Games

Destroy All Humans

Genre: Alien shooter

Developer: THQ

Platform: PS2, Xbox

As well as great things like experimental bisexuality, funk metal, Prodigy and dreadlocked beards, the early 90s were halcyon days for UF0-spotting and alien abduction.

Never before in the history of mankind had there been so many recorded instances of paranormal activity. Weirdly all the “greys” seem to disappear around about the same time that

The X-Files

reached its concluson.

I miss those crazy days with all the airbrush posters of aliens smoking spliffs, the cheap jewellery with alien heads attached to leather chokers, the erotic websites about alien love stories, now replaced by hentai and choking porn.

Even though I never saw any aliens myself, I used to love to read about them in the hundreds of different UFO magazines that suddenly cropped up around about that time. Newsagents shelves were cleared of whole racks of the less popular fetish-specific pornos and angling magazines to make way for publications like

Sightings

and

UFO Monthly

that were put together on Photoshop 1.2 and written by moustachioed middle aged men with weird glasses and facial hair influenced by Ming the Merciless. The mags would be full of elderly chaps from places like Oklahoma who would profess to be experts in the field of alien activity. They would advertise events where they’d charge idiots £500 to attend three-day seminars in seaside town conference centres where they’d talk about alien sightings, swap

X-Files

autographs and talk about their other hobbies, including Beanie Babies and wife-swapping.

During this time I was working on a newspaper in a seaside town and we cashed in on the

X-Files

/ alien invasion explosion of the mid-90s by publishing a column all about the paranormal activity that went down in our area. Most of it (99 per cent of it) was completely made up but the column ran for a year straight every week. Twice we published stories about underground satanic cults that we’d discovered in the area. Both of them were just pictures of me and my friends wearing masks and posing in leather chairs with copies of

Helter Skelter

and

Apocalypse Culture

lying on book tables next to us.

Once we said that the paper’s staff photographer was an expert with divining rods and that he’d found some lost gold under his patio one day. A week or so later we printed pictures from a ouija board session at the same guy’s house where we’d got in contact with the same dead relative who was the owner of the Victorian gold. Stories like this ran, totally unchecked, in the paper every week. The capper was when I interviewed the guy who ran the comics shop round the corner from the office about all the times he’d been on trips to Scotland to spot the Loch Ness Monster. This made the front page of the newspaper. Our circulation was 75,000. Meaning that 75,000 read those bogus stories every week for a year and nobody even wrote in to complain once. The lesson I learned from all this is that a lot of people will believe anything they read. And a lot of them will pay money to the liars who make the lies so the lies become more believable. Anything to make the rainy days go faster.

So, if any of you are like me and are missing the days when aliens were omnipresent then you have to get hold of this game. It’s the funnest thing we’ve had to review for months.

You play as this little wisecracking alien called Crypto who talks like he was raised in a tough area of Brooklyn during the 1950s, which is apt because the game is set in America during that period. All diners and rock ‘n’ roll hops and politicians that talk like JFK.

The aim is to invade earth and colonise it for all your chums but you get to do that by annihilating huge swathes of the earth with devastating, unforgiving brutality.

One of the best things about the game is the “mind control” feature. You get to disguise yourself as a lowly human and send off these hypnotism darts into their brain. Once you’ve got them in your grasp you can make them act like monkeys or throw then 100 feet over buildings and into walls. Doing this to the cows is excellent fun.

You can also suck out their brains and eat them to get their DNA which you trade in for new weapons and upgrades on your flying saucer. There are two levels of play. First off you roam around on foot zapping humans, huge robots and these

Men In Black

secret service guys who’re behind a big plot about aliens and robots and humans and whatever-it-is DNA bubble machines. The main thing is that you get to maim, kill and explode things at will without ever feeling too scared or threatened by the real world.

SYRUP DAVIES

SCAR: Squadra

Corse Alfa Romeo

Black Bean

PS2, Xbox, PC

Again with the serious, boring driving simulators. Who buys these things? Are these what kids have to play when they’re grounded? This should be called

Driving For Grannies

. So what if it’s a “realistic” interpretation of driving an Alfa Romeo car? How “realistic” can it be? It didn’t really fool me into thinking I wasn’t sitting in my front room drinking a beer, playing on my Playstation and wondering what the fuck I was going to write about this game. Getting the bus on a rainy day is more fun than this.

You know when you’re standing up by the side doors and they keep banging you in the leg every time they open? Usually the floor’s wet with a spilled McDonald’s drink and a fried chicken box with tomato ketchup sticking to your foot. There’ll be three prams blocking everybody in and the teenage mums who’ve spawned the screaming beasts will be talking loudly on their mobiles about absolutely nothing whatsoever. Hmm. Bus

rides. What else? Well one of the more remarkable ones I had recently was a night bus to Camden with the drug addict guy who used to trawl the World’s End with the big scab on the back of his neck. Me and him were sat on the back seat doing bumps of coke on the way to buy some heroin in Camden. We scored and that’s when he tried to convince me to come back to his house to shoot up. I was such a fucking druggy at that time I actually considered sharing his needle just after he’d shot up the heroin which he’d, five minutes earlier, shat out on the floor of his kitchen in two blue packets. The shitting part of it all made me chicken out on the needle so I went home to smoke it instead. Two weeks later I was back in Camden trying to score and one of his friends said Scabneck had left town. He went on to say everybody was happy about that because he’d been diagnosed with HIV and his big thing was getting other people infected with this needle he always carried around with him. Lucky escape eh? Phew. Just say no, etc etc…

ANTHONY CORPER