Last Week's Games: Fantasy Zone, Alien Syndrome, Altered Beast, Theme Hospital

Yeah, I didn't get to this level.

Needing to fill an hour on Monday Night, I had a go at some of the Arcade games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. My new game for the week was Fantasy Zone, a very colourful shoot-em-up. You play as a small flying ship that looks like it was made from Duplo bricks, and fly around the screen shooting at other creatures invading the land (I couldn’t tell you what any of them are right now!) There are eight larger targets in the level, which take some heavy shooting before they are destroyed. After that, there’s a boss battle, in which the game becomes a Bullet Hell as you try to attack the boss’s weak point while desperately looking for a gap in the projectiles flying at you. I got to the boss on the second level and was defeated, after that my concentration failed and I couldn’t reach that point in the game again, so I moved on. I do want to come back to it though; it was a lot of fun!

I also played Alien Syndrome, which I really enjoyed. I was expecting another side-scrolling beat-em-up when I first saw the game, as you unlock it by getting to a certain point on Alien Storm. But it’s actually a top-down shooter, in which you fight your way through constantly-spawning aliens to rescue your comrades, and once you’ve rescued 10, you go into an arena for a ferociously hard boss battle. It’s a good game, and one I look forward to coming back to in the future!

One game I will be glad not to have to play again is Altered Beast. I played the arcade version of this on the same disc. I didn’t really enjoy it that much but I managed to beat it eventually; you can see it covered in my Backlog Beatdown review. I also persevered with Killer7 for a while; I’m not sure whether I’m “enjoying” it in the usual sense, but I’m finding it intriguing enough to keep going for now at least.

I'll show you the games once
I've played them, alright?

I ordered a copy of Atari Anthology for the PS2, having been persuaded by one of the Metal Jesus videos, and before playing I had a look at the manual to it. With compilation discs, I usually mark the individual games off as complete once I’ve beaten them. One of the problems I was going to have with the Atari games is that most of them aren’t supposed to be “beaten” in any meaningful way. They’re arcade games; you play them until you die and aim for the high score. I wondered how many of the games I’d be interested in playing, because I like to see them through to the end. But Atari fixed this by putting unlockable items in the game; different game modes and interviews etc. Hot Seat mode looks intriguing! So once I’ve unlocked everything, I’ll mark off the whole disc as complete. Otherwise I’ve just taken on 85 games that can’t really be beaten!

Brilliant game, still playing it 20 years later.

Finally, I played Theme Hospital. I downloaded this from GOG a year ago; I have a copy of it on CD-ROM, but the chances I’ll ever get that to work on a modern laptop were slim, so I downloaded a digital version that runs off DosBox. And for a while, I enjoyed it hugely, building the hospitals, researching the cures, trying to let as few people die as possible. It took me right back to when I used to play it in the late 90s! I got to roughly the 8^th or 9^th level (I can’t remember which, it was a while ago!) and played quite a long way in to it before the game crashed and, since Autosave wasn’t a thing back then, and I hadn’t saved the game for a while, I lost a couple of hours of play. I know these things happen, but it’s a dangerous game to play with someone who was already looking forward to the end of the game by then. So I left it for a year, came back to it this week, and played two hours of the level I was stuck on before exactly the same thing happened. Well, darn.