Stupid Invaders, from the deranged Xilam Studios, is enough
to make me believe in the adventure genre again. It’s just delirious pure adventure
pleasure from beginning to end.

There are many things to admire about this
title, but the alpha and omega must be the graphics, the graphics, the graphics!
The game has the look of the late 40s Warner Brothers Looney Toons on steroids.
The shapes and camera angles are consistently delightful, and the colors will
come dangerously close to frying your retinas. Looking at this game, I was reminded
of the first time I saw Dumbo on a big screen, when the richness and intensity
of the color saturation literally pushed me back in my seat.

The environments
in the world of Stupid Invaders, whether it’s a wildly appointed Victorian
house, an evil scientist’s lair, or a gigantic dung factory (don’t ask), are just
plain fun to spend time in. I found myself staring at the screen with the same
stupid look of delight you’d find in the eyes of a kid in a candy store.

Special
kudos must go to Thomas Szabo, the project’s talented art director.

Next
up are the voices. Aren’t we all tired of lame or just adequate voice acting in
games? The characters in SI, especially the aliens, are very professionally
done–they’re distinctive and hilarious.

The character development, in fact,
is one of the most fun aspects of game. There are (depending on if you are counting
torsos or heads) either five or six aliens. There’s Bud, the stupid-sounding but
quick-thinking orange one; Stereo, the serene, double-headed, bright red one;
Etno, the purple one with the high IQ; Gorgious, the husky, gruff, bucktoothed
blue one; and finally, sour-apple green Candy, the nymphomaniacal presurgical
transsexual one. Got that, everyone? Any questions?

One of the game’s most
ingenious elements is the fact that you get to play, at various times in the game,
each of the alien characters. This is a great idea because each alien has a very
different personality and solves problems differently. It also heightens dramatic
effect as it gives you the sense of the story developing on multiple fronts. Even
though this is definitely a pure adventure, this device borrows a tasty tidbit
from the world of RPGs, and it makes the game even more interesting.

The
game is filled with stunning, hilarious cutscenes. Many of them involve your character
dying. In fact, the cutscenes are so good that you’ll actually be looking for
different ways to die so you can enjoy your animated demise! But even the nonlethal
scenes are a real pleasure to watch.

The puzzles are logical and rarely
mind-spraining. My one small complaint with them is that they often require knowledge
that you can only get by dying first, which always seems to me to be a bit of
a cheat. In other words, you might have to tie something around a door to keep
from allowing a bad guy from popping out of the door and killing you. But the
only way you would know he was lurking there is to walk in front of the door and
have him kill you! However, as mentioned before, dying is such fun in this game
that this is not a major problem.

I see this game as a much more successful
attempt to do what the Canadian game U.F.O.s tried to do: Highly polished
animated graphics and story involving a fish-out-of-water alien attempting to
fix his spaceship and go home. The two games have almost the same plot … but
the execution of Stupid Invaders is infinitely better.

However, it
must be said that this game is not for the squeamish or easily offended. Just
as in U.F.O.s, our alien heroes cheerfully dispatch humans as casually
as they would snap off the cap of a beer bottle. And a great deal of the middle
third of the game takes place in a dung factory that, uh, defies dignified description
(let’s just say you won’t soon forget the sculpture gallery).

But if you
get into the spirit of this game, you won’t be bothered by any of these issues–you’ll
be having too good a time.

The game is only of medium length, even though
it ships on four CDs (all those great cutscenes take up a lot of room!). Fortunately,
the linearity of the story eliminates too much annoying disk-swapping.

What
adventure lovers will appreciate the most about this game, I think, is the fact
that, with all its polish and rich production values, it’s still at heart a completely
traditional third-person point-and-click adventure. Those weary of tricky keyboard-controlled
games, rejoice! Those wary of action/adventure hybrids, dance in the streets!
Those who found Gabriel Knight III and even The Longest Journey a
little too serious and wordy, get down and get funky! Stupid Invaders is
here! Stop reading. Start ordering.

Final Grade: A

If you
liked Stupid Invaders:
Watch: Earth Girls Are Easy
Read:
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
Play: U.F.O.s