Absent Friends: Aliens Versus Predator
It is 1 AM. The room is lit only by the flickering lights issuing from the monitor in the corner. Menacing shadows spring from the banisters of the stairs, looming and dying in the space of a gunshot. The house is asleep, except for one sallow-cheeked yet incredibly attractive man, hunched at the computer and clicking like an enraged crab. On the screen, aliens leap and are cut down by withering hails of fire; they leap again, and again, until finally the man sits back in ragged defeat and eats part of a tangerine.
The man is me. And the game is Aliens Versus Predator. And the living room is my mum’s living room.
I mostly game at night. Mostly.
I have loved Aliens since I was old enough to watch it, which was at age eight. Luckily, I had already been desensitised to violence because my sister forced me to watch Nightmare On Elm Street the previous year, so I was not traumatised by the penis-shaped chestmonsters and disturbingly strong female role models. However, I ended up fetishising the film. Every lunchtime I recruited my friends to play Aliens playground games that all bore quite an incredible resemblance to Tick, though I swore at the time that the two were unrelated. I obsessed over every Aliens computer game I could find, including an old classic on the C64, which shat me up even more than the film did, thanks to the moment about halfway through when all the lights go off and all you can do is wander around screaming and then die.
And it looks just as impressive now!
You young whippersnappers have it easy
Games before Doom were hardcore. You weren’t even expected to complete them; the intention was to have you gibbering in impotent fury as your character expired on level 2 for the three-hundred-and-forty-sixth time, and most games achieved this goal with crotch-punching levels of success. When AvP was released in 1999, it recaptured the incredible stress of those old games by denying you the ability to save your games mid-level, not exactly a calming measure when the game was as hard as a cement block covered in tetanus-tipped diamonds.
Admittedly, the game would have been scarier if any of the aliens could move.
The genius of AvP lay in the random nature of the alien encounters. Although the levels were the same every time, the enemies were in a different place each time you played. Additionally, they would respawn at random intervals, meaning that if you just stood still, eventually you would be found and killed. There was never a safe moment, as I memorably learned when I attempted to roll a jazz cigarette and ended up flinging the contents all over the living room floor while a facehugger viciously raped my nose.
Let there not be light
Darkness pervaded the world of AvP. Very few games have played with the absence light so memorably. As a marine you could throw flares to light your way, but these invariably made the shadows more menacing; alternatively you could switch to infra-red, but you were blinded as soon as you fired your gun. Things got even more awesome with the Predator’s vision: one mode allowed you to see aliens, and another humans, but never both at the same time, which was a perfect recipe for Pant Poop Casserole. This was a far more subtle and plausible mechanic than Doom III’s cheap “torch or gun, but not both” trick, and AvP was released five years before this supposedly classic title. It’s a shame that programmers so often fail to learn from the lessons of their forbears due to being a big pile of tards.
In the “Gayliens” mod, the humans glow yellow when they are sexually aroused.
The biggest mindbugger was playing as the Alien itself. Not only did you move like a greased bastard, you also had the ability to walk on walls and ceilings. This could be hideously disorientating, but there was no finer feeling than crouching on the ceiling while a hapless victim walked obliviously beneath, then dropping to the floor behind him and getting blown to pieces by the twatting sentry gun you didn’t even know was there. Did I mention this game was hard?
Brevity is the soul of not making a godawful storyline
The first two Alien films treated the subject matter with a degree of respect, thanks to the well-written scripts. AvP does the same by not having a script. This was a wise move, since the storylines of most games are about as mature as a bitch-fight in a crèche. In AvP, the only speech comes from videos on the TV screens your character walks past, and they’re largely functional, serving only to explain the nature of the level and your ultimate objective. The actors are reasonably skilled and don’t look too ashamed of their choices in life. Not until the Special Edition that is, when the programmers (oh, those cards) replaced the professional actors with themselves. Results were mixed. In the same way that sewage is mixed before being pumped onto Crosby beach. I tried to find these videos to show you, but they have quite rightfully been erased from history.
I was a worrying young man
I played AvP until I knew every cubic centimetre of every level, and then I played it some more, until certain corridors and bulkheads were more familiar to me than my own family. I played it long past the point of fear, not an easy thing when every playthrough was different; eventually I was acing the game while holding the mouse with my toes and typing with my penis. At this point, I lost interest. As did my friends, who no longer wanted to use my computer for some reason.
When I gave away all my games, there was one CD I just had to hold onto. I don’t even plan on playing the game again, but I was just so damn fond of it for so many years that I couldn’t bear to let the game go. I am aware of how flamingly retarded this sentiment is, but on the other hand I AM SMARTGUNNING YOUR FACE I AM SMARTGUNNING YOUR FACE.
Filed under: Gaming nostalgia
Actually though I have this game I never played it… Hmmm sounds quite addicting, maybe I’ll dig it up…
I don’t know how well the graphics will stand up by today’s standards, but I’m sure you’ll be simultaneously pleased and horrified by the gameplay. It’s fucking hard. Far Cry is like Junior Nerfball compared to this.
Also, is it me, or were 90’s games about twice as fast as they are today? AvP, Half Life and Jedi Knight all feature the main character zooming about like he’s got a jet engine stuck up his arse, whereas today’s FPS games are plodding, sedate bastards. I can only surmise that modern game programmers wash down their sandwiches with cups of thorazine.
I tried (oh how I tried) to play this game, but I believe that I usually made it about 4 minutes into the game before being eaten by something I couldn’t see. This was not exactly the learning curve that I was looking for in a game. I have since played a lot of other games that make this…actually, it’s still hard. Never mind. Those other games? Cakewalks.
“Also, is it me, or were 90’s games about twice as fast as they are today?”
Isn’t that something Wong touched on in one of his articles? It was a bunch of sinister ways game developers extend gameplay without actually coming up with more material. I don’t know if this is one of the points he made, but it certainly sounds like a symptom of the same disease.
That sounds very plausible. The irony is that modern games are actually more realistic, even though they’re cheating.
Jedi Knight’s speed was utterly ridiculous. Standard walking speed was about 15 mph, and when you were running, you could outpace a Lamborghini. When you activated Force Speed, you had to make sure not to run into a wall or you would kill yourself for realsies.
In real life, of course, a Jedi would walk at the same speed as the rest of us.
Ah, as a seasoned gamer you should know graphics aren’t everything, not even close… One of my favorite game-that-I-come-back-to-every-once-in-a-while is Might and magic 7, which looks like it would be pixelated even on a psp screen…
Diablo 3 doesn’t look that pretty (compared with Crysis for example) but it will kick ass through the sheer force of inertion from Diablo 2
Yeah, one of my favourite old games is an ignored classic called Darklands, whose graphics are laughable by todays standards. Nevertheless, it conjures an atmosphere that modern RPGs would kill for.
Man did I love AVP. I played the shit out of this thing. The smartgun is the best gun I have ever played with in any virtual universe, ever.
I played AVP Gold edition, at night, in the dark, with headphones on. This is reserved for few games, such as System Shock 2 (which I am currently replaying.)
I never finished AVP Gold, but later I played AVP2 and damn that game was just as amazing.
Have I mentioned how much I love reading your blog? I got here via Cracked, a while ago.
I also bought this game, because I would buy a urinated upon rag if someone wrote “aliens” or “predator” on it at that age. I dont remember much apart from it totally schooling me, again and again. I dont think I ever embarassed myself so much in at attempt to master a game outside of space hulk on the sega saturn.
Good times.
Ahhh yeah. SS2 is one of those games that I try not to mention to my non-gaming friends, because I get a faraway look in my eyes and a wistful smile which suggests I lost my virginity to it.
The one downside to the game is the heavily dated graphics, but these sound and graphics upgrades go a long way towards fixing that problem.
Oh man, I’m feeling wobbly-lipped just thinking about this game. I’d better go to bed so as not to embarrass myself.
Baby must sleep.
Baby must rest.
Oh yeah, and Space Hulk ate my fucking balls. I loved the insanely over-the-top voice acting which was simultaneously awesome and ridiculous.
There… is… no…. EEEEEEEEEEEEEND to them!!!!!
And there wasn’t.
Ah, memories.
Speaking of AVP and Space Hulk, I have both. And I have never played them. I’ve had them for years, but AVP hates my computer and crashes it, and Space Hulk (which I got when I was still running a hand-me-down MS-DOS box) would never EVER install. I envy you folks who can (could) actually play the games that you have (had).
camerhill said:
“The one downside to the game is the heavily dated graphics, but these sound and graphics upgrades go a long way towards fixing that problem.”
Yeah, I came across those when I was looking for a tweak to set the resolution in SS2 for my widescreen. I tried installing them but something went wrong. Had to revert.
Besides, the models in the upgrades are honestly not as scary. There’s something about the mummified shape and texture of those old models that just gives you the creeps.
FUCK i love that game.
By the way, thanks for plugging “Living in Oblivion.” I loved Concerned, and last night I spent all day reading all the blog archives and then at night I reinstalled good old Morrowind and started playing again and I missed a deadline.
SO THANKS A LOT.
I know what you mean about the new models. I always groan inwardly when I see ridiculously buxom female enemies with breasts carooming all over the place, and that’s what the upgrade does to the midwives. They look cartoony and a little patronising. However, the general texture resolution upgrade is a wonderful thing.
Do you have an NVIDIA graphics card? Until recently, AvP wouldn’t work with them because of a driver issue. However, with the latest batch of drivers, the problem has been fixed. So you may be able to play it now.
Thanks for the tip, Tim. I also got DOSBox Portable for my thumbdrive, so now I have signed away the next 6-8 weeks of my life. Maybe I need to jump on to the game-quitting bandwagon. Do you have an supplemental literature available to go with this blog?
I don’t remember playing AVP that much. It kind of blends together with AVP2 for me (a deadly combination of which nearly failed me out of college during my freshmen year). The point remains valid, though: those were crotchpunchingly excellent games. I’m not sure whether it was the IP or the exceedingly well developed atmosphere of the game (or, as you mentioned, the insanely fun Alien mode), but everything about that game worked.
Not coincidentally, AVP is the reason I don’t play FPS games at night anymore.