Alien Hominid HD XBLA Review

Today's review is Alien Hominid HD. This game was released waaaay back in the early days of the Xbox 360 launch, which is about when I first bought it. I had heard good things and decided to take the plunge only to find myself way out of my depth. Alien Hominid HD seemed hard and unforgiving in a way that I wasn't ready to deal with at that point in my Xbox 360 life. Upon returning to it almost 4 years later I found that I was mostly mistaken and managed to get through all of Alien Hominid HD in a few days. With the exception of a couple of frustrating achievements I found Alien Hominid HD to be very enjoyable.

Overview
Alien Hominid HD started out life as a flash game on Newgrounds. Alien Hominid  was a cartoon fun, fast take on the classic run and gun action games like Contra. Behemoth decided to port the original game to the XBLA making it the high definition Alien Hominid we now have available. You play as an alien initially shot down by the United States to find yourself in a world of problems as you battle your way through FBI agents to regain your ship and try to escape this hell hole called Earth. Things are obviously not as easy as all that and you find yourself facing off against stronger and stronger foes in your quest for freedom.

Alien Hominid HD also includes a bunch of minigames, for you to try your luck at. Some are completely different than anything you'll experience in the main Alien Hominid game. One of these games is Super Soviet Missile Master, which has it's own achievement related challenge. This tasks you with flying a missile towards the US dodging obstacles in between and is reminiscent of an old Atari 2600 game.

Rational

Alien Hominid HD offers non-stop action

When you first start Alien Hominid you are thrust into the game with most of the options hidden away from you. This is the main reason I fled from Alien Hominid HD those many years ago. When you start a new game there are no difficulty options to pick, you just go. This confusion led to frustration and eventual surrender. The difficulty options are available to you in the options menu, make sure you take a trip there before picking new game. I would recommend running through on easy, as even easy posed some difficulties for me, though I really am not trying to present myself as an expert on this type of game because I'm not. Easy is enjoyable and offers just enough resistance to you as you get used to how the game controls and what it is asking from you.

There's a co-op option and many different mini games

Once I'd completed Easy I felt like I had a decent handle on the gameplay mechanics and I did a little better on the harder difficulties, but even then I was dying a lot and I didn't find Alien Hominid much fun anymore. If my first experience with Alien Hominid HD would have been the experience I had those many years later I wouldn't have avoided playing the game for so long. It's hard for me to be too negative on Alien Hominid as it was released so many years ago, but you can tell. The way the game moves and how the graphics look, they aren't near as sharp as those we've experienced in the years since Alien Hominid HD's release. Even the later releases by Behemoth blow Alien Hominid away.

The last gripe I had with Alien Hominid HD is that I felt the game never really told me how I should play it, or introduce any tactics to me. I wasn't making much progress until I found some guides that gave me a much clearer idea of the gameplay flow. Again this is another sign of Alien Hominids age, which is funny as I've played quite a few re-releases of older games and it seemed like most of those explained their gameplay just fine.

Head biting 50 enemies without touching the ground was one of the most infuriating achievements I've gone for

Summary
Overall Alien Hominid HD is a demanding game that people will get some fun out of if they have the dedication to learn how they should best play it. Running and blasting can be fun for a while, but when you really learn how everything is meant to work you make much faster progress and the whole game becomes more enjoyable. I can't say I recommend going back and picking this game up if you missed it when it was released, but it is worth taking another look at if you moved on prematurely like I did.

Fridaily Update

Friday's here! This means the weekend and more gaming! Since Wednesday there has been some decent gaming as well. I haven't gotten back to Angry Birds yet, I'm still taking some time away from that one. I'll return to it soon, maybe sometime this weekend or next week as I still want to get it finished before any potential problems arise from it's delisting. For now I'm enjoying my time away from the frustration of chasing those stars.

Not as hard as I once thought!

I've spent most of my time since Wednesday playing Alien Hominid HD, which I have now finished. The majority of the achievements are actually pretty easy once you know what you're doing. I don't know why I got so discouraged all those years ago looking back on it now. The game doesn't require all that much from you and is rather forgiving with it's lives and continues when you aren't playing on hard. I think it was the fact that I looked through the achievements and saw the one called Perfect Fight which wants you to "Defeat the Final Boss without using a continue" which I assumed meant that you had to play the whole game and beat him without continuing, which was quite demoralizing seeing as I was continuing on the first level. Turns out this is not the case, and loading up the final level and beating him that way is enough to unlock the achievement.

Those Soviets just wouldn't stand still, all I wanted to do
was rip their heads off!

The walkthrough helped me immensely, and I followed it completely. There are still a few hard achievements and some luck/patience based ones, which I'm not that gifted in. WMD tasks you to "Reach 5000 Km in Super Soviet Missile Master" which is a mini-game in Alien Hominid and required hours of attempts only to be denied more than 5 times with over 4900 Km. Eventually I managed to grab that achievement and nearly hit 6000 Km, it's funny how things work like that sometimes. That left me with the last achievement I needed, Head Chomper which wants you to "Head bite 50 enemies without touching the ground or firing." This is another achievement that just requires hours of patience and practice and luck. After trying for hours I was about to give up on it and started doing something else but I decided to come back to it and just relax and take it really slow while I was watching some Youtube videos and ended up unlocking it when I wasn't even really paying attention.

More running and gunning!

I'm really pleased I've put a lid on Alien Hominid and sealed up that 4 year quest. Emboldened by this victory I noticed Bionic Commando: Rearmed sitting around in my games list and I decided to tackle that. This is another game from my past and, according to the time-stamp on my then singular Bionic Commando: Rearmed achievement which reads 4th of January 2009, has been sitting around for longer than Alien Hominid HD on my hard-drive. I'm not so sure if I'll manage to complete this as it seems a lot harder than Alien Hominid HD, but I definitely want to complete some more achievements and at least beat the game once on a lower difficulty or something. So far I've managed to pop another two achievements and am working on a third. There's a long road ahead with this game so expect to see some more of it around here.

Apart from that there has been some more movement in the Windows Phone front, with the release of Monster Burner this week which is available for free. As someone that can never pass up the allure of free Gamerscore I downloaded this right away but haven't fired it up yet. I'm not playing any more Windows Phone games until Angry Birds and iStunt 2 are in the bag I've told myself. This goes for the recent purchase of Sally's Salon: Luxury Edition as well, though I'm not really all that interested in playing it. It's the Windows Phone Deal of the Week this week, with it being discounted to a buck, so get on it while you can if you're interested.

Speaking of Deal of the Week, this weeks Xbox DotW is Serious Sam themed, with all the Serious Sam games being discounted. As you might know I recently completed Serious Sam: TFE (Review) and was happy with this opportunity to grab the other Serious Sam episodes only to find the Marketplace being quite glitch when it comes to Serious Sam: TSE. Serious Sam: TSE doesn't show when browsing the Marketplace normally, but when searched for appears without the option to buy the game, only to download the demo. I did so, thinking once I had the game on my hard drive I could unlock it from within the game, pay my MSP and be on my way. This doesn't work either, instead it displays a notice saying that this content isn't available in my region. I don't understand why Serious Sam: TFE and Serious Sam 3 would be fine for my region but Serious Sam: TSE isn't. I'm planning on getting in contact with Microsoft about this soon as I don't want to miss out on this deal, especially because I'm planning on completing the Serious Sam series.

That's been my last two days, looking at this wall of text makes it seem far more eventful than I thought it was. Wednesday I teased some more about the upcoming features of my blog and I was right in holding back on promising anything. I've hit a snag and I'm not in the process of ordering some more stuff to get the stuff I already ordered to work, sigh. Oh well, I'm not going to harp on about this and tease it anymore until I know it's already working so I'll be going dark on this front for a couple of weeks it seems, forget I said anything. Hope everyone has a good time gaming this weekend, leave a comment if you feel inclined to do so, I'd appreciate it, and I'll be back Monday!

Wednesdaily Update

Hey everyone, Wednesday rolls around and some exciting things are going down. Before we get to that first lets cover what I've been up to the last couple days. I'm still chugging along on my quest to try and get Angry Birds done, with it being pulled from the marketplace I'm anxious to complete it, hopefully without any problems. I worked my way through what was left of the second episode, 3 starring everything except for one level which I can't for the life of me manage to hit the score required for the third star. Even if I do everything in the videos that I'm following I always seem to be a few thousand short of where I'm supposed to be.

It's situations like this that really put me off certain games. Games that have a huge luck component just frustrate the hell out of me. You can do everything exactly how you're supposed to and still end up failing and that just isn't a great incentive to play the game. I place my birds exactly as the video and the blocks fall the exact same way every time except sometimes these ones break, other times they don't. Why? The physics engine just messing up I guess. Sometimes a stone block falls from way up and only cracks, sometimes it slides off from a lower platform and it shatters instantly. For these reasons Angry Birds has always been more annoying than entertaining for me. I guess that's just the way the green pig infested tower crumbles.

Physics, why you no consistent?

So I'm one star away from the Episode 2 - Total Destruction achievement. After trying for that star for hours I decided to move on and I've made some headway into the third episode but my previous couple of  hours failures haunted me and I decided that I've had enough of Angry Birds for a while. Thinking that I needed some time away from those annoying birds I was looking around wandering what to tackle next. Slightly lost I was browsing random TrueAchievement pages and saw a link to an Alien Hominid HD Walkthrough on the right hand side of a page.

Alien Hominid is a game that I liked the look of and played for a couple of minutes years ago (on the 3rd of April 2009 by the time-stamp of my first and only achievement in the game before yesterday). It just seemed crazy hard and I had no idea what I was doing or how to tackle the achievements so I gave up on it real quick. Discouraged I never tried to play it again, scrolling past it every time I looked at my games library on my Xbox 360. It's one unlocked achievement taunting me, always reminding me of my pathetic skill in side-scrolling shooters. Well no more! I clicked on that walkthrough and have been following it towards success. I'm two achievements away from completing it, and while they aren't necessarily hard, man are they frustrating. Obviously I hope to wrap Alien Hominid HD up fairly soon and put a lid on this 4 year saga.

That's my last couple of days in gaming. Last Fridaily Update I sort of teased something fairly exciting and today it arrived in the mail. I have been looking at it and messing around a bit but I'm not in the position to start testing it out yet. I still have to set up some stuff and maybe buy some things. I would explain my plans but I first want to get it up and running and see what I can actually accomplish instead of making empty promises. Hopefully by the time Friday comes round I'll be in a better position and be able to share with you guys. That's it for today, yesterday I posted a quasi-review of Red Dead Redemption, stay tuned for a more formal review tomorrow, leave a comment and I hope to see you all again Friday!