Alien³

The Good
You are Lt. Ellen Ripley, the sole survivor of the EEV that crash lands on Florina 161, a planet inhabited by the former inmates of the planet's maximum security prison. You are taken to the complex and are locked in a room, and your mission is to find some way to escape.

As usual with any Alien3 game, you must also kill aliens if you are to survive. You start with no weapons, so you must search the complex for some. Alien3 for the Game Boy is slightly different to other versions of the game. You see, the objective of your mission is not to rescue prisoners, but to obtain equipment and use it to help aid your escape. This involves you running around a level searching for these, and going between the prison's three levels via a series of air ducts. You have limited spaces to hold equipments, but you can drop them, picking them up later when the time comes.

The GB version uses a top-down perspective. Despite its monochrome display, the graphics are detailed enough to see what each of the rooms look like. Some rooms are filled with computers and gadgets, while others contain structures that are likely to have an item that you need nearby. The interface is clean, with your ammo, energy, and life count in the middle of the screen, and on each side, a picture is displayed which indicates what weapon and object you are using.

Even though the characters are a bit small, the prisoners, wardens, and aliens, are quite well drawn and reflect that of the movie. The aliens include warriors, face huggers, and the Queen. Most of them look very dangerous, especially the Queen. Most of the weapons that you manage to pick up can be quite effective against them.

The music that can be heard during the game is great and it is the type of music that you would expect from both the movie and game. The controls are quite easy to use. As with any game, the D-pad controls your character, [A] manipulates something with whatever you have in your hand and [B] fires your weapon, and [Select] allows you to equip weapons and put objects in hand.

The Bad
Getting through the air ducts is very annoying. You basically have to push a series of buttons to either switch the fans off or on, or make them turn in the other direction. Most of the time it is the latter. If you make your way toward a fan, than it may blow you in a direction that you do not indent to go in. This is mainly due to a mistake you made earlier, and you know you fucked up, because there is no way to avoid the fan but to start over again.

The objects that lay on the floor (before you pick them up) are poorly designed. They look like tiny blobs out of nowhere, and I felt that they needed to look what they are supposed to look like when you view them from inventory.

The Bottom Line
The Game Boy version of Alien3 is different to the version developed by Probe Software. You basically run around, shoot aliens, climb through air ducts, and more importantly, pick up and manipulate items that will help make your escape. If you ignore the monochrome display, you will find that game should give you occupied for more than ten minutes.