85% - The first-person shooter Amiga was looking for

Alien Breed 3D

When the Amiga debuted in 1985, what should have followed was a line of computers that in sales paralleled and then far exceeded the Commodore 64. It should have emerged as the sole rival to Microsoft DOS and Windows in the 1990s, with the Amiga drawing in gamers and artists with its techy specs and affordability and Microsoft supporting businesses and a seemingly endless swath of third-party hardware and having a *huge* software library. Instead, it failed to save Commodore - the only thing that could have hindered the system&apos;s market potential - from itself, and the computer giant collapsed in 1994 and putting its own Amiga on the life support of European developers. Too bad the Amiga 1200 couldn&apos;t salvage its future, considering that DOS&apos;s capabilities have caught on big time. It was too little, too late. Still, it did not stop European developers from serving the admirably persevering market with games such as Alien Breed 3D in 1995, a first-person shooter that served as the dejected machine&apos;s badly needed killer app. Well, no, it was not like what Doom was to DOS, and I still prefer Doom. That game is just more polished in just about every aspect. Then again, AB3D had a good cost-per-value ratio as a game for a computer that cost a thousand or so dollars *less* than a typical DOS computer. It was a rare good game for the system in the dark ages.

I know you do not need a recap of what this game, or rather the thing it is based on (how could anyone reading this possibly not know what?), is about. It&apos;s a redundant explanation at this point, but, you know, I am explaining it anyway. In Doom, at a celestial military base, scientists conduct an experiment which goes awry. Disaster strikes, killing everyone there except one, a space marine, who is the only one who can contain it. In AB3D, at a celestial military base, scientists conduct an experiment which goes awry. Disaster strikes, killing everyone there except one, a space marine, who is the only one who can contain it. Get the picture? No? You want the details? All right, in this game, bioengineers inject human DNA into eggs collected from an alien world to facilitate the subjects&apos; cybernetic enhancement. Good grief, hasn&apos;t anyone learned that that is how we got disasters in the 21st century? Oh well, the survivor, Captain J. T. Reynolds, messages his top superior of the predicament and to order a fleet to obliterate the base whether Reynolds escapes, and, of course, the only way he can escape is by *going back to the base*. As I facepalm, I ask, what is it with the scientists&apos; chronic aversion to good disaster management? Is it because they are running tight budget constraints? Whatever the etiology of their aversion, it at least makes for quality entertainment in the form of a science-fiction thriller.

We get past disk loading and copy-protection cringe, and the first thing that hits me is the menu&apos;s relatively unpolished state. It consists of the well-drawn box art, a password, and plain text as the buttons suggesting that AB3D was rushed out despite delays. Then again, I am not playing Alien Breed: The Menu, and it is easy to navigate, so I will let it slide. As for the password, it turns out Team17 could not lend a programmer to add in saved games. They still stuck to the level codes, which in this case are 16 letters long. It&apos;s all right, though. It still stores player health, ammunition, and which weapons have been picked up, and we do not need the cheap ole quick-save anyway. The player should still defend their survival on their first try until at least level 8, and there are plenty of health kits to pick up, for me anyway. Also in the menu is shown the name of the first level: &quot;The Gate&quot;, and you Brits thought I would not have noticed that it is a reference to the level 1 music for Doom, &quot;At Doom&apos;s Gate&quot;. Genius, guys.

After a wall of text showing Reynolds&apos; inner thoughts - and in a bit of good news for plot-thirsty players of shooter games, we are shown one before each level - the first thing I notice while at the Gate is a large UI around a view of the world that covers only a little more than a third the size of the entire screen. The UI is nice, like looking through a helmet that provides readouts on one&apos;s vitality, the amount of ammunition left for the current weapon, and an inventory of up to four colored keys to doors. The black on the sides of the viewing screen flashes red upon taking damage, and the player can pleasingly carry a little more ammo than the meter can display. However, I care more about viewing the world around me, and in something better than the dreadful 2×2 pixel mode. Numpad Enter will enlarge the view, but, unfortunately, the picture quality remains the same, the UI is disabled, and the pixel size simply stretches to 3×3. Once again, it is one of the few trifling flaws to gloss over alone, but cringe at when added together. Another such flaw is that, if playing in mouse mode, there is no strafing with, say, the right mouse button, but at least I can zip and zigzag around, and that is what I did to kill the frighteningly large and quiet yet puny cyber alien in the last level. The soundtrack provided by Bjørn Lynne for the CD32 version (tragically the only difference between the Amiga and CD32 versions, unlike what the box suggests) really suits the mood and theme for the most part, but without a music volume control, gamers not wanting music may prefer the Amiga version. And AB3D strongly recommends a graphics accelerator for machines with the weak 020 processor. Floor and ceiling textures can be disabled, but someone forgot to make sure to speed up the game.

Oh well, who cares, I am blasting away red hounds with my number one weapon, the blaster, watching gibs fly in the air and exploding barrels. I then come across armed mutants and blast them, too. I open the door to the outside with a yellow key, and before me lies some sort of swimming pool. With real elevation, real lighting, and real level shapes, AB3D is the closest fun to Doom that one can have on the Amiga, but it goes further in some aspects. The water is one of them, with the lovely ripples, sound dampened when underwater, and the weight of the player&apos;s armor pulling Reynolds down gracefully. The sheen beauty of H20 is illustriously elucidated in level 3, where most of the rooms are flooded with water. No fish, unfortunately, but no drowning for anyone either. The other leap forward is that platforms can now be stacked one over the other, allowing for spiral staircases, rooms over rooms, bridges, and far more level possibilities. The last technical jump is 3D models. Admittedly, they are few and far between, but by far the best example is the AT-ST Walker in level 8, the only enemy in the entire game that is not rendered as a bitmap.

The human DNA in the aliens means they are more intelligent and more responsive to the environment, compared to the monsters in Doom, and here I shall refrain from any further direct mentions of that game. They are never seen standing still and go on alert when they *feel* Reynolds&apos; presence, making shrills and other inhuman sounds. They also fire slightly in front of the player as AB3D-Guy moves. Shotgunners, slugs with plasma guns, evil tentacles that spawn floating eyeballs, it&apos;s all monster fun, especially in the dark, tight corridors. Remember the large, floating meatball from you-know-what? The Cacodemon is back in AB3D, but as an Alien Breed ripoff which the game calls the &quot;Floating Thing&quot;. I am starting to think the documentation and the game&apos;s prospects were a bit of an afterthought, but I digress. Reynolds begins with his Imperial Blaster, but must find the other four to use them: a shotgun that goes &quot;BOOM!&quot;, plasma gun, grenade launcher, and the monstrosity that is the rocket launcher. While all of these are very useful, the grenade launcher has a special tactical advantage (it is vital before jumping down into one large room filled with beasts everywhere, without which entry is suicide), though I feel as if a sixth weapon is missing. Speaking of which, guns are your only means of self-defense, so you had better consume your ammo frugally. I recommend you find secret areas for goodies, which is how I got all five weapons by level 4.

AB3D is not without a few downers, though. The levels are large and sometimes maze-like, and while visual cues such as fresh corpses help, it can be disorienting finding one&apos;s destination, since there is no automap. Worse, the multiplayer mode has two players grinding each other in one of the game&apos;s humongous levels (except the last, for some reason) with all doors open and no monsters until one of them dies. No modem play, no cooperative mode as the box promised. If only the game had more efficient code. Consider me lucky then that I could not test it on my computer in two instances of WinUAE.

VERDICT: Alien Breed 3D is the closest thing to *the* first-person shooter on the Amiga. There, I said it. AB3D has everything from suspense and tension to guts and action, with a few tricks to compensate for what it cannot do. True, the programming is a little uneven, an automap would have helped the game&apos;s pace, and was it really so groundbreaking not being able to look up and down in 1993 that it had to be repeated in this game, especially when the (oh, deary me) Floating Things often hover high in the air? Never mind, the good news is that every one of those criticisms, except (naturally) the multiplayer, was heeded in the next game, The Killing Grounds. The bad news is, the sequel is mediocre. As a redeeming factor, both games have their source code available, which theoretically allows for level creation for the first beyond the 16 it comes with. Team17 might not have realized it, but they were onto something. Giving it the same developmental treatment as Worms might have turned it into a true classic, but it is still one of the best games for Amiga AGA computers.

When the Amiga debuted in 1985, what should have followed was a line of computers that in sales paralleled and then far exceeded the Commodore 64. It should have emerged as the sole rival to Microsoft DOS and Windows in the 1990s, with the Amiga drawing in gamers and artists with its techy specs and affordability and Microsoft supporting businesses and a seemingly endless swath of third-party hardware and having a *huge* software library. Instead, it failed to save Commodore - the only thing that could have hindered the system's market potential - from itself, and the computer giant collapsed in 1994 and putting its own Amiga on the life support of European developers. Too bad the Amiga 1200 couldn't salvage its future, considering that DOS's capabilities have caught on big time. It was too little, too late. Still, it did not stop European developers from serving the admirably persevering market with games such as Alien Breed 3D in 1995, a first-person shooter that served as the dejected machine's badly needed killer app. Well, no, it was not like what Doom was to DOS, and I still prefer Doom. That game is just more polished in just about every aspect. Then again, AB3D had a good cost-per-value ratio as a game for a computer that cost a thousand or so dollars *less* than a typical DOS computer. It was a rare good game for the system in the dark ages.

I know you do not need a recap of what this game, or rather the thing it is based on (how could anyone reading this possibly not know what?), is about. It's a redundant explanation at this point, but, you know, I am explaining it anyway. In Doom, at a celestial military base, scientists conduct an experiment which goes awry. Disaster strikes, killing everyone there except one, a space marine, who is the only one who can contain it. In AB3D, at a celestial military base, scientists conduct an experiment which goes awry. Disaster strikes, killing everyone there except one, a space marine, who is the only one who can contain it. Get the picture? No? You want the details? All right, in this game, bioengineers inject human DNA into eggs collected from an alien world to facilitate the subjects' cybernetic enhancement. Good grief, hasn't anyone learned that that is how we got disasters in the 21st century? Oh well, the survivor, Captain J. T. Reynolds, messages his top superior of the predicament and to order a fleet to obliterate the base whether Reynolds escapes, and, of course, the only way he can escape is by *going back to the base*. As I facepalm, I ask, what is it with the scientists' chronic aversion to good disaster management? Is it because they are running tight budget constraints? Whatever the etiology of their aversion, it at least makes for quality entertainment in the form of a science-fiction thriller.

We get past disk loading and copy-protection cringe, and the first thing that hits me is the menu's relatively unpolished state. It consists of the well-drawn box art, a password, and plain text as the buttons suggesting that AB3D was rushed out despite delays. Then again, I am not playing Alien Breed: The Menu, and it is easy to navigate, so I will let it slide. As for the password, it turns out Team17 could not lend a programmer to add in saved games. They still stuck to the level codes, which in this case are 16 letters long. It's all right, though. It still stores player health, ammunition, and which weapons have been picked up, and we do not need the cheap ole quick-save anyway. The player should still defend their survival on their first try until at least level 8, and there are plenty of health kits to pick up, for me anyway. Also in the menu is shown the name of the first level: "The Gate", and you Brits thought I would not have noticed that it is a reference to the level 1 music for Doom, "At Doom's Gate". Genius, guys.

After a wall of text showing Reynolds' inner thoughts - and in a bit of good news for plot-thirsty players of shooter games, we are shown one before each level - the first thing I notice while at the Gate is a large UI around a view of the world that covers only a little more than a third the size of the entire screen. The UI is nice, like looking through a helmet that provides readouts on one's vitality, the amount of ammunition left for the current weapon, and an inventory of up to four colored keys to doors. The black on the sides of the viewing screen flashes red upon taking damage, and the player can pleasingly carry a little more ammo than the meter can display. However, I care more about viewing the world around me, and in something better than the dreadful 2×2 pixel mode. Numpad Enter will enlarge the view, but, unfortunately, the picture quality remains the same, the UI is disabled, and the pixel size simply stretches to 3×3. Once again, it is one of the few trifling flaws to gloss over alone, but cringe at when added together. Another such flaw is that, if playing in mouse mode, there is no strafing with, say, the right mouse button, but at least I can zip and zigzag around, and that is what I did to kill the frighteningly large and quiet yet puny cyber alien in the last level. The soundtrack provided by Bjørn Lynne for the CD32 version (tragically the only difference between the Amiga and CD32 versions, unlike what the box suggests) really suits the mood and theme for the most part, but without a music volume control, gamers not wanting music may prefer the Amiga version. And AB3D strongly recommends a graphics accelerator for machines with the weak 020 processor. Floor and ceiling textures can be disabled, but someone forgot to make sure to speed up the game.

Oh well, who cares, I am blasting away red hounds with my number one weapon, the blaster, watching gibs fly in the air and exploding barrels. I then come across armed mutants and blast them, too. I open the door to the outside with a yellow key, and before me lies some sort of swimming pool. With real elevation, real lighting, and real level shapes, AB3D is the closest fun to Doom that one can have on the Amiga, but it goes further in some aspects. The water is one of them, with the lovely ripples, sound dampened when underwater, and the weight of the player's armor pulling Reynolds down gracefully. The sheen beauty of H20 is illustriously elucidated in level 3, where most of the rooms are flooded with water. No fish, unfortunately, but no drowning for anyone either. The other leap forward is that platforms can now be stacked one over the other, allowing for spiral staircases, rooms over rooms, bridges, and far more level possibilities. The last technical jump is 3D models. Admittedly, they are few and far between, but by far the best example is the AT-ST Walker in level 8, the only enemy in the entire game that is not rendered as a bitmap.

The human DNA in the aliens means they are more intelligent and more responsive to the environment, compared to the monsters in Doom, and here I shall refrain from any further direct mentions of that game. They are never seen standing still and go on alert when they *feel* Reynolds' presence, making shrills and other inhuman sounds. They also fire slightly in front of the player as AB3D-Guy moves. Shotgunners, slugs with plasma guns, evil tentacles that spawn floating eyeballs, it's all monster fun, especially in the dark, tight corridors. Remember the large, floating meatball from you-know-what? The Cacodemon is back in AB3D, but as an Alien Breed ripoff which the game calls the "Floating Thing". I am starting to think the documentation and the game's prospects were a bit of an afterthought, but I digress. Reynolds begins with his Imperial Blaster, but must find the other four to use them: a shotgun that goes "BOOM!", plasma gun, grenade launcher, and the monstrosity that is the rocket launcher. While all of these are very useful, the grenade launcher has a special tactical advantage (it is vital before jumping down into one large room filled with beasts everywhere, without which entry is suicide), though I feel as if a sixth weapon is missing. Speaking of which, guns are your only means of self-defense, so you had better consume your ammo frugally. I recommend you find secret areas for goodies, which is how I got all five weapons by level 4.

AB3D is not without a few downers, though. The levels are large and sometimes maze-like, and while visual cues such as fresh corpses help, it can be disorienting finding one's destination, since there is no automap. Worse, the multiplayer mode has two players grinding each other in one of the game's humongous levels (except the last, for some reason) with all doors open and no monsters until one of them dies. No modem play, no cooperative mode as the box promised. If only the game had more efficient code. Consider me lucky then that I could not test it on my computer in two instances of WinUAE.

VERDICT: Alien Breed 3D is the closest thing to *the* first-person shooter on the Amiga. There, I said it. AB3D has everything from suspense and tension to guts and action, with a few tricks to compensate for what it cannot do. True, the programming is a little uneven, an automap would have helped the game's pace, and was it really so groundbreaking not being able to look up and down in 1993 that it had to be repeated in this game, especially when the (oh, deary me) Floating Things often hover high in the air? Never mind, the good news is that every one of those criticisms, except (naturally) the multiplayer, was heeded in the next game, The Killing Grounds. The bad news is, the sequel is mediocre. As a redeeming factor, both games have their source code available, which theoretically allows for level creation for the first beyond the 16 it comes with. Team17 might not have realized it, but they were onto something. Giving it the same developmental treatment as Worms might have turned it into a true classic, but it is still one of the best games for Amiga AGA computers.

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