Burton's Bytes: Get a taste for taking on Aliens

DESPITE boasting one of the widest libraries of video games, PS2 owners have been surprisingly starved of real-time strategy action until now.

I say surprisingly because Command & Conquer on the original PlayStation was something of a hit, spawning two sequels and several RTS rip-offs.

Aliens vs Predator: Extinction marks the first real-time strategy title to appear on the world's favourite console. But RTS programmers have something of a dodgy reputation among console strategy fans for 'dumbing down' their favourite genre during the conversion from PC to PlayStation.

At least this game starts life with an absolutely sensational licence. The idea of controlling your own aliens as they battle for supremacy with the predators and space marines had me positively purring with anticipation.

Thankfully the game gives you the choice of playing as your favourite race (human, Predator and, err, Alien) and the range of units available to each is suitably wide.

The space marines have to rely on numbers and technology to make their way through the game. Body armour inures them to light skirmishes and pulse rifles are effective at repelling smaller numbers of alien maurauders by picking them off at long range. Marines can also call down airstrikes if the siuation becomes particularly hopeless.

The Aliens may lack high-tech weapons but when they attack in numbers their power and ferocity can often prove overwhelming. Alien Queens are even more unstoppable and I liked the way you had to drag vanquished enemies to alien eggs which hatched immediately when they sensed food.

You can also breed specialist aliens for carrying out specific tasks, such as carrying facehuggers to the battlefront.

If the Predators had the same power as their movie-going equivalents (ie the ability to turn invisible) they would be invincible, so the game places a time limit on the amount your guys can stay cloaked. Again, the predators come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some of them are capable of specialised attacks and you'll need them all if you are to succeed. Creating more units involves collecting the skulls of your victims.

The backstory is typical sci-fi B-movie. A small platoon of space marines lands on an inhospitable planet. Pretty soon they come to realise that it's even more unfriendly than at first believed because the barren landscape is teeming with Aliens and Predators.

Extinction pitches you headlong into a struggle for survival that's split into 21 different missions. Each race has several upgrades available to them as they progress further into the story.

In typical RTS style you'll be asked to fight across deserts, mountains, jungles and, in a change from the norm, soulless laboratories that provide the perfect camouflage for evil monsters.

The graphics are slightly plain (particularly the backdrops) but do their jobs in a functional kind of way.

One of the drawbacks of playing an RTS on a console used to be the lack of mouse control; there simply is no finer tool for selecting your troops and moving them quickly. PlayStation gamers were blessed with a mouse of their own but, until more RTS games are ported across, the PS2 owner has to make do with a control pad.

This slows things down a bit, but the selection controls have been adapted to the PS2 controller so things aren't as unwieldy as they could have been.

RTS veterans will find the gameplay relatively easy but we shouldn't be too hard on the programmers for this. Aliens vs Predator: Extinction is a first time RTS on the PS2.

Gamers who haven't tried the genre on a PC will probably find the difficulty level pitched just about right.

Virus Watch

Sobig.F

STILL recovering from the MS Blaster virus? Well, watch out - because another cyber bug is at large. According to anti-virus experts at F-Secure the past few weeks have been the worst in history for destructive PC viruses.

Mikko Hyppnen, Director of Anti-Virus Research at F-Secure Corporation said:

"This reminds me of fall 2001. I think 2001 remains the worst virus year ever, but this is starting to get just as bad. Within one week we've seen several major virus outbreaks as well as some completely new techniques in viruses."

Following the outbreak of the Lovsan (or MS Blaster) network worm earlier this month, the computer world has since been bombarded with a series of new and damaging viruses, including new variations of Lovsan and Dumaru, which uses a spoof message from MicroSoft to lure unsuspecting PC users to open an infected attachment.

Incredibly, someone has even written a virus that attempts to UNDO the damage wrought by MS Blaster. However well-intentioned this may be (and no one is sure if there is a hidden payload), it has the same effect of clogging up the e-mail system.

The latest virus to be released into the wild is a new variant of the Sobig family. Sobig.F arrives in an email that reads like this:

"From: an address found on the infected system

To: an address found on the infected system

Subject: Re: Your application

Please see the attached file for details"

Once opened, Sobig.F installs itself onto the machine and every Friday or Sunday between 7pm and 10pm, the worm is activated. Previous Sobig variants have installed backdoors to infected systems and some have been used to send massive amounts of spam.

* For more information, updates and downloads, visit www.f-secure.com