Customer Reviews

Alien Disco Safari

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Earlier this year, Roger Ebert rekindled an ongoing debate by claiming that not only are video games not art, no game in our collective lifetimes could ever aspire to be art. Well, Mr. Ebert, I think you've been looking in the wrong places.

The plot begins in 1977 (a possible reference to the popular science fiction film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", released that very same year?), when Earth launches a (fictitious) probe into space with samples of our culture, which, at the time, included disco. Unfortunately, aliens apparently somehow found this probe thirty years later, and found that they too enjoy disco. Obviously this transgression cannot go unpunished, and so the player assumes the role of a heroic gunner who mows down the peaceful invaders as they walk in circles near two different landmarks on Earth, as well as on their own ship.

Let me just say that the graphics and sound are top-notch. The Sega Saturn just doesn't get enough games that look this good. A lot of the 2D sprites even almost had me fooled, and I think it's safe to say that I have a pretty trained eye for this sort of thing. The care the artists put into the four different types of alien really shines through. They could have gotten away with just having one enemy type who went down with one shot on every gun, but the merely "good" is clearly not "good enough" for Encore, because like I said, there are FOUR different enemy types who go down with one shot. And if you were worrying that you would only get to see Egypt, France, or the alien ship once, rest assured, because you get to see them again and again in the game's "46" levels. There's really something for everyone here. Even if the visuals aren't giving you enough Disco Action with their complete lack of anything remotely disco-related, the game's MIDI soundtrack is sure to remind even the most knowledgeable music expert of disco.

Not even these qualities would save the game, though, if its gameplay wasn't fantastic. And that's where the "point and shoot" interface comes in. All you have to do here is click once on the aliens, and bam, they're dead. None of that irritating calculating bullet trajectories, or trying to lead them with your fire, or calculating how much ammo to use, because every enemy dies instantly and in one shot. This continues until you reach your quota for the level, at which point you still get to keep shooting aliens for however much of your 2-minute time limit is left. And for those of you who still need more variety than that, there are 14 "different" weapons, including the sniper rifle, which is like the default perfectly accurate gun, except more accurate; or the laser beam, which kills enemies in one hit like the default gun. And these are just two examples.

I unfortunately wasn't able to reach the end, but don't worry, that's just because this game was too intensely fun for me. Good luck to whoever does complete this game; I'm sure its creators would be interested in learning how it ends.