Alien³ (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

Description:

A playthrough of LJN's 1993 license-based platformer for the NES, Alien³. Alien³ on the NES, like every other Alien³ game, doesn't follow the movie particularly closely. Of course, it'd be difficult to make a run-and-gun action game when you only had one enemy, but I did feel like this structure would've been a bit more aptly applied to Aliens than Alien³. The whole game has you controlling Lt. Ellen Ripley, lone-survivor of both the Nostromo and colony LV-426 incidents, after she has crash landed on a remote planet used as a maximum security prison. Instead of directly dealing with the plot of the movie, though, Alien³ has Ripley running around different areas of the complex searching for and rescuing captured survivors. (Let's all conveniently ignore the fact that everyone captured by the aliens would have been 'impregnated,' and thus unable to be saved, Ripley included.) The stages are absolutely massive, and most have several paths that can be taken throughout. Some lead to the prisoners, some to hidden power-up caches, and others to dead-ends. There's a lot of ground to explore, and not much time to do it in - there's a time limit set for every stage, and if you don't get to all of the survivors before that limit is reached... well, you can imagine what happens. I liked a lot of things about this game. I thought the graphics, though a bit drab in their unrelenting shades of maroon, teal, and neon green, nicely set the tone, and there is some surprisingly good detail work and a fair bit of gross imagery to be found in the backgrounds. And Jeroen Tel's soundtrack alone is worth playing the game for. So atmospheric! The gameplay is done well, but it's plagued by one fatal design flaw: the time limit. The levels are huge and you aren't provided a map - they require exploration, careful resource management, and planning. The problem is that you are barely given enough time to complete the stage, even if you know where everything is. Missing a single jump can leave Ripley unable to finish the stage in time, and it requires an insane amount of patience to play each stage enough times to figure out where everything is, the most efficient route to hit the required objectives, and how to deal with each of the enemies without running out of ammo or being killed. If the game had removed the time limit - or had at least extended it by a substantial amount - this would be an excellent game. As it is, it is not. It's still far better than most LJN-published trash, but Probe side-stepped this issue in the well-regarded Sega Genesis game, so why brutalize the NES fans so badly? In order to finish it, I had to map out on graph-paper most of the areas through endless trial-and-error runs, and still, just look at how little time I had left at the end of each stage! It's completely absurd. It is fun to chuck Ripley down staircases, though. And if you have a Game Genie and a code to disable that timer, you'll probably have a good time with the game. Alien³ on the NES strikes an impressively somber and oppressive tone similar to the movie's, and the gameplay is enjoyable. It's just so disappointing that a single design decision compromised the entire experience. I still enjoyed it, but it had the potential to be something much more. _ No cheats were used during the recording of this video. NintendoComplete ( punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games! Visit for the latest updates!