Status Chovus Apr 2, 2025
I tried to play this on PSP but ran into a game breaking issue. I first tried Hard but once I realized it restricted each save point to 1 use only I restarted on Normal. I had my usual shooter control set up with R and L strafing, triangle for aim mode, square shoot. I had to lower the turn …
I tried to play this on PSP but ran into a game breaking issue. I first tried Hard but once I realized it restricted each save point to 1 use only I restarted on Normal. I had my usual shooter control set up with R and L strafing, triangle for aim mode, square shoot. I had to lower the turn and look sensitivities to the lowest setting to get any kind of precision. Now I could actually use the aim mode without constantly overshooting the target, but the character took several seconds to turn. Needless to say this was terrible and it was clear the game was not meant to be played with a controller, or at least not without using analog sticks. The game breaking problem was scripted doors and force fields not opening. Researching a solution online it appeared the developers designed the scripts to read in game sound files to know when to unlock, but emulators could not play those sounds accurately enough without a special plugin. It happened in the 1st level but I figured out the door only broke if I loaded the save. So just had to play far enough to open that door without saving or dying. Level 2 had no issues. Level 3 though was where I could not progress. I tried different combinations of things and managed to get past 2 bugged doors but the 3rd was not happening. So I abandoned the game for several months until starting it on pc.
I used pcsxr emulator and followed a guide to get it set up specifically for this game, but it was not straight forward at all. I downloaded the playstation bios but nothing seemed to change and I am not sure that was even necessary. The game was very choppy and it seemed liked changing graphics settings to opengl fixed that. I changed a few other graphic settings based on a guide but I am not at all familiar with this emulator and these settings. So I started on Hard without using any of those plugins yet. The game was pretty much the same as on PSP, only I was using WSAD to move, up arrow to aim and left arrow to shoot. Save states helped a lot and as far as I could tell Hard just limited saves and made enemies hit harder. Ladders were annoying until I figured out the way to descend was to walk forward into the ladder instead of strafing from the side. The controls were a pain so I resolved to fix that for the rest of the game. Nuvee plugin assigned to controller 2 and lilypad plugin assigned to controller 1 allowed me to use the mouse like a proper shooter. I could actually both turn like lightning and get precise head shots. But there were other kinks to work out. All key bindings had to be done manually since nothing was bound by default. Then I had to change the lilypad input type to direct instead of the default windows messaging because otherwise the emulator hotkeys did not work, meaning I had to use task manager to exit out of the game. The next issue was in level 3 when I got infected by a face hugger. Using the autodoc to cure permanently disabled the mouse. I had to restart the level and treat face huggers as instant death, but that was not a big deal with save states and good controls. I fiddled with the mouse settings but could not get around this issue. Maybe saving and reloading could fix it, but good luck using a save point without being able to turn. It would not be so crippling if the control scheme had backup key bindings for turning and looking. Then I ran into the same door issue as on PSP and realized I had to change the emulator audio settings to use the special sound plugin, changing the async to smooth. This got me through the door but introduced new issues. Now the mouse temporarily did not work while scripted sounds were playing, which got me killed a few times. Another situation where backup turning buttons would have been handy. The other issue was the sound would sometimes stutter and loop for several seconds, which was annoying, broke the atmosphere, and caused me to miss alien audio cues.
I beat the game with way more ammo and health items than I needed. Hard was very unforgiving because the xenos could kill in seconds, and the game liked to spawn them behind and in ambushes, and they often jumped around too fast to keep up with, all leading to a lot of melee range combat. There were lots of sudden deaths, and lots of situations where I could not believe I got out alive, like when 2 xenos spawned behind me, and thinking the threat was from the front I backpedaled at the same time as they both leaped forward. They completely missed me and were in the perfect position to shoot. A lot of times victory was down to having to correct weapon equipped. Pulse rifle was the best, able to mow down 3 or 4 xenos before they got close enough to attack. I also used it on soldiers, the queen boss, and the rocket launcher boss. Shotgun was only good at very close range and each blast staggered enemies. It countered xenos camping on the other side of doors with their otherwise unavoidable leap attack. Flamethrower was mediocre with poor range, mainly good for killing face huggers at close range. I did kill a few xenos with it but it was extremely unlikely to do so without taking damage. Grenade launcher was the only weapon Ripley could use underwater and could kill multiple xenos in a single shot, but it was easy to kill myself with it. I avoided using it unless the enemies were stationary and not coming towards me. The electric gun in the final level was almost as good as the pulse rifle only it needed to charge up for a couple seconds before it could 1 shot xenos at medium range. It was terrible without charging up and the charge could not be saved as the entire clip would deplete until automatic discharge when out of ammo. So it was tough to deal with xenos at melee range. Pistol ammo was infinite and it was the best way to kill face huggers, but it was bad against xenos. It took 10 shots to kill a xeno while the clip only held 12, plus backpedaling speed was slow, so it was extremely unlikely to kill a lone xeno without taking damage. There were a few times when the distance was enough and others where I save state scummed it to work. It was unnecessary though. The other characters had a few unique weapons; laser gun was similar to pulse, rocket launcher was similar the the grenade, and dual pistols was twice as good as 1. The final boss was annoying because every time I disabled it, the loud roar disabled my mouse, which made it tough to turn the valves. It was not too difficult though and I had plenty of electric ammo. Towards to end I figured out there was stealth in that crouching near eggs did not alert the face huggers inside.
Despite all of the emulation woes this was a fun immersive survival horror fps. I'd say Doom 3 took a lot of inspiration. I can only assume that the emulation troubles were from spaghetti coding but the game was pushing the limits of the ps1 with impressive graphics. The levels dragged on a bit too long with a lot of copy paste rooms, which I guess made sense for a space ship. The biggest flaw was no map, since some levels were huge with multiple paths. The enemy variety was limited, with only 3 kinds of soldiers, face huggers and xenos. 2 xenos near the end had different coloring but did not seem to be any stronger or behave any different. Overall I think this game was a little better than Alien Trilogy, assuming the controls and sound were as good on original hardware as the demo reel showed.
7.2/10
