Corridor 7: Alien Invasion (MS-DOS) - Guest Post

From the makers of William Shatner's Tekwar: The Game of The Series of The Book:

With "Technology Licensed from ID SOFTWARE, creators of WOLFENSTEIN™ 3D".

I can't wait.

Contains a single GIF with fast slightly-flashing animation.

In the far future, Space Year 2012 to be exact, a group of hardy astronauts head off to Mars on a mission of the utmost importance.

They retrieve the ultimate prize, a sample of the rarest mineral of them all: textured polygons.

Giddy with delight, they chip off a bit and stick it in the good old analysis laser.

Little do they know that Lasers + Textured Polygons = ...

Portal To The Hostile Alien World! Oh No!

Wait a cotton-pickin' minute! This is just the plot to Half-Life! Or rather, Half-Life is just the plot to this! TSK TSK TSK.

The research facility has been overrun by aliens from the portal, so my mission is to head inside the building, go down each floor until I reach the portal, killing all the aliens along the way. On this floor there are ten aliens. Here we go!

Argh! Alien eyeballs!

I poke my head into the next room and I'm getting shot at by this guy! I had absolutely no idea this guy was here, he wasn't making any noise!

Take off half my health in one second, will you?

Ratatatatata!!

Okay, no more eyeballs. No more health either. Eight aliens left to go.

Where on earth am I going? You'd think that given that this is a human-built research facility that I'd have access to a map showing where the elevators are. Whoever sent me in mustn't have cared all that much.

Duh, of course. Locked. There's at least four doors leading out of the entrance room of the building and all of them are locked. I cannot access any other rooms than the one I started in with the computers and the glass panelled wall.

I've gone back outside the building to see if there's any other ways in. Yes, this IS the outside. Yes, it has a ceiling. Yes, it looks just like the inside. Just use your imagination.

I'm having a look through the fences set either side of the building entrance. Hey, there's an astronaut over here! I'm sure he has some useful information or items that can

AGRGRGRRGRRGRHGHRHGRHLGHRGLRHGLHRGLHR.

YOU'RE DEAD. You killed 0% aliens, you found 0% secret rooms, your overall rating is 0%, you're a complete failure and nobody likes you.

Damn.

Take two!

So here I am again, shooting the eyeball monsters that clearly weren't in the room to begin with but suddenly and silently appear behind me shortly after I'm there. There has to be a blue keycard in this room somewhere... but I can't see any items at all! There's desks in the middle, computers on the walls and that's all!

Aaaaah!

You have to press Space on the computers! Now I can open blue doors! That makes some kind of sense. There's no indication what the effect of using any computer will be (this computer's screen was completely blank before I turned it on), so I'm turning on everything as soon as I find it.

Like the one next to it, which showed INTRUDER ALERT in big red flashing letters when I turned it on. More eyeballs incoming!

My submachinegun fires miniature drills with recursively serrated diamond edges and an antimatter payload. That's my explanation as to why I can't carry very many and they tend to do this to enemies.

Useless gizmos. I shoot them with my backup weapon but they're not intimidated in the slightest.

This music is awful. It started off pretty bad and it's getting worse as it goes on.

Stand back, villain! Don't make me price-label you!

Alright, you asked for it!

I hide round the corner and the cheating fiend shoots me through the wall!

Zeroes across the board. A solid performance!

The least they could have done is acknowledged that I killed four of the eyeball monsters and rounded it up to a 1% alien kill ratio.

I try it five more times, but it's really difficult to get out of the first room without having your health brought down to nothing by the first two eyeball monsters that appear. I figured out that they're coming in through the blue locked doors while I'm sliding about looking for the right computer. I can rush in through the doors after killing them if I want, but all that does is trap me in there with no way out!

There's no alternative, I'm going to lower the difficulty. I was playing on Captain difficulty (which I think was the default), and I'm lowering it one setting to Lieutenant difficulty. Shameful.

Well now this is different!

The alien counter's only showing three, well, two aliens here, and they're not gonna be sneaking up on me any more. Lieutenant starts off with a full map of the current floor and markers showing the locations of the remaining enemies. They're not any less deadly, but I now know where they are.

Captain had a map but it only showed a small box around my current position.

Being able to see the entire map at once at all times and knowing where the enemies are has totally changed the game. What I'm seeing in front of me now feels like a solid place and I can see all the routes I can take to take on the aliens. Reducing the alien count from ten to three was a bit extreme, but it's only the first level.

Safe!

Level 2. Full health, full ammo, a complete map. This time, it's for real.

I'm on to the second music track now. It's not totally bad!

Does every Capstone game have a crest? I'd say that this one looks as good as the one in Tekwar.

Keycards don't carry over from floor to floor, so I've got to hunt down one of those big computer walls again. If the game switches to another graphics set later on (which is really, really unlikely) I'm going to be hopelessly lost.

Did I mention how fast this guy runs, by the way?

He runs this fast. WHOOOOOOOSH!

Eyeballs! Open fire!

It took me ages to find one of these orc guys. They die in one hit from anything and they hardly do any damage. I'm surprised they weren't the first enemy. Were they not 'alien' enough?

And it's off to the exit. You don't even have to kill all the aliens to advance on Lieutenant difficulty, so you can blitz through the game like crazy if you like. The exit is the same place where you entered, but it's not marked on the map.

I'm going to stop playing. I'm really enjoying playing the game but I don't think it's going to have any new graphics to show you any time soon. It's visually boring enough as it is, so let's call it a day.

Captain and Lieutenant difficulty are like two completely different games. Captain is more of a test of luck and survival until you can find the map item. Lieutenant is a straightforward seek and destroy mission. I can't imagine what the easiest difficulty level must be like. Do you just click the mouse button and instantly win?

It's way better than most of the FPSs I've played, which is a shock to me. I was expecting a completely unholy mess along the lines of Rex Blade, but this is actually a game! It could be that this game is just Wolfenstein 3D with a lick of paint, but I hated Wolf 3D and I like this. I'm not going to play Corridor 7 any more but I still like it.