reacted (which is just a matter of hitting a turn-around button) they're in your face. Unfortunately, the game's engine craps out in these instances -- not only does the game turn to a pixelly mess (making it tough to see just what you're shooting), but sometimes your gun suddenly punches through the polygons, and you miss with point-blank shots.
In some ways, the faults with the controls are still passable -- good gamers will still be able to adjust and find patterns, and there's always a way to win so long as you keep at it and prove yourself. And after all, look at how crap Resident Evil's control scheme has been over its four-generation span, and yet it's still ready for more. Sadly, the story in the game punks out even worse than the film it's based on -- you never even meet Call and her gang, yet by the second mission you're the best of friends and she's following your orders -- so Alien: Resurrection doesn't have the emotional punch that enraptures RE fans. Still, there's nothing like that feeling of hearing that blip-blip of the motion detector and finding out that something's in the room with you, and that's signature Alien material. Atmosphere For what it's worth, the atmosphere created by the graphics and sound in Alien: Resurrection is second to none in creating fear and tension. The best moments of the game are spent exploring the halls, worried to death that an alien will burst out of the walls or pop out from under the floor.
When they do, it's shocking and violent; but when they don't, it's even more horrifying because you know they are there somewhere, waiting. And so hours are spent easing through blood-smeared caverns, crawling through claustrophobic vent shafts, and dashing through billowing smoke. It could be around any corner. You look up and see blood dripping from the ceiling, and you know it's close. So much detail went into making the game feel lived-in (much like the movie) that you rarely feel the floating-gun feeling of Quake or other FPS's. Even the head-bob animation is incredible. The graphic engine runs on pure ambiance, detailing precise lighting effects, water drips, fog, sparks and electrical currents, and more without a hitch to the graphics.
Alien: Resurrection's framerate is about the best of any FPS on the PlayStation, even with effects full on and corridors stretching several stories tall. Additionally, the audio clamor of this game is spectacular, exhausted in ways most games hardly scratch. The sound team has a soundtrack with rhythm and tension, but there is no musical accompaniment. Instead, it's all indistinct metallic noise and clatter (if you've seen the promotional trailer for Aliens, imagine that stretched for an entire game). Everything in the game was culled from the Fox Studios sound libraries, and is incredibly faithful to the series.
And even though none of the characters speak (a sad oversight), the blood-curdling screams heard down hallways or on the other side of welded doors shows that the effort was better spent where it enhances the gameplay. Unfortunately, so much work went into making every second away from the aliens a nail-biting buzz, and yet the actual encounters are so pathetic.
Aliens follow a script for their motion -- they can leap in and grab onto walls, crawl out from shafts, drop down from the ceiling, or just rip through a wall -- and these sequences are startling. Yet as soon as they're on their feet, the aliens run on a direct course towards you. No AI is used for them, so they don't cower and evade like the graceful predators they are. Even worse, they run on their hind legs after you, looking pathetically wobbly and weak due to the weak animation.
As soon as you come face to face with these awkward gangly versions of the sleek killers, the fear is gone, and the only thing left to be afraid of is the control. The Verdict Over three years of development went into this game -- so much R&D and development time for a product that's now selling at a bargain rate it's first week on store shelves. It's instances like this where I wonder why reviewers even bother with these games, and why it is that when we do, we feel compelled to rip them up and yak out mouths off with hipster-doofus lingo like we're above it all. Who's it really helping when I describe a game as 'monkey poop pressed into silicon' or 'so bad I bit my own hand off so that I wouldn't play it anymore' when the fact remains that no amount of harsh words will make a game play better. So I'll try to go the other route with this game and run it's soiled death rag up a flagpole for others to see and rally to fight against.
Alien: Resurrection made one major mistake, and because of that it falls -- it was never a general in the field, but at least it could have been an honored soldier like other games born of this franchise if it had its battle skills sharpened. You will know the second you've picked up a weapon what's wrong with this game, and it's a tragedy that could have been prevented.
The problem is very simple: For all of its versatility, the DualShock is an inaccurate instrument. It has a naturally steep incidence for motion sensing, meaning that the controller must be pulled a certain degree before it even engages. That's death for a game like this, where precision in attack is crucial to survival. This isn't exactly the most difficult game on the PlayStation -- in fact, all of the events are scripted, so it's just a matter of battening down at certain points after each play through -- but the inaccurate control means that even when you know what's up ahead and are prepared, your control may fail to get you through. This should be the very last time a console game of this nature fails to include Targeting Assistance.
Syphon Filter, EA's N64 Twine, and even Timesplitters have it. When an enemy is perfectly visible on the screen and somewhere near your sights, your gun should shift automatically to the target and stay with it until the target makes a major move that would force players to re-adjust. Players should only have to make small corrections to keep the site glued to the enemy. This isn't to encourage easier gameplay. Rather, games should be intuitive in a firefight.
The toughest part of shooting a target isn't finding one -- I can see a charging alien from ten paces easy, and even a small face-hugger is plenty visible if I'm paying attention. Shooting is about keeping a steady hand and straight sight. Metal Gear Solid nailed this near spot-on -- once you assumed a target in sniper mode, you had a sort of lock, but your hands still shook. The timing was in the trigger accuracy. Players could rely on their skills, and never had to doubt their weapons.
Not that Alien: Resurrection would have been a perfect game with Targeting Assistance. Not by a long shot. But what's here is still gristly, taut fun, just like most every other Alien game in the past, and for every ten moments of frustration, there's at least as many moments where this game looks and feels just right.
Still, that's a horrible ration -- unfortunately about equal to the quality of the two most recent Alien films. This one goes wrong where too many console FPS's and light-gun-sans-gun have gone wrong, and this is a stupid problem that shouldn't be occurring anymore. • 6 Presentation Three years late and without much more than a skeleton of a plot, this Alien encounter is only here for the bug hunt.
• 8 Graphics Slack character animation, but you spend much more time in the creepy blood-smeared halls than against an enemy, and that's where the fear is. • 9 Sound Unquestionably superb, building tension with every human scream, metallic shudder, and dissonant radar blip. • 6 Gameplay When it counts, your aim isn't true. For what it's worth, however, Resident Evil players have put up with a lot worse for a lot longer in the same pursuit -- panic fear.
• 3 Lasting Appeal Scripted events knock you down once, but after ten grueling levels, no man will brave this arduous mission.