It Came from the Desert Turbografx CD longplay

[laffer]

I just finished recording a longplay of the Turbografx CD version of It Came from the Desert, a really odd version of the game.

[ Show youtube player ]

It's pretty much completely different, but it shares some similarities with the original -

* the setting is the same - set in the 50s in a small desert town, though they changed the cool original name of Lizard Breath to the new lame name of Lovelock.

* your main ally is a somewhat nutty scientist

* your enemy is giant ants, and your mission is to take out the queen

* humans are taken over by the ants (similar to Antheads, only in this version they seem to be replaced by clones or something like that)

* you have a limited amount of days to finish the game

* it's nonlinear in that you select your destinations and you can only visit so many areas each day... meaning you will not see everything on your first playthrough, similar to the Amiga version

* the gameplay consists of talking to people and playing various minigames, this concept is similar to the Amiga version (though the minigames aren't as good by far, except one that is very similar)

* at one point you get a map screen of the town, displaying places you need to protect... only unlike the Amiga version, you only see this map once and it has no functionality

[mr.vince]

Interesting. But has lost all its charme...

[laffer]

Yeah it's nothing like the Amiga version, it's really bad!

But I like it on its own terms, I love cheesy stuff

For instance, take a look at the little scene at [ Show youtube player ] in... it's great

[switchblade]

Wow, that looks quite terrible...

You can obviously tell the TurboGrafx was never designed for FMV, and it really shows here!

I heard that Cinemaware went bankrupt for having to invest $700,000 to develop this CD port of the original. It doesn't begin to look like it was even worth it!

[s2325]

Yes, some movies if not all have 16 or less colours.

[laffer]

I recorded a longplay of the unreleased Sega Genesis version as well, and this one is even less similar to the Amiga version... it's a top-down shooter game, in the style of Dogs of War and games like that.

[ Show youtube player ]

It was very frustrating to record as I couldn't find any guides or anything for it, so I had to figure out the item combinations for the weapons and time bomb by just randomly trying different combinations.

Here's an interesting interview with the programmer of the game -
http://sega-16.com/feature_page.php?...0Matt%20Harmon