Alien Carnage
Description official descriptions
Alien Carnage (also known as Halloween Harry) is a follow-up to the 1985 game Halloween Harry, created for the Microbee System by John Passfield in 1985, but it has very little in common with the original game.
In this side-scrolling platformer, earth is being invaded by aliens who turn humans into zombies in order to enslave them. Harry is the only saviour of earth, and he has to traverse different levels and rescue the kidnapped humans. There are many different weapons to collect, and most have a limited amount of ammo.
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Credits (DOS version)
10 People (9 developers, 1 thanks)
Written by | |
Graphics by | |
Music by | |
Map Design by | |
VGA Routines by | |
Music Interface by | |
Cover Illustration | |
Manual Design | |
Special Thanks to |
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Reviews
Critics
Average score: 89% (based on 6 ratings)
Players
Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 43 ratings with 4 reviews)
General rule: Flamethrowers are sweeeet. HeHeHe....
The Good
Beautiful VGA graphics!! This was the first Apogee game (along with Raptor) that was simply gorgeous to look at, with vivid colors, lush details (I loved those office levels early on!) and plenty of good animations and fxs. Furthermore as standard for all Apogee games, the controls are silky smooth making for a very satisfying experience even if it takes a bit to get used to the new way of "jumping".
The use of heavy-duty weaponry and especially the implementation of the flamethrower and the jetpack made for an interesting twist in gameplay since it worked as an effective way to ditch the jumping puzzles and kept the focus on the action. Ditto the updates that your partner gave you from HQ. They may not seem like much but it all amounted to a clever twist that kept you playing what was essentially a standard platformer, and certainly brought the game up from being just a Duke Nukem wanna-be!
And dammit, it's always sweet to torch a zombie with a flamethrower!
The Bad
Didn't break any new ground really. Heck, if you start thinking about it the hostages are just another way of having you pick up keys or stars, or whatever.
The Bottom Line
Standard side-scroller gameplay wise. But man, is it sweeet :))
Big guns, beautiful graphics and plenty of smooth action. That's Halloween Harry, perfect for when you feel the need to torch some aliens.
DOS · by Zovni (10504) · 2002
The Good
Halloween Harry (aka Alien Carnage) is an absolute classic side-scroller. Aliens are turning people into zombies and you, as Halloween Harry, must save the day. The graphics were awesome, the animation was smooth, and the controls were responsive.
As Harry, you shoot zombies and retrieve coins. Using the coins, you could purchase weapons at what looked like vending machines. As I recall, there were five weapons (flame-thrower, photon gun, missiles, grenades, and omega). The omega pretty much wiped out everything on the screen.
The Bad
Nothing. The game rocked.
The Bottom Line
Holloween Harry is a classic side-scrolling, platform game. Great fun!
DOS · by Toadstool (54) · 2000
The Good
Everything! I used to play a different version called Halloween Harry, but they're basically the same. The graphics are excellent, the music is great (really!), the controls are more than decent and the gameplay is as addictive as they get!
The Bad
Nothing! It really is that good.
The Bottom Line
A greatly underappreciated game most people will find enjoyable.
DOS · by Tomer Gabel (4539) · 2001
Trivia
Freeware release
On May 24, 2007 Alien Carnage was released as freeware by 3D Realms with the permission of John Passfield. The game had previously been discontinued from their product line on April 21, 2000 due to it having problems running on Windows. They recommend using DOSBox to run the game on Windows 2000/XP/Vista.
Halloween Harry
Before it was named Alien Carnage, the name of the game was Halloween Harry. The name was supposedly changed so the game would have more appeal all throughout the year rather than just Halloween. The two versions play exactly the same, but Alien Carnage swapped Block 1: Office and Block 3: Sewers, as well as rotating the music for Blocks 1-3 around.
Music
The music in Halloween Harry was done with .mod files, slightly altered to not play in a standard mod player
Release history
This game's first publicly available version as Halloween Harry was version 1.1 released on October 10th 1993. Version 1.0 of the shareware version was an incomplete version released only to a UK magazine.
When the game was released as Alien Carnage, its version 1.0 release was released on November 2nd 1994.
References
The 3rd level boss, a "sentry droid", is labelled THX-1138 -- George Lucas's first movie, made even before Star Wars. (This is a common injoke in the game industry.)
Shareware content
A shareware version of Alien Carnage was released which had "Block 1: Sewers" playable. Halloween Harry's shareware version had "Block 1: Office" playable. Due to this, half the game ended up being released as shareware.
Studio.exe
The game includes a Studio.exe file in its directory (originally included as a bonus for acquiring the full version) which allows to play all the music from the game.
Information also contributed by Scaryfun, Tomer Gabel, WildKard, Xantheous, Yakumo and Zovni.
Related Sites +
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Alien Carnage v1.0
official game page from 1996, preserved by the Wayback Machine -
Crapshoot
A short, humorous review on PC Gamer -
The Halloween Harry Webshrine
A fan site dedicated to all the games in the Halloween Harry series.
Identifiers +
- MobyGames ID: 522
- Steam App: 358280
- Wikipedia (en)
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Accatone.
Windows added by 666gonzo666. Macintosh added by Koterminus.
Additional contributors: Derrick 'Knight' Steele, Frenkel, Cantillon, Patrick Bregger, piltdown_man, Joseph Collins, Plok, MrFlibble.
Game added December 4th, 1999. Last modified August 14th, 2023.