Silent Debuggers

~ SILENT DEBUGGERS ~

Data East / NEC

HuCard

1991

Silent Debuggers is the miserable, monotonous result of Data East's attempt to craft a "suspenseful" first-person "sentry shooter." Patrol a maze-like area and rid the hallways of hostile aliens who all look and act the same. I can't understand why people hype up the "atmosphere" in this clunker and make the game out to be some sort of shock-filled thriller. I don't think I was surprised by anything the whole way through. Why would I have been when there's but one type of enemy, and it appears over and over and over again, with its appearance almost always preceded by visual and audio signals? I do like the alien design and the noises the creatures make, but that's about it.

Choose two weapons to tote. The Sleep Launcher is handy as it can stun the aliens, rendering them immobile and defenseless for brief periods.

Defend the zones in your base. Each serves a purpose, and some (such as the reloading room) are essential to survival.

The action is so, so repetitive. All you do is run around and clobber an army of look-alike aliens (though some breeds are stronger and sneakier than others). Note the timer: following completion of the first level, you're allowed "only" one hundred minutes to take care of business. This adds oh-so-much suspense to the proceedings. Imagine my anxiety when I saw I had but 94:00 left to finish five more stages of doing the exact same thing.

Well, here I am ninety minutes later... still fighting the same kind of fool. Some of the tough guys in the last stage pull a little funny stuff through powers of invisibility.

Wish I could say the same.