Long before Alien vs. Predator was a disappointing movie, it was a disappointing video game first!
We got a couple of different Alien vs. Predator games in the 1990s, and pretty much all of them were awesome.
There was the excellent arcade game from Capcom that let you play as Arnold’s character from the first Predator movie. Then there was Alien vs. Predator on the ill-fated Atari Jaguar console, which may have been the first TRULY great home system first person shooter ever. Then we got that great shooter on the PC in 1999, which is STILL one of the best survival horror games of its era.
Which brings us to Alien vs. Predator on the Super Nintendo. Which, uh, isn’t quite so great.
It’s not that Alien vs. Predator is a bad game, per se. Indeed, I’d consider it a slightly better than average beat-em-up game on a console that had a lot of slightly better than average beat-em-up games. Pretty much all of the great things about this particular game are strictly aesthetic — the design of the characters, the shout-outs to the movies, the comic-book-like cutscenes. The core gameplay is OK, but just OK isn’t going to cut it when you’ve got Streets of Rage 2 and Final Fight as your contemporary, in-genre competition.
Alright, let’s get a little bit of the background stuff out of the way. The game was published by Activision (the guys who would later make a gazillion dollars off Tony Hawk and Call of Duty) and developed by an obscure Japanese firm called Jorudan … who, in one of those idiosyncratically Japanese kind of things, is much more famous for making public transportation websites than they are actual software.
You have to remember, this game came out eleven years before the first Alien vs. Predator movie. There were a couple of comic books and a crossover action figure line, but beyond that the makers of the game had precious little to go on. You kind of get the idea that the designers basically understood what both properties were about, but they had no idea how to wrap them together into anything even remotely resembling a coherent story. Which isn’t that big of a problem when you’re making a Super Nintendo game that’s 90 percent punching alien monsters right in the face over and over again.
Now, this iteration of Alien vs. Predator does have a few things going for it. For starters, the character design is great and the sprites are very large and detailed. Several of the Xenomorphs you encounter are clearly modeled after the concomitant toy line and it’s pretty neat seeing them in live action on your TV screen. You also get a couple of different power-ups on loan from the Predator filmography, including spears, invisibility cloaks and my personal favorite, those sawblade thingies designed exclusively for bifurcating Gary Busey at the waist. You can even collect the skulls of your enemies after vanquishing them for extra points, which is a neat little nod to the series lore.
The backgrounds, though, are pretty generic. There’s a sewer level, there’s a debris covered street level, there’s this one level where you’re on an elevator (by the way, what is it with elevators and these kinds of games?), there’s the obligatory snow level, etc. The final level is just absurdly long with a million-gazillion aliens tossed at you as you endlessly navigate this spaceship with a bunch of stuff hurtling at you at light speed in the background. There’s virtually no platforming in the game, either, so punching and impaling stuff is pretty much all you’ll be doing in this one.
The combat system is a disappointment. You can punch, you can jump (which produces a hilariously inappropriate springy sound effect) and you can kinda baseball slide into enemies. Beyond that, though, the only other thing you can do is walk around. Like, the game doesn’t even bother using half of the buttons on the SNES pad, and I can admire that commitment to simplicity to some extent. Unfortunately, the lack of offensive maneuvers makes this a VERY repetitive game, made even more repetitive due to its lack of a two-player mode, which is the one truly unforgivable sin for a title of its ilk.
The music is pretty bland, too, mostly comprised of generic sci-fi sounding suites that don’t really fit the mood and atmosphere of the game at all. And considering how frustratingly long some of the levels are, you’ll be hearing the tracks on a loop until you’re ready to hit the mute button on your remote.
It’s hard to call it a worthwhile game, but it’s not a total loss, either. The bosses look FANTASTIC and it’s pretty neat seeing the two iconic movie monsters lock horns in what’s tantamount to a Jackie Chan battle royale. There’s not much depth or nuance at all to the experience, but that’s somewhat irrelevant. Sure, you’re just hitting the same buttons a million times, but there’s some innate fun to it and I still played my way through the whole thing despite its repetitive nature.
This is the kind of game you can mindlessly wade through for about an hour while waiting for your meatloaf to cool off. It’s certainly not the best game of its type, but its moderately enjoyable in short little spurts. And it’s hardly the worst Alien or Predator branded game out there … as we should ALL know by this point.
