Stupid Invaders Preview

Ok, what have we got? Stupid Invaders... We seem to be in for another remake of a classical shoot-em-up in full 3D, with dynamic lighting, and smoke effects... Funny how everyone keeps doing the remakes of old games trying to implement something new and interesting and systematically failing... Hey, wait!?! There's not too many of these invaders about! In fact, there are only five of them. And they seem too dangerous either; they look like they could use some protection. Have things changed over the last couple of years?

This five funny guys crash land on Earth in an attempt to have a picnic, and as luck would have it they immediately run into the evil scientist Dr. Sakarine, whose hobby is collecting aliens. I don't know how his hobby went so far, but he already has one fanatical follower - Boloc, who has great desire to study alien anatomy and physiology.

Ethno, Gorgeous, Candy, Bud and Stereo, the weirdest creatures of the already bizarre universe, will have to save their colorful hides relying on your wits, as you take control of them in turns.

This game is being produced by Gaumont Multimedia, whose work basically came down to making movies and movie effects (5th Element, Les Visiteurs). In 1995 they created their first game "Down in the Dumps", and it didn't sell too good. Stupid Invaders are based on a french cartoon series called "Space Goofs" (Les Zinzins de l'Espace). This should give you some ideas about the quality of the animation. The authors said they really wanted to advance the genre by creating a real interactive cartoon. Stupid Invaders should mostly resemble Lucas Arts': Sam'n'Max Hit the Road and Day of the Tentacle...

The Developers are trying to make this game as stupid as possible, hopefully in a positive sense. Gaumont Multimedia employed two playwrights who only did cartoons up till now. They conceived the whole story, but as the producer states, it's going to be far from a children cartoon. Absurd humor and dirty jokes will dominate the screen, starting from the very appearance of the protagonists, the entire story, to dialogues and references to well known, adventures, comics, movies and events. The humor is supposed to be slightly British, as the developers themselves claim to be great Monty Python fans, so they even hired an "English talking person" to do the humorous dialogues... Say no more!

The game will support the relatively modest 640x480 resolution with 24bpp, but still beautiful 3D rendered locations crammed with details. 3D hardware acceleration will be used only to scale sprites. The game will have over 100 cinematics.

Sound and music have been given special attention. They change depending on the situation from easy and slow music in less interesting parts of the game, cheerful music during funny situations, to spooky backgrounds during dramatic events. The same goes for the voice-acting, done by true professionals used to working on projects like Futurama, The Simpsons...

As for the difficulty, let us just say that hard-core adventurers should be able to complete the game in about thirty hours, because they will have to go through more than 120 locations with 500 backgrounds and associate with / run away from more than 50 characters. The puzzles will be typical for adventure games: pick one object up, combine it with another give it to someone and you'll get something in return. Even though the authors strived to create the stupidest game ever, they still tried to make more or less logical puzzles, with progressive difficulty in order to let the players really get into the game. Now, if you add that up with some 2000 dialogues (a relatively small number for an adventure, but this was primarily supposed to be a slapstick), and you have the basic idea what we're talking about here ...

Stupid Invaders have been announced to arrive during September on 3CDs, and give us a nice adventure-oriented end of the year. Yes, of course I was talking about Monkey Island 4, what else?