Not my body, I need that! It's got my arms and legs attached!

With their platform-gaming translation of The Incredible Crash Dummies, Gray Matter taught us the benefits of not being run over by traffic, buckling up when in the car... and how to waddle along on a decapitated torso should we come a cropper and lose both of our legs. All useful life lessons.
Further novelty comes in the form of our dummy's unique health status system. Succumbing to each penalty hit results in the loss of a limb, and once we lose them all, we're a dead dummy. See, quadriplegia is funny after all if it's depicted in a game! Limb loss doesn't have to be catastrophic if we can maintain the existence of at least one, since collecting screwdrivers will regenerate them an appendage at a time.

In a separate article, I cover the curious case of the missing lawn bowling sign with regards to one of The Incredible Crash Dummies game ports.

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Believe it or not, it's Ripley

Ellen Ripley and a facehugger are the only survivors following an inferno that guts her Colonial Marine spaceship, Sulaco. Ejecting from an escape pod, she crashlands on prison planet Fiorina 'Fury' 161 where she encounters hostility from the deranged inmates and an even less welcome reception upon reuniting with her enduring nemesis, a descendent from the Xenomorph lineage.

In 1992 Probe produced a gaming tie-in for the Amiga, Game Gear, Genesis, and SEGA Master System that ignores the crux of the third movie; that Ripley must face the alien threat unarmed. It's a 2D, side-scrolling shoot 'em up platformer that blends core elements of the franchise in general rather than strictly adhering to the nuances of Alien 3. A solid, albeit insanely difficult, tribute to the source material.

I assess the merits of each, drawing parallels where possible.

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Wolfie's fine, honey. Wolfie's just fine.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 reassured us "I'll be back", he can't have been referring to the franchise or merchandise as a whole. Is it possible to come back if you never went away in the first place? It's a mixed blessing in that not everything the series has spawned is a masterpiece like the first two entries in the celluloid field. Luckily I only cover Terminator II, the movie. Oh, and its translation to the medium of 8 and 16-bit home computer gaming in 1991 courtesy of Ocean Software, which erm... could have gone better. In their defence, it wasn't an inhouse creation, LJN were behind it. At least where the Amiga version is concerned, which is my main focus.

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