[MrFlibble]

https://www.gog.com/game/alien_rampage

You can get a seven-level shareware here:
https://www.classicd...en_Rampage.html

[Sledgehammer]

Huh, this looks great actually. I wonder if gameplay is as good.

[Steve 64]

I just notice on GOG that they are bringing back Army Men Series Nice RTS nice take two got my attention

[MrFlibble]

Sledgehammer, on 24 August 2017 - 01:42 PM, said:

Huh, this looks great actually. I wonder if gameplay is as good.

I played the shareware a bit a while ago and liked both the gameplay and art. Controls could be better if you could aim with the mouse like in Abuse, sometimes you have to shoot fliers that are off-screen, not very convenient with diagonal aiming via keyboard. Otherwise there are fun weapons and some non-trivial things like weapon shops and friendly NPC aliens that help you.

The way you blast enemies into pieces and solve puzzles certainly makes it similar to Duke3D albeit in 2D.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

MrFlibble, on 30 August 2017 - 08:13 AM, said:

The way you blast enemies into pieces and solve puzzles certainly makes it similar to Duke3D albeit in 2D.

According to LGR, the engine it uses was actually prototyped for an early, early Duke Nukem Forever when they considered making it a throwback to the sidescroller Dukes, so that makes sense.

[Hendricks266]

I have builds of when Alien Rampage was called Duke Nukem Forever (the sidescroller), as well as when it was called Ravager.

[Sledgehammer]

Does it include Duke sprites as well?

[Hendricks266]

It wasn't just named Duke Nukem Forever...

[MrFlibble]

Sledgehammer, on 31 August 2017 - 04:54 PM, said:

Does it include Duke sprites as well?

Some screenshots of that game are available here, provided by a certain source at 3D Realms a while ago (can it be told now who that person was BTW?).

Hendricks266, on 31 August 2017 - 10:36 AM, said:

I have builds of when Alien Rampage was called Duke Nukem Forever (the sidescroller), as well as when it was called Ravager.

This implies that Alien Rampage was directly reworked from the DNF sidescroller base, which is new to me. What I heard before is that DNF was scrapped and the engine repurposed for another game, Ravager, which was then acquired by Inner Circle Creations and re-titled Alien Rampage and completed under that title.

It is interesting to note that the shareware v1.0 of AR (available here) not only still contains references to Ravager but also an episode selection screen similar to Apogee games, notably Duke Nukem II (with a preview image of each episode), while later versions skip episode selection altogether:


For those interested, the Wayback Machine has preserved the official site of Alien Rampage maintained by Softdisk:
http://www.alienrampage.com/

Among other things it has a selection of official screenshots.

[Hendricks266]

I haven't looked deeply into the prototypes, and I've never played Alien Rampage, so I don't know if any content survived.

[MrFlibble]

It would probably make sense to dig into the data files of the versions available, although I have no idea what their format is. The shareware data file is called RAMPAGE.GOO.