Alpha Six

Posted by oddbob on August 21, 2006 · Lovingly Filed Under Other peoples games 
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Alpha Six is described on the website as, and I quote “a pure action game.” - well, that sounded right up my alley from the off - graphics looked lovely in a retro old skool kinda way - so this morning I downloaded it. Wandered off and remembered about it around half an hour ago and in a fit of schoolboy excitement loaded it up.

Jesus.

I should have known, really, I should - as any regular readers will know - I love and adore simple concepts in games, I love well executed idea’s, I love pretty graphics, I like good things.

Oh dear lord

Yes… a fair proportion of my will to exist thanks to this game…

Alpha Six just, well, isn’t good. I’d even be so bold as to say its quite possibly one of the most appallingly executed things I’ve come across in around 12 months, and I review shit games for kicks…what set the alarm bells off at first was the size of the manual. Now, I’m all for comprehensive documentation in games - in fact, I love nothing more than a well written piece on a game and tactics involved in playing it (obvious self pleasuring excepted) but when your manual features such exciting information as this dizzying amount of dull statistics and lengthy pieces on the various “special” moves in the game (think “special child” and you’re not too far off) then we’re heading seriously into “if you have to explain it, its not working” territory.

HOW MANY FUCKING KEYS?

I’ll control myself when you fucking learn to slimline your control methods.

The main problem is, its all a case of overthinking. What should have been a decent enough straightforward shooter turns into an unnecessarily complex fuckmeld of things that I swear, two minutes in, a fucking kitchen sink fell out of my monitor whilst running the game. And most of the additions to the game, like Line Of Sight visibility, frankly, are shit and unnecessary.

LoS works well in Paradroid because the entire game mechanic is carefully built around it, whereas in a game which I would best describe as a really shit SmashTV meets Streetfighter, or everything Gibbage would have been if Dan Marshall had taken leave of the last of his marbles and decided to make the worlds most appalling deathmatch game, with overly complex grandiose idea’s of greatness, too many buttons, no gameplay and a manual the size of the worlds biggest ball of twine… (and we’re thankful to Dan for saving the 2d deathmatch genre still, cheers Dan!) its rank and nothing more than an extra hurdle in an already inaccessible game.

If I wanted to spend 2 minutes wondering where the fuck the enemy is, I’d get myself a career in jungle warfare not play fucking games.

I've had enough now, kill me

Look, the AI guy will be in the top corner wedged amongst something, same as ever.

I guess what it boils down to is AlphaSix is the antithesis of everything I enjoy in a game. It doesn’t care about you, its a giant egowank from the authors, a show of what they can throw into one game with no care or attention to how it plays at the end of it. Everything you see in this game has been done better elsewhere and more succesfully, by people who *do* care about you, do care about the player, and aren’t just out to spunk up their coding abilities in an 18meg zip file.

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Speak your brains

5 Responses to “Alpha Six”

  1. Richard on August 22nd, 2006 8:35 pm

    24 key controls sounds about right to me..

  2. oddbob on August 22nd, 2006 9:09 pm

    You’re an evil man Rich!

  3. Smayds is NOT amused! on August 23rd, 2006 1:53 pm

    I was thoroughly disappointed with this tot. Nowhere NEAR enough options and keypresses to fuck with. I mean COME ON WANKERS, if the manual doesn’t rival the Bible for sheer “very thin paper required due to too much bollocks” then you’ve obviously written a game that only you can understand because you wrote it and programmers are a weird bunch and I should jolly well know as I am one which can be determined by the unkemptness of beard and the ungrrlfriendness of, uh, me. So, how do we go about improving on this pile of utter SHITE? Well, for starters, the developer needs to (a) burn it to CD, (b) delete it off his hard drive, (c) fire MANY BULLETS AND THE LIKE into his hard drive, and (d) take the CD outside and incinerate it, then (e) stomp the ashes into the ground for a hundred million years. Git.

    What do you mean, too extreme? Well, you should have written a decent game then! WITHOUT an 800-pound gorilla.bas, uh, manual.

  4. Paul on August 25th, 2006 12:07 pm

    Oh, I definately agree that the controls are too complicated. I don’t think the size of the manual is that extreme — a lot of games have manuals that are over 100 pages long, and this one’s was about 30 — though for an action game, I see what you mean.

    Anyway, it was one of my first games, and I’m still learning how to make them, so lessons well learned for the next I guess.

  5. oddbob on August 26th, 2006 2:44 am

    Hi Paul, thanks for the response and good luck with any games you make in the future.

    I must confess that I get more annoyed at games when there’s obviously been a lot of time and effort expended in their creation and they turn out far more frustrating and inaccessible than they should be.

    On the plus side, there’s a lot of great idea’s in the game that whilst they might not have worked this time round (in my opinion, of course) hopefully you can expand those idea’s into something truly great next time.

    Good luck anyway, and I’ll keep an eye out for whatever you come up with next :-)

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