ST Format


Plan 9 From Outer Space
By Gremlin
Atari ST

 
Published in ST Format #40

Plan 9 From Outer Space

Zombies, flying saucers, incredibly stupid policemen and kidnapped girlfriends - it's all too silly for words. Cue the ST game of the film where the best bit is the title...

There comes a point where a film is so bad that it crosses the threshold and becomes strangely good in a sort of cringingly embarrassing way. Plan 9 From Outer Space is hailed as one of the worst films ever made. Featuring a million continuity errors, actors with woodworm and a script with all the flair of a dead slug. An obvious candidate for a game licence. Er, really?

Fortunately you're not involved in the film's shambling plot. No, you are hired by its producer to recover six reels of the film which have been lost. When you find a reel you can watch it at one of the projection booths that are scattered about - your questionable reward for this discovery is to see a small digitised clip from the original film. Cue a fairly ordinary point-and-click adventure as you bumble around locations collecting and distributing objects. The screen features the now customary graphics window, the inventory list of obscurely useful objects and the available commands to click on.

Plan 9 from Outer Space

Although there are a fair number of locations to visit - the game even spans continents - progress is linear and annoyingly constrictive at times. You need to click on some tiny graphic to get a clue to the next section. If you don't, you are frustratingly powerless and have to backtrack to find the bit you missed. Some of the puzzles are not in the land of the logical. You come across some nasty vampire bats in a cave just off the Copocabana beach which suck you dry. The solution is not to chew whole garlic bulbs, don a vampire outfit or drink pints of dragon's blood - or anything like that. What you have to do - and get this - is to take a picture of Bella Lugosi into the cave so the bats swoop on that instead.

Plan 9 isn't set in a believable game world, or even in a believable B-movie, although there are some neat B-movie touches. Two of the characters play nearly all the bit-parts, one character's moustache starts to fall off and the accents are all terrible. The humour ranges from the groan-inducing upwards, although it never hits really funny.

Verdict

The graphics are detailed and have the odd spot of interest-adding animation making it a good-looking jaunt. The disappointing part is the adventure element - with obscure puzzles and fairly linear progression, it soon turns into a battle with the programmer's imagination in one puzzle after another. If you miss something, it's likely to turn into frustration city. It's a game that either grips you as you battle determinedly on to the next scene, or that makes you feel like wrenching the disks from the drive and stamping on them - be warned.

Chris Lloyd

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