Alien vs. Predator Review
Alien vs. Predator

Recipe for the perfect game, Take two box office smash licenses mix gently, add one VERY unlucky marine, and stir. Atari hit the gold mine with this license, unfortunately its marketing scheme was sub par. The marketing consisted mainly of game magazine ads, which were fairly cool but a bit sparce, and an amazing commercial that aired VERY infrequently. AvP was Atari's killer app, too bad noone heard of it until it was too late.

Although it was met with rave reviews from many magazines at the time, AvP came out with little fanfare. It did however give the Jaguar its first highly selling game, as when word spread copies of the game became difficult to find. Rebellion proved that the Jaguar was a 64 bit system and gave Atari its first cult hit. They also proved that a movie licensed game could actually be good.

The graphics in AvP were incredible at the time and still fairly impressive today, the space station has a cold, eerily sterile feel to it, like the complexes in the movies did. The walls and ceiling were texture mapped with lights giving way to alien cocooned corridors as you progress into Alien infested territory. Enemies were well drawn and animated well, there was some choppiness to them but they were well done overall. The Predator materializing in front of you, or alien screaming as it attacked from behind were enough to scare anyone.
Vision fields for the Predator were taken directly from the movie and had that distinct sound as you switched between the multiple fields of vision he had while invisible.

Music in AvP is nil, there is a slight eery song at the title screen, but no in game music. This is where AvP shined, its sound effects were incredible, the station could always be heard as its engines lightly hummed in space. The chilling calm could be broken by the roar of the Predator oh his evil laugh while he sits and watches you while invisible =). Screaming Aliens, shouting Marines and hails of weapons fire broke the calm readily as well.
The sound effects are what gave AvP its ''feel'' activating a computer brought on the computer ''voice'' from the alien movies, very creepy... it just capped off the eery sterile feel and made you truly feel like you were all alone.

Gameplay was rather straightforward, standard FPS (first person shooter) controls abound walk forward, bakward, turn, strafe, switch weapons, and the ever present health bar. Medical supplies, food, and ammo is abundant. and you WILL need it =)
nothing truly innovative, except the overlays that came for your controller, they made switching between weapons by far the easiest of any FPS I ever played, and although it becomes second nature after a bit, theyre nice to have =)

Alien vs Predator is not a flawless game, it DOES deserve its ''10'' though, as its flaws are rather nitpicky and in no way hurt this incredible game. What would have made it better would have been more animation frames on enemies, a run button, and the chance to save a few fellow marines would have been a nice touch...

Like I said not flawless, but this game is pretty nearly as close to perfect as any FPS I've ever played, as it suffers from almost NO slowdown regardless if theres 2 enemies or 10 on screen at once, and that alone in my book is pretty amazing considering I've seen N64 FPS's slow down to a crawl with 3 enemies.

Rent or buy.... BUY! cause your not going to find a Jag rental place anyway.... but once you play this game, you won't want to stop =)

Reviewer's Score: 10 / 10