1 ALIEN EVOLUTION - ISOMETRIC POST APOCALYPSE

ZX Spectrum Vega game #0029

Dear Readers,

Today I'll talk about this isometric action game by Marco Paulo Carrasco, Rui Manuel Tito and Gremlin from 1987. I had a look for this game on World Of Spectrum as I found it to be a bit feature heavy with all its weapons. I didn't get that much information on them but I found a bit of lore and some nice cassette inlay artwork.

You control some kind of hovercraft the humans have sent from underground to get rid of aliens on the surface. The aliens are described as highly sexed and have bred all over the place. The humans are described as nice and kind.

There are two distinctive cassette inlays for this game. One of them has your hovercraft shooting at dinosaur like creatures and their eggs on a barren landscape with a yellow sky. The other has a green xenomorph-like creature with blood dripping from its teeth and claws. I'm a little more fired up to play the game now :)

I just played a session where I kind of hid away in a corner to try and suss out the controls. Isometric controls always take a bit of getting used to for me, even though I played loads of Monster Max on the Game Boy as a kid. The aliens in the meantime multiplied like crazy! I didn't last long and got a game over with 100 points.

The high score table has names of the game makers but no high scores, so I got the top spot anyway. It has some nice music though, and then the title screen had more nice music with its own version of Mozart Symphony #40. (I had to look up old Nokia ringtones to help identify that one!)

After a couple of more sessions, and being no more confident in any way about isometric navigation, I got to defeat a few more aliens with the help of those mines that look like computer chips that you can pick up again. My score that time was 1,410, which is my highest yet. The only new thing I learned was how to use those umbrella like transporters.

I might come back to this game, but it'll take lots of practice to get any good at it, especially with the aliens zipping around the place so quickly.