A Man and his Penguin

I played the 2006 edition of Alien Arena a long time ago, and I really wasn’t impressed. Although it played okay on my old AMD Sempron-based computer with integrated ATI graphics, I didn’t really think much of the game and instead preferred Nexuiz (which needed a faster computer with better graphics).

Fast forward to late 2007. I heard lots of people saying that Alien Arena 2007 was very good and had a lot of personality. So I tried 2006 again and still hated it.

In the past week I’ve heard a couple of times that AA2007 includes a mode where there are vehicles, and this is one of my favourite parts of Unreal Tournament 2004 (which I play a lot on my new computer).So I leeched off someone else’s internet connection to download Alien Arena 2007.

I still expected the gameplay to be as terrible as Warsow, which suffers from badly-written bots and ineffective weapons. While at first I wasn’t blown away, I did seem to die too much considering I had the bots turned onto "Easy".

Then somehow, it all clicked for me.

Now I quite like Alien Arena 2007. The vehicles aren’t very well thought-up sadly, and it looks like all the levels are small and claustraphobic, but I’m still having some fun with the rocket launcher and chaingun.

Alien Arena 2007 does betray the underlying game engine, or perhaps follow Quake too closely. I’ve never seen the point of "armour shards" which add 1 to your armour, but they are here in AA. The client-server architecture of the game is also obvious - playing a single-player game involves clicking "Host Game", for instance (just like Warsow).

AA2007 does add a couple of things to the genre. Firstly, unlike most other games, it’s not possible to fire just one round from the chaingun. It’s a powerful weapon, but if you fire it you’re committing to fire a certain number of rounds. If you just tap the fire button, the chaingun belches out fire for about a second and a half. Therefore, having good fire discipline is the order of the day when using the chaingun.

There’s also the obligatory Capture The Flag gametype. Team Core Assault is like Unreal Tournament’s "Onslaught" gametype; except with very small maps, much fewer powernodes, and the nodes can be taken or retaken simply by stepping on them (no link gun).

I imagine Deathball mode to be like "Bombing Run", or possibly like Marathon 2’s "Kill The Man With The Ball". The AA2007 gametype "All-Out Assault" is where you get the vehicles, and there’s also a bizarre new gametype called "Cattle Prod" which I couldn’t work out. It’s something about herding cows. Very strange.

I also find it funny that the "OMG I have no ammo!" weapon is called "The Probe". So the event log would say "Player was probed by Cyborg".

In all, Alien Arena 2007 is worth the 200 megabyte download. If you tried the original version, you should check out the new one. Or, you could wait for Alien Arena 2008 which should be out quite soon. Sure, Alien Arena 2007 didn’t blow me away, and in the grand scheme of things it’s not an impressive game, but it’s enough fun. I definitely saw potential in this game and I’m sure each edition will build on this promising base.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 12:34 am and is filed under Open-source application software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.