#the thing that annoyed me most about the martian was how all these world governments banded together to spend billions

[coquelicoq]

you can read an andy weir novel that features your area of expertise. but watch out

[the-desolated-quill]

‘But They’re Covered In Nipples’: The Story Of Destroy All Humans - Quill’s Scribbles

Another E3 has come and gone. There was some good announcements. Square Enix unveiled their Avengers game, Keanu Reeves came on stage to give us the release date of Cyberpunk 2077, Ubisoft are making another Watch Dogs set in London, and... um... what else happened?

Oh yeah!

DESTROY ALL HUMANS IS BACK!!!!!!

Yes, the cult classic Destroy All Humans is returning next year, developed by THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games. This was quite possibly the nicest surprise I’ve ever had. When the teaser trailer came up on my YouTube recommendations, I practically screamed the house down. It’s a level of excitement I felt when 20th Century Fox announced they were finally making a Deadpool movie. 

Yeah. That excited.

Destroy All Humans was my favourite video game series growing up. I played the first two games non-stop on my PS2 and I even bought a Nintendo Wii and PS3 just so I could play Big Willy Unleashed and Path Of The Furon (yeah, we’ll get to them). Unfortunately, while the series was reasonably successful, it never quite broke through into the mainstream, and it ended up having a very short lifespan, making it one of the most underrated franchises of all time.

So, to mark the return of Crypto and Pox, I thought I’d take a retrospective look at the series as a whole. Analysing each game in the franchise and talking about what made them so good, whilst also looking at how it faded into obscurity and how THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games can hopefully avoid this fate with their remake.

Radioactive, Exploding, Zombie Cows

The first Destroy All Humans was developed by THQ and Pandemic Studios (the latter probably most famous for making the original Star Wars Battlefront games. You know? The good ones that weren’t overloaded with loot boxes and microtransactions) and was released in 2005 on the PS2 and Xbox. You play as a Furon warrior called Cryptosporidium 137, or Crypto for short, who is tasked with harvesting the brains of humans in order to extract pure Furon DNA from them. His leader Orthopox 13, or Pox, explains that the Furons are at risk of cloning themselves into extinction as they are unable to reproduce naturally due to a lack of genitalia and the DNA in their cloning banks are starting to degrade. Fortunately the Furons visited prehistoric Earth on their way back from destroying the Martians and took the opportunity to ‘let off some steam’ with the natives. As a result, humans possess a strand of Furon DNA that can hopefully restore the Furons’ reproductive organs. Unfortunately a secret government organisation called Majestic (a sort of cross between Project Blue Book and the Men in Black) have caught wind of the Furon invasion due to Crypto 136 crash landing in Roswell 10 years earlier. So Crypto 137 will have to be extra cautious in his quest to take over Earth.

The game was released four years after Grand Theft Auto III, which had completely revolutionised gaming with its open world sandbox. As a result, other companies were attempting their own open worlds and putting their own spin on them. While Destroy All Humans didn’t quite have the same scale as GTA, it made up for it with quality over quantity. The game offered six small open world areas for players to have fun in and its central premise was utterly captivating. After countless games where you had to fight alien invaders, Destroy All Humans allowed you to play as the alien invader.

Pandemic Studios completely embraced the alien invasion premise, giving the player a vast number of weapons and abilities to wreak havoc on planet Earth. You had access to weapons like the Zap O Matic, Disintegrator Ray and Anal Probe (no, really, there’s actually a gun called the Anal Probe and it’s as funny as it sounds) as well as mental abilities such as Psychokinesis, Hypnotism and the Cortex Scan, which allowed you to read the thoughts of humans and was also used to help maintain your Holoblob disguise in stealth missions. And if that isn’t cool enough, you also get your own flying saucer, which you can use to destroy buildings and landmarks. The game gave you a lot of freedom, essentially dropping you in a small destructible playground and telling you to go and enjoy yourself.

But the thing I loved most about the first game was the writing. The plot itself is actually pretty good with plenty of twists and turns as the military and Majestic become more and more desperate to stop you. And the humour, my God the humour! Honestly Destroy All Humans remains to this day one of the funniest games I’ve ever played. It’s use of satirical humour and 50s pop culture references never failed to make me chuckle. There was one moment that I’ll always remember where I scanned the mind of a police officer and it revealed that he was thinking about forming the Village People. If only he could find a cowboy, an Indian and a construction worker. 

The game’s main source of comedy mostly came from poking fun at the culture and attitudes of the time period. 1950s America was of course gripped by ‘the Red Scare,’ which the game mocks frequently as we see Majestic and the US government try desperately to cover up alien activity by blaming the death and destruction on communists, to the point where it just gets more and more absurd. At the end of each mission, a newspaper headline is shown, often blaming recent events on freak weather or communist propaganda. Yes, that should explain perfectly why people’s heads are exploding and why the cows are glowing green. It’s all perfectly normal. No aliens here. What’s that? A little green man in a flying saucer is blowing up ice cream trucks? Damn you commies!

The game also pokes fun at 50s sci-fi B movies, often parodying and lampshading the tropes and gimmicks one would expect in a low budget sci-fi flick. For example, the game ends with you fighting a giant robot that houses the President’s brain. It’s fully aware of how ridiculous and stupid it all is and clearly revels in it. Killer robots, mind control, radioactive animals, mad scientists and secret government conspiracies galore. Destroy All Humans is very much a love letter to cheesy sci-fi.

But by far the biggest draw was the main characters. Crypto and Pox. They’re both such funny, wonderfully realised and likeable characters. Pox is voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz, who you may remember from Invader Zim, and he gives the character a maniacal glee. I honestly could listen to his rants all day. He’s the quintessential evil genius. Crypto meanwhile is voiced by J. Grant Albrecht, who gives the character a Jack Nicholson-esque voice. Unlike Pox, Crypto is crass, crude and craves destruction, which often puts him at odds with Pox, who favours more subtle styles of invasion such as mind control. The two characters often bicker and squabble, which never fails to be entertaining, and yet there is an underlying respect and fondness for each other that helps ground the relationship. It’s the perfect double act.

Destroy All Humans was a good game, but does it still hold up? Well there are a few issues. Controls can be a bit clunky at times and missions can often get repetitive. Destroy x number of farmers. Collect x amount of DNA. That kind of thing. Also, annoyingly, there’s no checkpoints, which means if you die or fail the mission, you’re automatically sent back to the Furon Mothership and you have to start the mission all over again. But the writing, humour and entertainment value more than make up for it.

Hot Monkey Love

While the first game wasn’t what you’d call a hit, it was successful enough for THQ to commission a sequel. Destroy All Humans 2 was released in 2006 on PS2 and Xbox, just one year after the first game, and this time Crypto was going international.

Set in the 1960s, ten years after the events of the first game, the KGB in Russia learn about the Furon’s takeover of America and plan a counterattack. They nuke the Furon Mothership, killing Pox, and try to assassinate Crypto 138, who is posing as the President of the United States. The assassination fails and Pox’s mind is able to survive in hologram form. The two then embark on a global adventure, seeking revenge against the KGB and uncovering a massive conspiracy that puts the entire Furon invasion at risk.

Destroy All Humans 2 is an ambitious sequel that increases its scope from the first game. No longer confined to America, we see Crypto terrorise San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Russia and even the Moon. Our arsenal of weapons are also expanded. The original weapons from the first game return as well as some all new ones such as the Disclocator, which fires a purple disc at a human or vehicle and sends them flying around the map, the Burrow Beast, which summons a Tremors-esque space worm to cause carnage, and Meteor Strike, which I think speaks for itself. We also get a few new mental abilities such as Transmogrify, which allows you to turn objects into ammo, and Free Love, which causes everyone in the general vicinity to start dancing, allowing you to make a quick getaway while they’re distracted. The saucer too has some extra features, including a cloaking device and the ability to drain vehicles of health using your Abducto Beam.

This sequel pretty much takes everything that worked from the first game whilst tweaking the things that didn’t. The GTA style Alert system got a complete overhaul. If you want to raise or lower the Alert level, all you have to do is bodysnatch a cop or a soldier and make a call using a police box (you can also make prank calls from them, which is good for a giggle). Holoblobbing has been replaced with Bodysnatching, which works so much better and it does away with the annoying Concentration meter, so you can PK cars and humans to your heart’s content. There’s also a lot more stuff to do now. There are numerous collectables such as Alien Artefacts, which unlocks the Burrow Beast weapon, and FuroTech Cells, which are your main currency that can be used to upgrade your health and weapons. Missions have greater variety than in the first game. There’s a lot more side missions, including Odd Jobs and my personal favourites the Cult of Arkvoodle missions, where Crypto brainwashes humans to worship the Furon God Arkvoodle of the Sacred Crotch.

As you can tell, the humour is still just as wacky and ridiculous as ever. Destroy All Humans 2 lampoons and ridicules the 60s mercilessly, taking aim at the Cold War and the hippie counterculture movement. It also pokes fun at 60s sci-fi films, spy films and Japanese movies like Godzilla. In fact there’s a boss fight that involves you fighting a Godzilla-esque monster and it’s honestly the best boss fight in the series. It regains health by destroying buildings, so you have to destroy them first before you can kill the monster. It’s a great premise.

Story-wise, Destroy All Humans 2 is a worthy successor, raising the stakes and expanding the lore. We’re introduced to the Blisk, the Martians that were presumed extinct by the Furons millions of years ago. It’s a brilliant conflict and ostensibly allows the developers to make commentaries on America and Russia at the time using the Furons and the Blisk respectively as stand-ins. Crypto and Pox are well written, funny and likeable as ever and we’re also introduced to an assortment of new characters, including the Russian spy Natalya and MI6 agent Ponsomby (voiced by none other than Anthony Head from Buffy). The game is engaging and rewarding, but it crucially never takes itself too seriously. For example there’s one instance in Tokyo where Crypto learns about the battle between the White and Black Ninjas and he guesses that the conflict started because of the cliche student betraying his master type origin, but it turns out that both groups of ninjas were originally Grey, but then they ran out of grey fabric and disagreed over which colour they should be instead. There’s so many great comedic moments like that and they pretty much hit bullseyes every time.

That being said, there was one aspect of the game I didn’t like and that was the crude sex jokes. Crypto 138 is the first clone to have pure Furon DNA, which means he now has genitalia. As a result, this new incarnation of Crypto is far more randy than 137 was in the first game.  This mostly takes the form of Crypto constantly trying to hit on Natalya, despite her showing no sexual interest, which I personally found pretty gross. Worse still, the game ends with Crypto cloning Natalya and ‘making a few adjustments’ so she will consent to have sex with him. The word ‘creepy’ doesn’t begin to cover how I felt about this. If THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games ever decide to remake the second game, I really hope they consider rethinking that ending because... Jesus!

On the whole, Destroy All Humans 2 was a brilliant sequel. It was also sadly the last Destroy All Humans game to be developed by Pandemic Studios before they were bought by EA and eventually shut down in 2009. Unfortunately this would have a severe impact on the future of the series going forward.

Limp Willy

The next game in the series was a spinoff for the Nintendo Wii, released in early 2008 and developed by Locomotive Games. A PS2 version was also planned, but was scrapped due to budget cuts (remember this. It’ll become relevant later).

Destroy All Humans: Big Willy Unleashed was... underwhelming, to say the least. Set in the 1970s, six years after the second game, Crypto and Pox have opened a fast food restaurant called Big Willy as a way of disposing of the corpses left behind during Crypto’s missions. However a rival fast food chain, run by Colonel Kluckin’, is stealing their business and socialite Patty Wurst is threatening to expose Big Willy (smirk). So it’s up to Crypto to protect Pox’s Big Willy (haha) and maintain their cover on Earth.

Now you’re probably thinking this sounds quite tame compared to the previous two games, and yeah, it is. But it’s a spinoff, so I can understand to a certain extent. However there are a few narrative discrepancies. The big one being Crypto has retired from being the President. No explanation given as to why and we have no idea what Crypto is doing instead. When we first see him, he’s watching TV. He doesn’t even know Big Willy exists until Pox brings it up. So what’s going on exactly? Are they still trying to invade Earth or have they gone native? Also, compared to the grand conspiracy stories of the previous games, Crypto protecting a fast food restaurant sounds a little beneath him.

Gameplay is virtually unchanged from the previous game. There’s some new guns such as Ball Lightning and the Zombie Gun, but nothing special. The biggest addition is Big Willy, the restaurant mascot that’s actually a Furon battle mech in disguise. It’s... fine. Not that much different from the Saucer really. We also get some new locations. Harbor City, Fairfield in Kentucky, Fantasy Atoll (a weak parody of Fantasy Island) and Vietmahl (a painfully obvious homage to Vietnam). None of these locations are particularly interesting however. There’s also a multiplayer mode, which... exists.

Honestly the game as a whole is just lacklustre. The story just isn’t as good as the first two games and the humour doesn’t have the same wit or intelligence. Most of the comedy surrounds the fact that Pox has called his restaurant Big Willy and isn’t entirely aware of the double entendre, which admittedly is funny for the first few missions, but by the time you’ve finished Harbor City and move on to Fairfield, the joke gets old real fast. There’s less of an effort to actually satirise the culture or films of the time, instead merely making 70s pop culture references without ever actually doing anything with it. It’s like the Family Guy school of comedy. Take Fantasy Atoll for instance. A pisstake of Fantasy Island, but instead of Mr. Roarke and Tatoo, we get Mr. Pork and Ratpoo. That’s the level of humour we’re talking about here.

What’s worse is that J. Grant Albrecht and Richard Steven Horwitz don’t return as Crypto and Pox. Sean Donnellan and Darryl Kurylo voice the characters instead and it’s just not the same. It doesn’t feel like Crypto and Pox. So from the very first cutscene, we’re already off on the wrong foot.

And then there’s a bunch of other stuff that I find really questionable. The most obvious being the revelation that Colonel Kluckin’ makes his chicken wings from the corpses of the Vietmahl (Vietnam) war, which just seems in very bad taste to me. If there is a satirical point being made here, I can’t find it for the life of me. There’s also some side missions where Crypto finds out that he and Natalya have a son, which goes absolutely nowhere and doesn’t feel like something that should be in a Destroy All Humans game.

Overall, Big Willy Unleashed was a massive dud meant to tide us over until Destroy All Humans 3 came out later in the year. Honestly the one aspect of it I thought had potential was the side missions involving Crypto and Pox being assessed by a Furon Efficiency Expert called Toxoplasma Gondii. Considering what happened in the second game, including the destruction of the Furon Mothership, the return of the Blisk and the Furon operation on Earth being jeoprodised, this could have been a great premise for a sequel.

Instead what we got was... 

Disco Inferno

Oh boy. Where do I begin?

Path Of The Furon was developed by THQ and Sandblast Games and released in December 2008 on the Xbox 360 in North America. The PS3 version was cancelled because Sandblast (and Locomotive Games) was closed down before development was finished due to THQ’s financial problems at the time. However the PS3 version was released in Europe and Australia, so either THQ got another studio to complete it or, more likely, they just released it in a broken, buggy state.

Fans really didn’t like this game, myself included, but before we go tearing it a new one, lets look at the few positives the game has. First off, J. Grant Albrecht and Richard Steven Horwitz return to voice Crypto and Pox, which is great. As a result, the original chemistry is back and they help salvage the game when the writing fails to deliver. There are a few cool new weapons, like the Black Hole Gun and the Venus Human Trap, which creates a giant man eating plant. The Saucer’s weapons have been tweaked, so now they affect the environment as well as destroy buildings. So if you fire your Death Ray at the ground, for example, you can create scorch marks. PK now has its own dedicated button, which means you can pick up and throw objects whilst using your guns simultaneously. There’s also the titular ‘Path Of Enlightenment,’ which upgrades your mental abilities significantly as well as allowing you to freeze time.

That’s the good stuff. The bad stuff is... pretty much everything else.

The humour is, again, quite poor. Rather than satirising 70s culture, the game continues to make references to 70s films like The Godfather and Star Wars, but not actually doing anything with them. Just making the reference. The writing as a whole is quite substandard as the plot pretty much recycles the plots of Destroy All Humans 2 and Big Willy Unleashed, except instead of the Big Willy restaurant, it’s the Space Dust casino and instead of the Blisk, it’s Nexosporidium warriors, who are basically Furon cyborgs. Things do threaten to get a bit interesting when Crypto and Pox discover someone has been manufacturing synthetic Furon DNA, but nothing ever really comes of it. Instead the game focuses mainly on the Master.

Ah yes. The Master.

In an attempt to recapture the magic of the second game, Path Of The Furon tries to spoof kung-fu movies just like how DAH 2 spoofed spy films. Unfortunately this leads us to a slew of unfunny gags, cultural appropriation and some of the worst racial stereotyping I think I’ve ever seen. The Master is a Furon who crashed on Earth a hundred years ago and embroiled himself in Eastern culture, enhancing his PK abilities. This is what he looks like:

YYYYeah.

Oh and if that’s not awkward enough, he also speaks in an over the top ‘ah so’ accent. It’s incredibly cringeworthy and made me want to crawl out of my body and hide in the darkest corner I could possibly find. How anyone involved in this game’s development could look at this deeply racist and downright embarrassing excuse for a character and think this was okay, I don’t know.

And before anyone tries to excuse it by saying that he has been living in China for a hundred years, so he’s bound to pick a few things up, please note that Nolan North is in this game playing the Furon Emperor Meningitis, who also has an over the top ‘ah so’ accent. Now I suppose some could argue that the game is satirising how Asian people were portrayed at the time, but if that’s what the game is going for, they’ve failed miserably. See, the problem with that argument is that replicating something doesn’t count as satire. By recreating over the top racist caricatures, you’re not making fun of them. If anything you’re just reinforcing them. The first game’s satire of the Red Scare worked so much better than this because there was an actual point behind it. It comments on how paranoid the people of the 50s were at the time by using Majestic to exploit the threat of communism in order to cover up alien activity, and everyone willingly buys into it because of that sheer paranoia. Now yes, admittedly the humour in Destroy All Humans isn’t the most sophisticated in the world, but it used to be a LOT better than this. Not only do I find the racial stereotyping in this game deeply offensive, it’s also frankly beneath this franchise. And it’s not just limited to the Chinese either. The final act takes us to the Furon homeworld (which was pretty underwhelming after four games worth of buildup) and we meet another Furon called Endometriosis whose only characteristics are that he has an Italian accent and wears a beret. It’s these broad strokes and general laziness that makes this game such a disappointing experience.

Path Of The Furon is subpar in every way imaginable. The writing, the humour, the gameplay and even the graphics. The first two games looked so much better than this and they were on older consoles from the previous generation. It’s shocking.

It’s hard to blame Sandblast Games for this considering they were shut down before development was finished. It was THQ’s mismanagement and financial woes that killed off this franchise and indeed themselves. The company went bankrupt in 2012 and their various IPs were sold off to other studios, with Nordic Games buying the lions’ share, including Destroy All Humans, which briefly reignited hopes that we might get another game, but that seemed unlikely considering the franchise has never exactly been a mainstream success. There was even talks of doing an animated sitcom based on the games for Fox, to be written by the same guy who did King Of The Hill, but that never went anywhere.

No. It seemed like Destroy All Humans was gone for good and fans reluctantly made peace with that. It was fun while it lasted, but perhaps it was time to move on.

Oh The Furonity!

I’m not going to lie. I was pretty sure we were never going to see Destroy All Humans return. Not just because of its lack of mainstream appeal, but also because game development studios and publishers in recent years have become more and more reluctant to make single player, mid-tier games. Instead pivoting toward massive triple A releases and ‘live services’. So it came as a rather pleasant surprise when Nordic Games, now named THQ Nordic, released Darksiders III in 2018, a sequel to a series of games that were also not very mainstream but still had a significant cult following. This briefly reignited a small flicker of hope within me that maybe, just maybe, we might see our favourite Furon return.

And as you already know, I got my wish. A new Destroy All Humans game will be released next year by THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games.

So what can this remake learn from the franchise’s past? Well thankfully the writing and voice acting is going to remain the same, so story, characterisation and humour won’t be an issue. They’re also incorporating elements from the sequels such as Transmogrify from Destroy All Humans 2 and giving PK its own button like in Path Of The Furon. There’s also a few new additions that I’m excited about such as the ability to dodge and strafe using the jetpack. That should make combat much more exciting and dynamic. I know a few people have a problem with the new cartoony designs of the humans and the world, but I honestly don’t mind. In fact I think it suits the tone and setting quite well. Hopefully people will eventually get used to it. The big question mark hovering over all this is whether they’re planning to remake the other games in the series. I for one would love to see a remake of the second game. As for Big Willy Unleashed and Path Of The Furon, I think it’s best to leave them firmly in the past. The big dream would be to see Crypto and Pox have further adventures together beyond the first two games. Hopefully even have enough sequels to get the characters to the present day. We’ll just have to wait and see what the future brings. My only word of advice for them would be to never forget what made the first two games so good and so beloved. Big Willy Unleashed and Path Of The Furon lost their way, as its writing and humour grew lazier and lazier. If we are fortunate enough to get more games, the developers will need to remember what it was about the first game that made it so special and build off of it.

This is a second chance. Not a lot of franchises get this. Don’t waste it. Here’s hoping the remake will provide the definitive Destroy All Humans experience and that it will gain the success it deserves.