Alien Hominid First Look

Alien Hominid is the upcoming GameCube and PlayStation 2 shooter from newly formed developer The Behemoth and publisher O3 Entertainment, and it will officially be announced tomorrow. The game's title may sound familiar to veteran Web surfers and frequent visitors to Newgrounds.com--a Web site for Flash games and movies that lets aspiring artists upload their work for the world to see--where a rough prototype for the game was uploaded in 2002. The brainchild of Newgrounds founder Tom Fulp and artist Dan Paladin, this simple game was a funny and surprisingly hardcore shooter that put you in control of an alien and asked you to blast everything in your path.

As luck would have it, the pair hooked up with John Baez, who would eventually come to produce the game. He urged them to make a console version of Alien Hominid. Following an assortment of power meetings, The Behemoth was born, and a team composed of Baez, Fulp, Paladin, and a tiny handful of others set out to reimagine the simple Flash game into a fully fleshed-out console shooter. We had the chance to visit the team at The Behemoth's modest San Diego offices to get an exclusive look at the game, which has come light years from its simple Flash roots.

Alien Hominid's story is a simple one, and it unfolds much like a director's cut of E.T. in which, rather than passively sitting back to play with a Speak & Spell and sucking down Reese's Pieces, E.T. comes packing an alien piece. You'll play the role of a small yellow gender-neutral alien who has the misfortune to crash-land on Earth after slightly overzealous FBI agents shoot down his ship as it cruises by. To add insult to injury, the ship literally crashes on the doorstep of FBI headquarters. As if that weren't bad enough, some FBI agents make off with the craft. Our yellow hero, anxious to return home, sets out to reclaim his ship.

Unable to communicate with the locals, the small alien busts out his trusty green laser pistol and grenades and begins speaking the universal language of "blowing stuff up" to the scores of FBI agents and outlandish bosses that stand between the alien and his intergalactic set of wheels. While the odds may sound daunting for a tiny yellow visitor from space new to town, it's not all bleak. Sure, the FBI is eager to take him out, and the local citizens aren't helping his cause, but, as always, children are on hand to help save the day. As he makes his way to the ship, fat kids will appear and offer help in the form of weapon power-ups, in much the same way the hostages in the Metal Slug series do. While power-up-dispensing fat kids aren't a replacement for, say, an enormous martian death walker or a space tank, they're better than nothing, and besides, this alien is nothing if not handy.

The game's structure is pretty basic and is broken up into several main levels, which are divided into sublevels that have their own unique bosses and minibosses. Your goal on most levels is basically to run to the right and kill anything in your way. Besides using guns and grenades, you'll also be able to make use of vehicles strewn about certain levels and even engage in some carjacking. During boss fights you'll often have to use your head to figure out how to defeat obviously superior foes by using the alien's modest arsenal or the environment. Every so often you'll come across levels that put you in a spaceship and require you to shoot up everything around you.

The gameplay in Alien Hominid is old-school gold and features a run-and-gun mechanic that feels both old and new at the same time. The core mechanics are clearly inspired by classic 2D shooters such as Contra and Metal Slug. However, while Alien Hominid has obviously been influenced by those games, it doesn't end up being derivative. You'll move the little yellow whatsit with the left analog stick, and you'll have buttons to jump, shoot, and pitch your grenades. The shoulder buttons will let you perform rolls for avoiding gunfire. You'll also have a button that lets you enter vehicles, and to control them you'll use a variation of the above control scheme.

The basic move set is dressed up with a number of little touches that give the game a nice bit of variety. You can use your weapon's bullets to slow your descent as you come down from a jump, and you can hold down the fire button and charge up your weapon in order to unleash a mighty power shot. Hitting the fire button when you're close to an enemy will pull off a melee attack that slices your foes in half. The fire button will also let you bite the heads off your foes if you've jumped on their shoulders (which is always fun to do). Another option is to pick up your foes and throw them. Perhaps the coolest move for the alien is the ability to burrow underground and lie in wait for foes that you can grab and pull under when they walk over you. You won't be able to abuse the ability, as our boy does still have to breathe and will suffocate if you leave him underground too long.

Service With a Smile

Another nice, subtle touch is the way that power-ups affect your arsenal. You'll find seven power-ups in the game: fire shot, ice ray, photon burst, acid blast, laser pulse, spread shot, and mega cannon. Each power-up will temporarily upgrade your gun with a limited amount of ammo that does considerably more damage than your normal ammo. In a nice twist, the power-ups will also affect your grenades, giving them the properties of whatever power-up you've collected. So throwing a grenade when you've collected the ice ray will yield an ice explosion that freezes your enemies.

In addition, Alien Hominid's mechanics subtly change when you're playing with a friend in co-op. By simply popping another controller into your console, you can go on a tear with a buddy. When you're playing with a friend, the game offers up some cooperative benefits that keep things fun. You'll be able to ride on your buddy's shoulders for some hilarity, and while you're doing so, your friend can perform a superjump that is handy for avoiding trouble. The best two-player mechanics in the game, however, are easily the vehicle mechanics. Some vehicles are built for two players, with one player handling the driving and shooting and the other player focusing on being a gunner. And don't get us started on what it's like to have two aliens in a flying saucer facing off against FBI agents in airplanes and helicopters and using jetpacks...

A nice perk to the game's two-player mode is the customization option that lets you independently select one of three difficulties for each player. The difficulty settings don't affect enemy behavior or game difficulty per se, but rather they serve as a handicap for the amount of damage done by a player in the game. So players with a lower level of difficulty will do more damage with their bullets to compensate for the fact that they'll likely die more often than a veteran player.

While this all may sound like quite an assortment of things to do, Alien Hominid holds even more treasures to discover. A minigame mode will feature five minigames in which to test your skills. When you first check out the mode, you'll find only one game type, a PDA game. You'll have to unlock the rest by playing through the main game. We were more than a little surprised by the PDA game, which is a simply laid-out puzzle game that plays out in a PDA-style screen held by the alien. Your goal is to control a stick figure and wipe out the enemies onscreen by jumping on their heads. Your little stick man will be able to run, duck, jump, and double jump, and he can even self-destruct in order to restart levels you haven't figured out. It sounds ridiculously simple, but, much like the minigames in Wario Ware, you'll soon find yourself addicted to the game as it becomes increasingly more challenging. You may even be driven to the brink of near insanity as you try to get through all of the levels in the game, which, at present, stand at roughly 200. Yes, 200.

Better still, because the team knows that insanity loves company, you'll be able to have up to four friends join in. Although cooperating with three other friends will certainly make the later levels easier, the team also realizes that there's something to be said for messing with your friends too. As a result, you'll be able to attack your fellow stick people just to mess with their heads. If you manage to actually plow through the 200 or so levels in the PDA game, you can go into a level editor and create your own via a very simple click-and-drop interface. You can save the levels to a memory card and trade them with a friend in an attempt to make your friend go insane. The four unlockable minigames will offer some unique experiences--three will support up to two players, and the fourth will offer a nerve-racking test of skill for a single player.

You'll find some amusing extras to unlock in Alien Hominid. If you go into the game's options menu, you can customize your alien's name and even pick out a jaunty hat for it. When you first start the game you'll only be able to select a red baseball cap, which is the default accessory for the second player in two-player games. But, as you get further in, you'll unlock a wide variety of amusing headgear for the little guy, ranging from flowers to different hairstyles. If you play the game with the right headgear and turn the game's gore setting "off," which causes flowers to appear as you mow down your foes, you're in for a pleasantly trippy experience.

Two-Dimensional and Proud of It

The graphics are an excellent complement to the tight gameplay, with great use of color, simple lines, and whimsical designs. The star of the show is obviously the hominid. He's a yellow antihero with antennae, who manages to look surprisingly cute as he eviscerates everything in his path. We're especially pleased by the borderline maniacal grin/puppylike smile on his face when he's driving a vehicle. The supporting characters in the game have a similar style that's all clean lines and funky animation. Bosses can make you chuckle--for instance, giant FBI robots have instructions written on them asking that their heads not be damaged. Some of the "vehicles" you'll be piloting are also pretty funny, thanks to their unconventional appearance.

The hand-drawn animations may not be as polished as those seen in other 2D games, but the simple look has a scruffy charm. The designs for some of the environments and foes you find in the game are inspired and very funny. Sharp-eyed players will also be rewarded for scrutinizing the city backgrounds, which are densely packed with amusing bits of graffiti and storefronts. The PDA game, whose levels have their own sparse look, are equally charming and contain some amusing touches on the interface. As we mentioned, the games are played out on the alien's PDA, which he holds in his hand. His right thumb covers a part of the lower right side of the screen when you start playing, but as you move your character near it, it will move.

From a technical standpoint, the work-in-progress versions we saw for the GameCube and PlayStation 2 moved well, although there were some slight frame rate inconsistencies when the action onscreen got insane (and it will). Those issues are currently being addressed as development progresses. The game looks basically the same on both platforms, though the GameCube version seems a hair crisper and more colorful. For videophiles eager to get the most out of their TVs, Alien Hominid will support progressive scan on both the GC and PS2.

The audio is a modest assortment of amusing sound effects and an impressive soundtrack. You won't hear a ton of speech--just tiny samples here and there--but that actually works in the game's favor because the sparse approach helps create the atmosphere. The retro and cartoony sound effects for the various weapons and explosions are a perfect complement to the visuals. The game's soundtrack includes a good mix of styles and provides a solid accompaniment to the game's action.

Based on what we've played so far, Alien Hominid is an original game that has the undeniable across-the-board charm of the old-school games many of us cut our teeth on back in the day. The straightforward, accessible gameplay found in the various game modes is rock solid and a blast to play. The multiplayer modes are an awesome addition to the mix, and the level editor in the PDA game is icing on the cake. The visuals are simple, but they pack a whole lot of personality into the colorful package.

In a generation of hardware where the order of the day is intricate, high-polygon 3D graphics with often overly complicated gameplay, Alien Hominid serves as a potent reminder that you don't need to move millions of polygons per second and use every button on a game controller to create an addictive game. If you're a shooter fan, Alien Hominid is a game you'll want to keep an eye out for when it ships, and even if you're not, the game is worth trying for its endearing and quirky change of pace. Alien Hominid is currently slated to ship this fall for the GameCube and PlayStation 2. For an exclusive interview with the talented team behind Alien Hominid, and to see a slew of movies of the game running on the PlayStation 2, check out our media page.