Alien

I'll cut the BS and jump straight to the point on this one. Alien on the Atari 2600 is nothing more then a bad Pac-Man port. Game play is an exact carbon copy, aside from being able to briefly scare the aliens with a flamethrower. Every maze is exactly the same as the one before it only with slightly faster enemies. Enemies that seem to get lost. When you complete a level, you're given a special mission where you must walk between pairs of moving aliens to get to the top of the screen. You might think that this would be a nice change of pace, but it serves as little more then a three second distraction.

After one play session, I was so frustrated that I had to go try the Atari port of Pac-Man and let me tell you this, it felt like a good game. That's right; Alien is so bad it makes the game that caused the Great Crash of '83 seem good.

Frankenstein's Monster

What would you do if Frankenstein's Monster was on the loose? Well if you worked for Data Age, the solution was to brick him up. It may seem a bit silly, but it works well as an objective. Players start off at the top of the screen next to the monster. Normally, this would be a scary place to be, but fortunately the creature is dormant. Unfortunately, it's also hooked up to a lightning rod and if it gets struck enough the creature will live. So off you go, down the map and over some jumps to get bricks to seal the creature in.

For the most part the game feels like Pitfall, as you'll spend a great deal of time avoiding pits and dodging monsters. If you manage to make it back to the top with a brick, you'll be treated to a new stage where you must dodge a torrent of vampire bats to make it to the monster's side and place the brick. It's a nice change from the slower pace of the platforming sections. Once the brick is in place, the process repeats itself with the map slightly altering its configuration to be more challenging.

Graphically, the game is quite impressive. By using gradients instead of the usual solids, they've created a sense of depth and shadow, not often seen on the system. The ending, if you lose, is also quite impressive and features an excellent use of sprite scaling and stomping sounds as the monster storms forward towards you, the player.

If there's one major complaint with this game, it's the harsh collision detection system. For some jumps, you have to be dead on or you'll miss, fall and die. It's agonizing, but it's where the game gets much of it's difficulty from.