Alien Breed 3D
Alien Breed 3D, developed by Team 17 and published by Ocean Software in 1995.
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Player's Review
"Over the last four years, the Alien Breed saga has become legendary amongst Amiga owners... now the series culminates in quite spectacular fashion... Alien Breed is now in 3D! Transported to a spectacular 3D environment, you must outwit the ferocious Breed once more, but this time the added dimension of "being there" brings you even closer to the disgusting creatures than ever before!
3D ENGINE FEATURES
Floors, ceilings, 4096 colours, depth shading, gouraud shading, staircases, transporters, doors, exploding aliens, real 3D rooms, different height platforms, lifts, moving floors, rippling water and much, much more... the definitive realtime 3D engine for the Amiga!"
Alien Breed 3D was developed for AGA only Amigas like the 1200/4000 and CD32. A new wave of FPS or Doom clones as they were known as really pushing the limits of a stock Amiga 1200 by amping up the details and was a step above the likes of Gloom, Fears and Breathless not to take away any of the advancements they brought forward of course. Whilst the game does play ok on a stock machine, it was certainly encouraging you to upgrade to a faster cpu for a better experience and there were a couple of options to strip down the gfx for a little extra speed. This was normal in the PC world where upgrading your cpu every year was all part of the pc gaming experience but on the Amiga, any remaining users went into the new world of faster Amigas kicking and screaming and blaming the developers for slow games.
When Alien Breed 3D released is was perhaps the closest yet of being truly a Doom clone although not quite there yet. There is only one difficulty (can be Hard or easy depending on how well the game is running for you but the later enemies certainly hit hard) and no scoring so doesnt really matter about killing everything for points. There is no map or ability to look up and down although shots will home in on things above or below you. platforms can be multilevel with lifts or stairs to reach them and the water is interesting with its ripple effects. Getting through some doors can require keys of which there are four colours. There are 16 levels to playthrough each having a text based level description or narrative.
Difficulty is mixed. levels are not overly large and there are plenty of med kits about as well as ammo. There are only five weapon types and I find the grenade and missile launcher the least useful as they don't seem to do much damage and it can be a bit random for the game to decide if the shots connect with the enemy. You must be careful with them as the grenade can bounce back at you and the explosions hurt you a lot.
For this longplay we are using a stock CD32 2mb config just as a console owner likely would have back in 1995. It is worth noting that just adding some fast memory (through an SX1) would give a noticeable uplift in the framerate. The A1200 recording shows an accelerated playthrough of the game. The game only supports 2x2 pixel graphics mode for performance reasons and looks best played in a window. I don't know if there is a hidden option to enable the 4x4 fullscreen mode on the CD32. The game is exactly the same as the A1200 release with the addition of background music and the default controls map well to the CD32 joypad. Of course they had to drop the ending as they ran out of space on the cd, and even the A1200 floppy version only shows the ending if you don't use the official update/patch.
Overall, It was a great release for the Amiga in it's dwindling days. Showing the Amiga was always capable of a Doom like experience on a stock 2mb A1200. Sure, were not quite at the level of Doom yet with a fair few mechanics missing but just maybe we will get there in Team 17s final Alien Breed game, The Killing Grounds. For the most part AB3D is a great game if you are into corridor shooters but the difficulty can be its shortcoming, not to mention the poor framerate on a stock CD32/1200. As noted already, the rocket and grenade only do impact damage if they connect and there is seemingly no aoe damage making killing enemies quite difficult with them. This is especially true at the end of level 15 where there is a room full of enemies and I unload every grenade I can carry into them killing maybe 2 out of 20 making that final run for the lift quite frustrating and it certainly didn't help that ammo and health were scarce.
00:00:00 Title Screen
00:01:42 M1: The Gate
00:05:18 M2: Storage Bay
00:09:46 M3: Sewer Network
00:16:08 M4: The Courtyard
00:26:54 M5: System Purge
00:33:00 M6: The Mines
00:42:41 M7: The Furnace
00:57:02 M8: Test Arena Gamma
01:11:02 M9: Surface Zone
01:21:00 M10: Training Area
01:32:40 M11: Admin Block
01:45:11 M12: The Pit
01:57:01 M13: Strata
02:03:28 M14: Reactor Core
02:20:05 M15: Cooling Tower
02:34:37 M16: Command Centre
--------------------------------------------
02:42:54 Title Music in Full
02:47:26 Game Over
3D ENGINE FEATURES
Floors, ceilings, 4096 colours, depth shading, gouraud shading, staircases, transporters, doors, exploding aliens, real 3D rooms, different height platforms, lifts, moving floors, rippling water and much, much more... the definitive realtime 3D engine for the Amiga!"
Alien Breed 3D was developed for AGA only Amigas like the 1200/4000 and CD32. A new wave of FPS or Doom clones as they were known as really pushing the limits of a stock Amiga 1200 by amping up the details and was a step above the likes of Gloom, Fears and Breathless not to take away any of the advancements they brought forward of course. Whilst the game does play ok on a stock machine, it was certainly encouraging you to upgrade to a faster cpu for a better experience and there were a couple of options to strip down the gfx for a little extra speed. This was normal in the PC world where upgrading your cpu every year was all part of the pc gaming experience but on the Amiga, any remaining users went into the new world of faster Amigas kicking and screaming and blaming the developers for slow games.
When Alien Breed 3D released is was perhaps the closest yet of being truly a Doom clone although not quite there yet. There is only one difficulty (can be Hard or easy depending on how well the game is running for you but the later enemies certainly hit hard) and no scoring so doesnt really matter about killing everything for points. There is no map or ability to look up and down although shots will home in on things above or below you. platforms can be multilevel with lifts or stairs to reach them and the water is interesting with its ripple effects. Getting through some doors can require keys of which there are four colours. There are 16 levels to playthrough each having a text based level description or narrative.
Difficulty is mixed. levels are not overly large and there are plenty of med kits about as well as ammo. There are only five weapon types and I find the grenade and missile launcher the least useful as they don't seem to do much damage and it can be a bit random for the game to decide if the shots connect with the enemy. You must be careful with them as the grenade can bounce back at you and the explosions hurt you a lot.
For this longplay we are using a stock CD32 2mb config just as a console owner likely would have back in 1995. It is worth noting that just adding some fast memory (through an SX1) would give a noticeable uplift in the framerate. The A1200 recording shows an accelerated playthrough of the game. The game only supports 2x2 pixel graphics mode for performance reasons and looks best played in a window. I don't know if there is a hidden option to enable the 4x4 fullscreen mode on the CD32. The game is exactly the same as the A1200 release with the addition of background music and the default controls map well to the CD32 joypad. Of course they had to drop the ending as they ran out of space on the cd, and even the A1200 floppy version only shows the ending if you don't use the official update/patch.
Overall, It was a great release for the Amiga in it's dwindling days. Showing the Amiga was always capable of a Doom like experience on a stock 2mb A1200. Sure, were not quite at the level of Doom yet with a fair few mechanics missing but just maybe we will get there in Team 17s final Alien Breed game, The Killing Grounds. For the most part AB3D is a great game if you are into corridor shooters but the difficulty can be its shortcoming, not to mention the poor framerate on a stock CD32/1200. As noted already, the rocket and grenade only do impact damage if they connect and there is seemingly no aoe damage making killing enemies quite difficult with them. This is especially true at the end of level 15 where there is a room full of enemies and I unload every grenade I can carry into them killing maybe 2 out of 20 making that final run for the lift quite frustrating and it certainly didn't help that ammo and health were scarce.
00:00:00 Title Screen
00:01:42 M1: The Gate
00:05:18 M2: Storage Bay
00:09:46 M3: Sewer Network
00:16:08 M4: The Courtyard
00:26:54 M5: System Purge
00:33:00 M6: The Mines
00:42:41 M7: The Furnace
00:57:02 M8: Test Arena Gamma
01:11:02 M9: Surface Zone
01:21:00 M10: Training Area
01:32:40 M11: Admin Block
01:45:11 M12: The Pit
01:57:01 M13: Strata
02:03:28 M14: Reactor Core
02:20:05 M15: Cooling Tower
02:34:37 M16: Command Centre
--------------------------------------------
02:42:54 Title Music in Full
02:47:26 Game Over
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