Area 51 (Arcade)
After having played both of Midway’s attempts to reinvent the alien shooter series Area 51 with its 2005 version and BlackSite: Area 51, I knew I had to finally see how it all started when I spotted a cabinet for the original game in the arcade. This 1995 light gun game was apparently such a shot in the arm for the flagging Atari Games Corporation that it helped spur their rise back into arcade prominence. Having played the game now though, it’s a bit hard to believe such a resurgence was built off the back of such a straightforward light gun shooter.
Set in and around America’s infamous Area 51 and happily playing into the conspiracies that it houses alien life, the game named for the military facility has a group of aliens known as the Kronn seizing control of the installation and converting the on-site humans into zombified forms that can help repel America’s immediate counterattack. As part of a special alien task force known as STAAR, the player must shoot their way past all of the enemy forces and enter the research facility to prevent the Kronn from escaping Earth. To cover all evidence of the incident up, you and the other Special Tactical Advanced Alien Response team members must activate a nuclear bomb to obliterate any evidence the event took place. This plot is mostly conveyed by a few text screens prior to hopping right into the action and things end almost with an anti-climax since the text returns to say the job’s complete, but there is at least a final fight to cap things off as you face off with the enemy mothership.
The action in Area 51 kicks off quickly, throwing players into areas around the military facility where your movement is controlled by the game but you are in charge of all the aiming and shooting that needs doing. Using one of the gun peripherals attached to the cabinet, you and another player only need to point at where you wish to target and pull the trigger to fire, reloading performed by pointing away from the screen and shooting. Over the course of the game you can find Power Ups that will turn your default pistol into stronger weapons, things upgrading to an automatic version where you can hold the trigger to fire, a shotgun that requires a bit less precision despite it already being fairly easy to hit your targets, and an automatic version of the shotgun for rapid fire high damage shots. Taking damage will knock your weapon down a level on this upgrade tree, but as you start the game, you’ll find that’s not too much of a concern. The opening half of Area 51 is so easy that it threatens to make the entire experience too dull to enjoy.
Before you push into the research facilities of Area 51, you’ll spend the first few stages shooting the alien-possessed humans. The problem with these enemies is that they are all so easily dispatched without being able to put up a good fight of their own. The opening stages end up feeling like a small step up from a passive shooting gallery. As you move around military locations like hangars and exterior areas littered with crates and barrels, the human foes will pop out and begin firing with sci-fi weaponry, but their guns won’t do damage unless you leave them alone for too long. As soon as an enemy appears it’s fairly easy to point at them and land the shot needed to kill them, and even if you did miss, the time they need to hurt you versus the time you would take to fire multiple back-up shots ends up being too great for them to be much of a concern.
The first few stages are mostly made up of these pop up targets and if thought of more like whack-a-mole than real enemies, taking them down is a passable affair but one that certainly couldn’t sustain a fun experience on its own. The game does introduce a few ideas to try and keep these early stages from being completely stale. Purple-suited enemies appear that require plenty of shots to take down, often hurling barrels towards you at a rate that does have a chance of dealing some damage before the enemy is dead, and other rare durable foes like a helicopter or zombies driving forklifts actually pose a small threat. Fellow STAAR members also pop up all over the place during these early stages, their sudden appearance meant to trick the player into shooting them and losing health for the friendly fire. This common trick to punish players for roboticaly firing on anything that appears in an light gun game has an interesting secret to it here though, where if you only shoot the STAAR members you get to switch to the role of a Kronn hunter, the game now presented with a filter similar to the Predator’s heat vision although not truly impacting the gameplay in any other way. Nifty secrets and rewards like screen-clearing grenades earned by shooting crates give these early stages a bit more than the basics, but it’s when you first see an alien outside of special hidden areas that the game really begins to find its footing.
Once you enter the facility proper, Area 51 begins to throw the Kronn aliens at you, and they are a considerable step up from the regular fodder. Quicker on the draw and more dangerous for it despite being almost as easy to kill as the zombies, the Kronn tend to either appear in close quarters areas like an office section or arrive in great numbers like in the deeper research labs. The number of zombie soldiers is cranked up as well so that between dealing with them and the aliens they actually have a shot of dealing some damage, the player now needing to be much faster to fire accurately and health loss is actually likely to happen even without purple-suited zombies involved. Soldiers who appear right in front of you and wind up a physical strike also become common threats, and with the speed of play requiring quicker kills, things like the explosive barrels that seemed like too much help before now are more like a way of evening the odds in your favor. The difficulty increase salvages the experience, the game even tossing multiple purple enemies at you at once, but there are still a few moments that are a little strange such as a stage where you spin around in place three times and shoot at enemies who spawn in at the same places each rotation.
One of the best features in Area 51 though is one I didn’t realize the importance of until I was fighting the final boss. The mothership fight is actually a timed battle where you get the bad ending if you can’t destroy its parts quickly enough, and with so many aliens running around during the fight it is possible to be overwhelmed trying to manage your health and their numbers while making time to deal the damage to the boss. After getting the bad ending though I found myself at the start screen where it offers an ingenious option: the ability to warp ahead to the alien levels. While the experiencing the totality of a game is important and for a game that takes around a half hour to complete playing through the first few levels doesn’t seem too bad, but allowing the player the option to skip the dull start and get straight into the more challenging action helps ensure that Area 51 can be experienced as a fully decent light gun shooter if you so wish, it just requires skipping the slow beginning to achieve that higher quality bar.
THE VERDICT: Area 51 gets off to a poor start as the enemy soldiers fought are too slow and too easy to target to really put up a fight, but the game almost seems to acknowledge this rough beginning and puts in an option to skip right to the more interesting firefights. Once the aliens enter the picture though the game picks up in both difficulty and stronger enemy positioning, the game still not quite hitting the heights needed to be a riveting light gun game but packing in enough challenging moments and small additions to your power like the weapon upgrades and grenades that it settles into an acceptable form for its back half.
And so, I give Area 51 for arcade machines…
An OKAY rating. The scale weighing the early boring segments where enemies aren’t even threatening against the more packed alien fights of the later interior areas is balanced in favor of the more interesting gameplay segments thankfully, but the dull start certainly threatened to drag down what is otherwise a passable arcade amusement. It still doesn’t ascend too far above a fairly plain light gun game concept, the power-up system pretty much the only thing it has going for it besides positioning enemies in a way that allows them to put up a decent fight, but thanks to the warp you can get a small but enjoyable enough burst of alien shooting that won’t feel like a quarter wasted. More enemy variety is the easiest suggestion to improve things, as would giving a few more foes the durability needed to put up a threat. For what is mostly a quick draw challenge due to many foes going down to one shot needs more push back either in the enemies being deadlier or they need to require more effort to dispatch. Even the earlier stages could be made more interesting if there were more mix-ups like the underutilized helicopter and forklift zombies.
While still an unbalanced package, Area 51 at least lets you skip its worse parts, making for a game that’s more believable as the start of Atari’s return to prominence. For the most part it does provide just the basic enjoyable aspects of a light gun shooter like needing to be fast and accurate to hit all the enemy targets, but that simplicity also lets it slip into the arcade where such game designs often draw in plenty of different players. It doesn’t seem like the series got off to a sterling start, making the two future sort-of reboots make a bit more sense, but there does still remain a direct sequel to Area 51 out there in the form of Area 51: Site 4 that I have yet to take a look at. Hopefully it can learn some lessons from the mediocrity of Area 51, but at least this alien shooter didn’t completely fail in providing arcade goers with some fast-paced alien shooting action.