Halloween Harry, also known by the alternate title "Alien Carnage" is a platform action game developed by Sub Zero Games published by Apogee, and perhaps one of the lesser known games in my "Know Your Classics" list, but still a game that should be listed here, for it is one of the better platform action games to be released for DOS PC.
The game takes place in the future when an alien ship of unknown origin lands in New York City and kidnaps all civilians and turns them into mindless zombies. Many agents send by the authorities tried to rescue these hostages before they are turned into zombies and to defeat their king. All of them failed, and now you are the last trump card they have.
Your commander, a woman by the name of Diane, will instruct you about your mission, and from there the game begins.
Halloween Harry does spoof the typical scifi heroes, and most specifically the big of sexism that went around these heroes has been excellently parodied by the hostages, most of them (but by far not all of them) being female instantly falling in love with you as soon as you rescue them.
(The male hostages will just make a kind of "yippee" gesture).
Now the gameplay is that of a typical action platformer of the time, however as DOS PC was always a bit lacking on the hardware, game consoles and the AMIGA always had the better titles in this genre (though there may be a few notable exceptions). Halloween Harry did show a game like this was possible for DOS PC. The action and controls were really smooth, and the graphics were of a pretty good quality, if you consider the game runs in a 320x200 pixels mode with only 256 colors. But if you consider one of the better action games that came before Haloween Harry (commander Keen) had only 16 colors, perhaps you know what I'm getting at. Also the background music is entirely made of digitized sounds, most likely in a kind of soundtracker based format, which was really something DOS PC users often had to miss from the AMIGA counterparts of games.
Now the game has four episodes, and as usual for games published by Apogee, the first episode was free and was allowed to be freely distributed (however unlike what Apogee said, not shareware, as Apogee always had that definition a bit wrong), when you buy the game you get all four episodes. Each episodes has four levels + one boss level. Making a total of 16 regular levels and 20 levels if you count the boss levels. The objective in each normal level is the same rescue ALL hostages and make your way the elevator. Please note, you are not allowed to take the elevator when not all hostages have been freed. You have a radar at your disposal as you can see in the screenshot and the pink dots are the hostages you haven't yet freed. All you have to do to rescue the hostages is touch them, and as soon as you do they'll disappear (I guess Diane beams them out, hey this is scifi after all. To be frank the game doesn't really explain this, but who cares). Now you can walk around and shoot enemies and you got quite some nice weapons at your disposal. The trick however is your jetpack, as in stead of jumping you can use your jetpack to fly around, however doing so costs fuel and when you run out of fuel (which you can also use for your initial weapon, the flame thrower) you got a bit of a problem. Shooting enemies will make them drop coins and you can use these coins to buy new weapons at vendor machines found everywhere in the level. There are also terminals found in every level, touching them will activate them, and those are checkpoints you can transport to if you die. Please note you only have 2 lives (very rarely 1ups can be found) and when you are out of lives the game is over. The giant 2 at the right of the screenshots indicates I had two lives when I took that shot. The status bar really speaks for itself.
In the boss levels the rules are a bit different. You can still run around and use your jetpack, however in boss levels you have unlimited fuel and you only got your flame thrower at your disposal. Killing the boss will immediately end that level.
The level design is overall pretty good, but sometimes you need to search a lot and with your limited fuel supply (and time limit) this can sometimes work frustrating. Overall the game runs pretty fine and is easy to get the hang of. The game serves three difficulty settings, so nice for beginners, still a challenge for the die hard gamer.
What is a bit of a bummer is that the music for all levels in one episode is roughly the same, which gets boring after awhile.
Playing this game at modern times.
First of all, I got good news for those who wish to play the game, but not to pay for the game. It's free now, officially announced by 3D Realms (the current name of Apogee). Find more information here. The downloads can be found there as well. Possibly the games still contain a warning for not being shareware or blah blah. I got my copy back in the old days, so I really don't know if they were removed now.
Second you need of course DOSBox (which 3D realms by the way also recommends). The game works fine in DOSBox, however there are a few palette issues. Each new screen will get completely black and then comes back. I do not know why that is, that never happen to me when I played the game on my real DOS PC. Ocassionally the palette settings of a level go haywire. Therefore I recommend to save at the start of each level, as you can get this right by quitting the game, restarting and loading that savegame.
WASD is not supported by default (which was normal back then). However you can set your keys in the config, so you can get around that. To me that never worked correctly, but perhaps you have more luck than I had.
On my machine the game itself worked as quickly and smooth as on a real DOS PC despite the palette issues, so the issues I did find will not affect your experience too much.
And lastly... Happy new year everybody!
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