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 Never did seven Greek goddesses and forty dollars worth of garage sale profit conspire to create such a mammoth headache. During the summer of 1988, spring cleaning had reached its end at our house, and it was time to see the return of a few greenbacks in exchange for toys and what-not that had outlived their usefulness. What was sold mattered not; the outcome proved to be quite delightful for a 10-year-old kid like me. Back then, forty bucks was a lot of cash. (Well, in my current role as a post-collegiate....it’s still a lot of money) April the fifth presented me with an interactive outlet: the Sega Master System. Considered at the time to be inferior to the Nintendo Entertainment System, the SMS had the advantage of being a bit more exclusive. Its fans today are as equally devoted to the preservation of its games as those of the NES. Besides, variety is the spice of life, and I’ve always been a sucker for a bit of kick in my punch.
Flash forward to the day after our garage sale: while everyone else gathered and sorted what didn’t make the cut, the profits to me were burning a hole in my pocket. By this point, there was no question that the alien game was next on my list. In a whirlwind succession of events, I corralled my dad and drove to Kay-Bee to pick up the game. Despite their withering collection of Master System games, “Alien Syndrome” was among them, and I snatched it up quickly. Just as quickly, we were back home, and “Wonder Boy” gave way to the new acquisition. Thus began the headache. Intriguing though it was, “Alien Syndrome” presented some interesting problems almost immediately. It was one of those early video games where the bad guys didn’t stay dead. Through some weird, extra-terrestrial phenomenon, they would flicker twice from out of thin air, and materialize, presenting a fun, fatal surprise for Player 1: Ricky. In addition, like the question mark buttons adorning many of the walls, there were too many unanswered questions surrounding the game as a whole. Having an acute ear for music and all things auditory, "Alien Syndrome", on this level, presented enjoyment comparable to that of an ingrown toenail. The soundtrack was unlistenable. Three themes played from the Master System's MIDI device during the game. The first was a slow, pulsating, and sickening loop with occasional flat-9 chords that reaffirmed the fact that you did not want to be on this ship (or playing the game). However, once the last required hostage had been rescued, the music, acting as an indicator, immediately changed to a harsh, painful, and very dissonant alarm, no doubt influenced by Penderecki or Schoenberg or Crumb or some other 20th-century alchemist with designs on inflicting pain on those who would bare their ears. Once aural solace had descended on the player by entering the boss' chamber, the music now consisted of a synth bass line and a high-pitched arpeggiating pseudo-horn that generated the sensation of crawling insects and other vermin--the kind that suddenly make you itch in twenty different places all over your body. In retrospect, the music couldn't have been more effective: the nauseating Leroy-Anderson-on-Valium of the timebomb, the spidery Hanon of the boss room, and the haunting cliche of the "game over" screen all contributed to one of the least pleasant ventures into stereophonic sound of my young life. In addition, when killed, Ricky made a ghastly screaming noise that still makes my heart stop to this day (Ricky's partner, Mary--aka Player 2--made a completely blood-curdling female scream when killed....which is why I insist on playing the game solo), and is almost enough to convince you, the player, that these guys are people, too. After an appropriate period of immersion, the technique became more familiar, and I had gathered enough hostages to face the enemy boss of Round 1, a ship called Calliope. Again, this took many hours and many game-overs to overcome. Soon, Ricky had advanced to Round 2, Clio, and was facing a big, blue blob that spit deadly balls in sets of three called Aargh.
Having consulted a technician at Sega directly, I was presented with no helpful information. Common fodder such as “look out for the alien boss helpers!” and “use the fireball for maximum damage!” made great punchlines, but they couldn’t guarantee a victory. There were no cheat codes: if I could have skipped through levels or walked through all ships while invincible, there would be no mystery. In the meantime, I read ahead and learned how to defeat the subsequent bosses. The tips from Sega provided interesting data: I discovered the name of the final boss on the 7th level was “Mr. Mimi”, but I still had no idea of what he looked like. I pulled out a dictionary and unearthed the origin of the names of the seven ships: Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Thalia and Urania. They were all muses of the Greek mythology, seven of the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. So where were Polyhymnia and Terpsichore, the two daughters whose names were omitted from christening on an Alien Syndrome ship? Needless to say, I had resigned myself to the idea that I would never advance beyond the second ship, and that the remaining levels would forever remain locked in enigmatic silence inside that damned black cartridge. EPISODE II Flash forward to the summer of 1998: ten years after purchasing the game, and a year after graduating high school, I broke out the old SMS once again, to have a crack at the old classics. Thanks to a help guide on the Internet, I defeated the epic role-player “Y’s: The Vanished Omens”--a game in which I had also reached an impasse years ago. I also charted out the 16x8 maze that was "Zillion" on my own--partially for convenience, partially just to view it at a glance. That having been noted and logged, I moved on to “Alien Syndrome”. The frustrations were recalled quickly. The game still sucked as badly as it had ten years prior. Instantaneously-reincarnated aliens would pop up right beneath you and claim you with the snap of a finger. Though the hand-eye coordination problem had been somewhat remedied by several years of piano playing, it still couldn’t overcome graphic limitations of the 8-bit genre. I arrived back in Aargh’s darkened pad to take another pass at blowing him away. By this time, I knew where the hostages were, and what route to take to minimize misdirection. Using the long-range laser, I did what I could to take out the alien helpers first, and then fire at Aargh when I wasn’t dodging his spread. To my amazement, after the last hit, Aargh froze, and then exploded incrementally (as allowed by the game’s graphics). As my heart raced, and as I wiped the sweat from my hands, I realized my fascination. To me, the intrigue of the game came with discovering what the next ship looked like on the exterior, and what shape the layout of its interior took. Upon arriving at Erato, the third round, the ships were taking on architectural qualities as tentacular as the slimy vermin which infested them. Erato was a mess. For one, the aliens were moving faster than before. They also seemed to deliberately materialize underneath the player, no matter where or when. This often catalyzed several fatal moves in which the player quickly scurried off to escape the flickering alien, only to run into another one. For another, the ship was perforated by large bottomless pits. Most had catwalks spanning them (two of which had hostages unfunnily placed upon them), but they all presented a hindrance to the player. However, the first game played during which I advanced to Erato, I collected enough hostages to face the boss: a slithering, lethargic, oversized hand named Tacapy.
This sudden advancement cast me aboard the fourth ship, named Euterpe for the muse of music and lyric poetry. This one, on the outside, bore a striking resemblance to Deep Space Station K-7 from the original Star Trek episode, “The Trouble With Tribbles”. Immediately, I was running from little red critters with designs on my life, and big orange mouths for which I might be a tasty snack. Again, this ship presented labyrinthine confusion and sudden apparition-cum-solid-matter bad guys. Regrettably, my tenure on Euterpe was to be brief, as I didn’t survive very long during the first go at the game, and shortly thereafter surrendered my SMS to a young man named Drew, who borrowed the system for three years. EPISODE III Last summer, as I moved into my new apartment, I enlisted my mom to recover the system from Drew before it met some irretrieveable fate at a garage sale of his. Mom snatched the system back, taking most of the games with it (some titles of mine are still MIA at this juncture). In the recent days, my rabid obsession with “Alien Syndrome” has returned, and despite an intense desire to conquer the game, I’m realizing just how badly the game was put together. In some weird, subconscious way, I had managed to convince myself that the game’s difficulty level was on account of my lack of skill. This most recent revelation of mine vanquished that notion. As the “Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels” soundtrack drowned out the morbid, minimalist soundtrack of the game, I foraged on through the tired levels of Calliope and Clio, tiptoed my way through Erato, and blasted my way through Euterpe. I arrived back at where I had left off, still amazed that, contrary to what I believed thirteen years ago, these levels actually existed. Thanks to another help guide from the Internet, I now had a blueprint of how each ship was laid out. Now, for some reason, each ship seemed smaller, more vulnerable, easier to understand. These maps, however, were very basic, and didn’t illustrate much more than the simple layout of where one could go when in a particular room, where the hostages were (which I found contained incongruencies on certain ships, thereby throwing its overall accuracy into question), and where the weapons were--helpful information indeed, but for a visual learner like me, it wouldn’t do. I thereupon took on the daunting task of mapping out every twist and turn of each ship, taking very detailed account of how each room looked. Now, grid coordinates wouldn’t need to be remembered, and regions of the ship could be discriminated against if there were no hostage there to be rescued. Weapons could be easily located, and based on the look of the room alone, you always knew where you were. Suddenly, a blanket of logic fell over the game. It wasn't out to get me. Video games want to be beaten, but they also want you to respect the craftsmanship that went into their development. Therefore, they taunt and torture you the whole way. But once you've beaten the game, the wave of success and triumph washes over you, like you've just found the secret to eternal youth or some such. And at that point, what does the game care? It's just an inanimate object in a black plastic shell.
Allow me to elaborate on the importance of collision detection. This is the process that a video game goes through to determine whether or not the player has come in contact with an object in the game which will affect them either positively or negatively. In some video games, a collision detection will render the player instantly dead or injured. This also changes functionality for the player, for example, when s/he picks up a weapon. "Alien Syndrome" has lousy collision detection. There have been times when I've been in the vicinity of an alien, and I've suddenly died because the brilliant SMS thought I had touched it. Conversely, when fighting Masher, I discovered that, by ensconcing oneself at the bottom of the screen directly below him, one can fire upwards, and Masher, who is technically touching the player as he comes down, will suffer damage, but the player will not. It's only when he releases his cronies (the ones who evade the gunfire) that Player 1 is in jeopardy. Therefore, it's a matter of getting enough hits in before they flutter on down and a collision is detected. There are also limitations of the system itself. Because "Alien Syndrome" is a bird's-eye-view game, the planes of movement shift: now, the Y-axis operates on the same level as the X-axis; in other words, "up" translates to "northbound" instead of "skyward". It flattens the playing field into two dimensions. However, in the 8-bit world, rarely do bird's-eye-view games allow you to move in more than the eight directions assigned by the controller. Such is the case with "Alien Syndrome". The disadvantage of this is that the aliens aren't limited by a controller, and can move as arbitrarily as they like. Hence, when you're lining up a shot, they can easily move out of the way, and advance toward you on a vector along which you can't shoot them. It requires you to relocate, reposition, and reshoot. As any player of 8-bit games will verify, there is great danger in having many things occurring on screen at once. It will almost always slow down the movement of everything as it attempts to account for logical and accurate motion. "Alien Syndrome" is often in this state. However, when Player 1 has cleared a room, the character moves considerably faster through the room. This also means that shots fired by the enemy move faster as well. Through some twist of fate, I destroyed Masher in the middle of last week for the first time. Again, I was perched on my ottoman, with the Sega system sitting upon a sideways crate for easy access to the pause button (since the Master System was the only system at the time that didn't have a pause button on the controller....archaic indeed). As I relished the vision of Melpomene's exterior for the two seconds before the round started, I quickly paused the game and broke out a new sheet of grid paper. It was time to chart new territory. Based on the tips from one of the Master System fan pages, I knew what the layout of Melpomene was going into it. I knew exactly where I was the moment the round started up. Once the aliens began materializing, I discovered what I was up against. Again, the game did its job by making every round harder than the last. Melpomene proved to be a formidable maze, just two ships away from the end of the game. This was compounded by the fact that the twelve hostages aboard the ship were spread as far apart as possible, and, unlike the previous rounds, every hostage had to be rescued. As heinous as this turned out to be, eventually, after the liberation of the last hostage, the DJ inside my Sega changed the music from the depressing, slow-paced yawn to the intense, dissonant music that urges the player to go to the exit. Sure enough, once I found my way up to the exit, the big steel door had been opened, and a black void beckoned. Dodging the flickering aliens, I passed through the door.
He turned out to be enormous, and though he moved slowly, he spit fire out in sets of three with annoying frequency. By the time I was able to squeeze off a shot, he had already nailed me with a coughed-up fireball. Of course, by this point, my adrenaline was already at a level where, unless I were to get up and do something physical, I wasn't able to function very properly in a precision-oriented environment. I think I had two lives remaining when I got to Haggah, and they disappeared before I even knew what happened. (In a sick sort of irony, Melpomene is the muse of tragedy) The next evening, I decided to videotape my next game for analytical purposes. It was during this game that several realizations flourished. For one, I discovered that Tacapy takes 14 hits to destroy, and Masher, who had previously required the loss of several lives to accrue enough accumulated hits to blast, took 17 hits, and the whole destruction process was documented on video. I also got back to Haggah once again, and took another stab at precipitating his demise. What I discovered, through repeated viewings of the very brief encounter with Haggah, was that my pre-conceived ideas of how to go about destroying him were worth absolutely nothing. His weak spot wasn't where I thought it was, thereby drowning me in confusion when my blazing fireball blast wasn't producing the desired effect. The one shot that actually meant something was fired from the side while dodging Haggah's frequent spread. This particular shot landed right above where I thought his weak spot was. Of course, once he landed one on me, I went back to my piddly, short-range rifle....which basically meant death was to become quickly and repeatedly familiar to me. In short, Haggah still lives, and I'm chilling back at square one. Although, after watching the video tape over and over again, the need to get back to Level 5 or whatever to see where everything is and how to beat Boss X....I can live vicariously through my VCR, and put the stress on hold. As masochistic as it might be to watch myself die over and over, it's almost kind of therapeutic. Before the game completely takes over my life, I want to, at the very least, extract any element of surprise from it....that is, until Round 6. GAME OVER: a 13-year retrospective on "Alien Syndrome" I don't know what my exact fascination with "Alien Syndrome" is. My early intrigue with science fiction probably spawned the interest surrounding the design of the ships. I'm curious as to how Thalia is laid out (it seems that there is no ship to negotiate on the seventh level, Urania--you go straight from Minosar to Mr. Mimi), and if there's anything different about the transition from Thalia to Urania. I'm curious as to what Mr. Mimi looks like. Urania was the muse of astronomy, so I suppose Mr. Mimi just sits in his ship and stargazes until Player 1 knocks on his door. I'm curious if there's some way I could spend less than a thousand dollars to get the game transferred onto some platform where I could manipulate the functions (you know, become invincible, advance through levels, etc.). As mentioned before, a great deal of satisfaction has come from having the taped game to reflect upon. I guess it's a matter of finding the balance in moderate satisfaction and imminent disappointment. "Alien Syndrome" delivers on both accounts, making it a bit like gambling: it brings you down most of the time, but you can't let it go. Maybe next time.... A video game that remains unbeaten is like a complex dinner. You spend all this time getting there, and then it's gone. You have nothing to show for it once it's served its purpose. (Even if you beat the game, you still have to go through the whole thing again to relive that experience) But I think the greatest satisfaction must come when you plod through the whole thing through legitimate means, kill what needs to be killed, and say you did it. And then....who knows? There certainly were some cruel minds that collaborated to create this bane of my existence. Obviously some literate folk, who finally arrived at the notion of using the names of Greek goddesses for the enemy ships. Some architectural sadists were surely involved, designing ships that were meant to confuse and disorient the player. All those aliens--you know, the ones you thought you killed? Well, actually, if you wait around long enough, you'll find that you didn't really kill them after all. Like cockroaches, you can't get rid of them. And alien bosses with whom you trade collision detection errors as means of defeating them? Things simply shouldn't work that way. As much as I love this game (it's a one-sided relationship, AS 'n me), I'll be glad when it's all over. Pass the Excedrin, Mr. Mimi--it's gonna be a long night. Enter the Alien Syndrome Player's Guide Click here to read Eric's response to "Alien Syndrome" Special thanks to The Sega Notebook for graphics and technical information. |
Anyways, by the time summer hit, I had acquired a handful of games for the SMS, and was still working on my hand-eye coordination. Each game came packaged with a fold-out poster, to enlighten its new possessor with the catalog of Sega titles that awaited them. Having fallen into the bottomless trap of science fiction during fourth grade, which spawned my closet Trekkie phase, a particular title called “Alien Syndrome” stood out to me. 
For many years, Aargh was the game's Achilles’ Heel for me. There were just too many things going on at once. I would box myself into a corner, and he and his little alien helpers would close in on me. After trying so hard to fill Aargh with what seemed like a sufficient number of shots, I became convinced there was no way to defeat this boss. I had come to an impasse with the game.
Tacapy’s weak spot was obvious: as he crawled along, his eyes gradually opened, revealing a pair of psychedelically-colored dead giveaways. It was then merely a matter of hitting him between those big old targets, and watching his body flash enough times to render him....dead.
The thrill continued for me as I mapped out Euterpe for ease of navigation in the future. The new apocalyptic obstacle awaited me at the end of this round: a funky spider-like H.R. Giger-esque concoction named Masher. This guy was a quick bastard. He moved in broken zig-zag patterns in his black room, spitting fire off to the sides and unleashing little bat-like cronies that seemed to evade the player's gunfire. It was easy to get cornered with Masher, primarily because he moved faster (most of the time) than the player. This opened my eyes to the myriad disadvantages facing the player of this game.
The alien boss on Melpomene was a many-tentacled, wicked-looking thing called Haggah. I had seen the picture to the right in the manual many times, and had determined how I was going to kill him. It was pretty obvious, like Tacapy, where this guy's weakspot was--the target-like zone in the bottom-center of his body. I had mapped out my battle against him years in advance.