Alien Carnage/Halloween Harry

Alien Carnage was originally called Halloween Harry. It features you, Harry, on a little mission to save the world from some Aliens who are turning people into zombies and stuff. When I had it, it was called Halloween Harry, and I could swear that I remember the missions being different, but they changed a lot of it for some reason or another.

Gameplay: 7/10
Let's just get this off our chest right now; Harry can't jump. He must weigh like 500 pounds with giant gas tank and helmet he wears. What Harry lacks in mobility he replaces with the brute force thrust of his jetpack, subsequently draining his flamethrower fuel. That's right, they're linked together. If you run out, it sucks. You gotta go buy some more from one of these vending machine things, but in order to do that, you must make the money by killing a few of the many enemies in this game. There's blobs, spiders, zombies, aliens, and lots more weirdness. Every now and then Harry runs across a chick who's about to get some tentacle. He unties them and makes them disappear into another dimension or something. The controls are ridiculous and stiff, gravity just seems to suck in this world Harry lives in. That set aside, the game is still pretty fun to play and it runs well enough for me to only -3 points.

Graphics: 9/10
I've always enjoyed the graphics in this game. They're fresh and vivid, a little cartoon nature about them, and the levels look really good. Cut scenes are spectacular. It could have ran a little faster, as it seems a little skippy, but still very fast. Only -1 point!

Sound: 7/10
When I had this game around 1995, I don't think I had a Soundblaster, or even knew what that meant. I remember using the PC Speaker option, but it lacked music. Now when I play it, the music sounds pretty good, and the sounds are defiantly worthy. It's not very high quality, but I can't complain. -3 points.

Overall: 8/10
Alien Carnage, or Halloween Harry for that matter, is a staple of one of those wonderful Apogee sidescrolling games. Man, did they come out with a ton of them, but it's great. When I play this game now, it reminds me of many other games to follow in its wake, like Borderlands, running around getting money killing stuff vending machines and so on. I also can't help but wonder if Duke Nukem took a little piece of the storyline out of this game. I guess we'll never know. You should probably play this game, because it used to cost money, but now it's free to play and distribute.
http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/alien-carnage/