Alien vs. Predator (Jaguar) Playthrough

A playthrough of Atari’s 1994 license-based first-person action game for the Atari Jaguar, Alien vs. Predator.

In this video I go through all three campaigns:

Alien 1:51
Predator 24:35
Colonial Marine 1:42:47

That Alien vs. Predator was one of the best games ever released on the Atari Jaguar is no secret. It was one of a small handful of games that offered a glimpse at what the hardware was truly capable of, and it was arguably the only game in the Jag's library that could match the level of sophistication and polish of Nintendo and Sega's best offerings.

The game was created by English developer Rebellion after Atari had sublicensed the AvP brand from Activision. It was originally intended to be a port of the lackluster SNES beat 'em up of the same name (   • Alien vs. Predator (SNES) Playthrough - Ni...  ), but thankfully, the guys at Rebellion thought better of that idea.

It's a first-person action game that takes place at Golgotha, a Colonial Marine training facility at which both a Predator ship and a xenomorph ship have docked, and each race gets its own single-player campaign.

As the xenomorph, your goal is to rescue the Alien Queen who has been captured by the Predators and is being held on their ship. The Alien can't make use of any items or weapons, but its lightning speed and incredible strength can make short work of anything in close quarters combat. The Alien is highly suspectible to ranged attacks and goes down easily in a firefight, but it can reproduce by cocooning the humans it comes across. So long as one of its clones has fully matured, whenever the current drone dies, a hatchling will resume the quest in its stead, giving the Aliens the longevity needed to complete their task.

The Predator seeks a trophy in the form of the Alien Queen's head. He has an invisibility cloak that can be activated at any time, and when cloaked he can make use of visual filters to highlight certain things in the environments. He carries four weapons - a wrist blade, a combi-stick (a telescoping cattle prod, basically), throwable smart discs, and a shoulder cannon - and these weapons become available once he has earned sufficient honor points by killing enemies while uncloaked.

Private Lewis of the Colonial Marines is sole surviving human at Golgotha, and his mission is to set the station to self-destruct and to make it to an escape pod before the place blows. His is the campaign that best resembles a traditional FPS: he'll need to find keycards to gain access to restricted areas and the station's computer terminals while fending off the onslaught of invaders. He can make use of a motion tracker to keep tabs on his immediate surroundings, and in addition to the shotgun he starts with, he eventually gains a pulse rifle, a flamethrower, and a smart gun to help even the odds.

Each of the campaigns offers its own distinct style of gameplay, and though Lewis's path is clearly the best developed of the three, they're all satisfying in how well they manage to capture the essence of their stars. This is fan-service done right.

The controls are smooth and make good use of the Jaguar's controller layout, and the difficulty level is nicely balanced. It's skewed high enough to maintain a heavy sense of tension - death is an ever-present threat no matter how powerful your weapons become - but it's not so hard as to feel cheap and unfair. You'll die a lot, but things become more manageable as you learn the layout of the station, and the game's save-anywhere feature is generous, though the auto-map is blanked and the enemies respawn when you load a saved game.

It looks impossibly good for a game of its time running on a $250 console. The textures are all high-resolution, 15-bit color digitized photos that completely lack the warping and muddy filtering seen in PS1 and N64 titles, and the smooth scaling of character and object sprites gives areas a clean sense of depth. They crammed a ton into this 32 megabit cartridge.

The framerate is just as impressive. It generally hangs out in the low teens, and while I'm sure many modern gamers would scoff at this level of performance and outright dismiss the game as being unplayable because of it, in its time, this was epic next-gen stuff. It was smoother than anything that was visually comparable on the $700 3DO, and it positively smoked the SNES's impressive port of Doom. Dated as it looks today, between its performance and outstanding image quality, AvP marked a huge step forward for console FPSes.

Alien vs. Predator was a game that didn't sell nearly what it should have because of its platform, but it was also a game that worked so well because it was built from the ground up specifically for the Jaguar hardware.

If you're looking for a game based on the Alien or Predator franchises or an old-school FPS that's positively dripping in atmosphere, Alien vs. Predator for the Jag is absolutely superb.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.