Alien (Aackosoft)

Alien was published for the Commodore 64 in 1984 by Argus Press Software, and it is one of the very few adaptations of Ridley Scott that does not try to be a shooter. You are aboard the Nostromo, an alien has hatched from the body of one of the seven crew members, and the remaining six have to deal with it before the ship reaches Earth or the oxygen runs out.

You play through menus and orders rather than direct control. You select individual crew members, send them around the ship, assign them equipment and try to keep track of who is where. The game immediately hands you two problems: you do not know exactly where the alien is, and you do not know which crew member is an android. That one is not a reliable ally, and unmasking them is a task in itself.

The strongest thing about it is that several routes lead to a result. The alien can be killed, it can be driven off the ship, or you can set the auto destruct and leave in the shuttle Narcissus, though only with three people and only if you leave nobody alive behind. At the end the game calculates a percentage score based on how many survived, whether the Nostromo was destroyed and whether you identified and contained the android.

The weak points are pace and presentation. Most of the time you are reading status lines and moving names around a deck plan, the tension is something you supply yourself, and on repeat plays it turns into a spreadsheet exercise in resource management. Still, if you like deliberate strategy under incomplete information and can live with slow order giving, this is a game that understood the film better than most action adaptations.

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