Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds

Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds is a first-person shooter, the fifth game in the Alien Breed franchise, a series of science fiction-themed shooters by Team17. It was published in 1996 by Ocean Software.

Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds
Developer(s)Team17
Publisher(s)Ocean Software
SeriesAlien Breed
Platform(s)Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000
Release1996
Genre(s)First-person shooter
Mode(s)Single-player, multiplayer

Team17 had originally intended this to be its final Amiga title. Following the success of Worms, Team17's first multi-format release, the company was looking to get out of the Amiga game market, which had become stagnant over the years. As it transpired, The Killing Grounds was not Team17's final Amiga title—Worms: The Director's Cut was released the following year.

Team17 made the game's source code freely available in March 1997, on the cover CD of Amiga Format magazine issue 95.[1][2][3]

Gameplay

With the success of Alien Breed 3D, Team17 decided to follow it up with a sequel. This time Team17 was aiming even higher, hoping to recreate something similar to the Quake engine on an Amiga. Team17 had included two versions of the game spread over 5 disks: one with high-quality sound and textures, the other with reduced quality versions. The reduced version was supposedly able to run on a non-expanded Amiga 1200, although the game ran slowly.

Their project, however, was perhaps over-ambitious. Most Amigas of the time struggled to run the game, even with upgraded RAM and accelerator cards. Even with the fastest CPU at that time (MC68060 @ 66 MHz), the game could not be played smoothly with high details in fullscreen.[4] Most Amiga enthusiasts have only been able to play the game in recent years using emulation.

Poor level design, no collision-detection with monsters, and repetitive sounds did nothing to aid the gameplay experience.[5]

An editor was shipped with the game, allowing users to create their own levels.[6]

Reception

Cancelled sequel

A PC/Dreamcast follow-up to The Killing Grounds, entitled Alien Breed: Conflict, began development in 1999. The development was cancelled due to the size of the project. To date, Conflict remains as the only title in the series that was developed specifically for the PC and as the only PC game in the series developed solely by Team17 (the PC version of Alien Breed was ported by MicroLeague, while Alien Breed: Tower Assault were ported to the PC by East Point Software). According to what little information there is concerning this game, Conflict was also planned to be a first-person shooter and, presumably, would have followed on directly where The Killing Grounds left off.

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References
  1. Alien Breed 3D by John Girvin "In March 1997, Team17 released the source code to AB3D’s sequel, "Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds" (known as TKG), on the cover CD of Amiga Format issue 95. It was megabytes of undocumented, disorganised, messy assembly language. Andy Clitheroe, the lone programmer of both games, must have been some kind of genius, I think. The official release was of the TKG source code. However, when poking around the CD I found the original (and equally messy) AB3D source too." (archived, 2009)
  2. alien-breed-3d-ii-quellcode on successdenied.com by Vince (December 13, 2010, in German)
  3. a3dsrc src mirror on aminet.net
  4. Amiga Power Issue 65, September 1996, pages 14-17
  5. Amiga Power Issue 65, September 1996, pages 14-17
  6. Amiga Format Issue 91, December 1996, pages 90-91
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