The Same Thing We Do Every Night, Pinky

My most excellent roommate brought home a great game last week, and I've been playing it every day since.

It's called Destroy All Humans, and as you might have guessed from the title, it's not Homo-Sapien Friendly. You play as a Grey alien (NOT a green, let's get this straight) race known as Furons who are bent on the destruction of Earth. Or at least, Earthlings.

You spend time on foot as well as in your flying saucer, and can deliver satisfying amounts of damage in both modes. The combat is somewhat repetitive, but the strength of this game is in the writing and voice acting, which is what is keeping me playing.

Your player character Crypto is voiced in a fun, sardonic Jack Nicholson fashion (he could sue, really) with fun one-liners that don't get old, even after you've heard them five times. Crypto has a fun assortment of weapons and four psychic abilities.

The invasion is directed from the alien mothership by Pox, a great character in his own right, voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz, the voice of Invader Zim. The writing for the Pox character is very much like Zim, so if you miss the show, here's a good way for a new fix.

The entire game is full of a great personality and character - you spend a lot of time scanning average human minds, and the thought-soundbytes you receive are grin-and-shake-your-head funny, with a few that are laugh-out-loud worthy. I tried to find some wavs to link to for your enjoyment, but couldn't find any. I might capture a few myself, to share.

I managed to freeze/crash the game twice, and had to restart the PS2, losing my mission progress... but breaking games is what I do. It's sad to find such easily reproduced crash bugs in a released product, however. The frame-rate also suffers when there are many moving characters on-screen, but the environments are so huge, I can forgive this.

There's a lot of texture-popping and distance-draw issues, (objects flickering in and out of existence, depending on your POV) which are glaring but don't really break anything.

Some of the AI is questionable - for example: One scientist I was assigned to shadow repeatedly got hit by a car while crossing the street, and so I failed the mission. (Protecting the man's life was not one of my objectives). I ended up using Crypto's telekinesis to nudge cars out of the street to protect him.

The missions are set up in an all-or-nothing fashion, and if you fail the mission near the end, you have to play again from the very beginning. There really should have been objective checkpoints, since re-playing through long sections of stealth missions to reach the fun carnage at the end gets frustrating.

The soundtrack is drawn directly from Plan 9 From Outer Space, which modern audiences are likely aware of thanks to Tim Burton's film Ed Wood. The soundtrack uses lots of wavery, spooky theremin pieces, which really drives home the feeling of the pulp sci fi era.

Great game, lots of fun, play it!