[Mystvan]

I found a very interesting site on the sequel to the game Another World: Another World 2.

Heart of the Alien picks up right after the end of the first game, with the alien, now nicknamed Buddy, landing himself and Lester in his old village which has been demolished by the dictating forces. Through flashbacks, the viewer now witnesses how everything came to be, and how Buddy ended up in the prison cell along with Lester after a long hard fight in the village. It turns out that Buddy is actually the chief of his village, and that he is fighting an evil ruler identified as "the red eyed alien". It is this evil mastermind that is behind all the pain and suffering in this world, and when walking through his destroyed home, Buddy decides to hunt this red eyed alien down and settle things once and for all. Lester is still wounded from his fight at the end of the first game, and is left in the hut to rest. Chahi had originally intended for the whole game to be played out during the events of the original from Buddy's perspective, but this is all done in a flashback cutscene setting up the game instead. While it is interesting to see some of the events that supposedly took place, the direction of these cutscenes leaves a lot to be desired. Once the flashbacks are over with, you get your first objective, to find Buddy's whip.

Perhaps the greatest sin this game commits is the execution of Lester, and the way it handles this event. This was initially an idea suggested by Chahi early in development, but quickly discarded because he felt it gave the game a defined conclusion which was conflicted with his original intention of having the player draw their own conclusions and theories to the story. Nevertheless, when Chahi was gone, Interplay decided to use the idea to climax the story. It is here you find the greatest flaws with the art style and animation because unintentionally, Lester's death is a hilarious performance of Looney Toons proportions. When Buddy is knocked out by the evil red eyed alien, he decides it's time to kick some butt and jumps onto the back of the red eyes villain. Lester then proceeds to cover the alien's eyes and hit him with hammer punches to the top of his head in true Bugs Bunny fashion. Unfortunately for Lester, he is thrown into a force field where he is zapped to death while his skeleton is flashing as he dances the deadly samba till he can dance no more. To illustrate the impact this gruesome event has, the game continues on without making any further mention of Lester until the end cut scene, treating it as an afterthought. You eventually catch up with ol' red eye, and the final showdown with him is played for laughs to further run the story into the ground.

Heart of the Alien is a disaster from an artistic standpoint, and a mediocre, broken mess of a game. Quickly after it was released, Chahi made a public statement that the title did not represent his vision of the world he crafted and disowned it altogether from being treated as an official sequel. One of the few things that carry over is the music. Composed by none other than Tommy Tallarico, it uses a very atmospheric though more aggressive approach to go along with the added amount of action found in the game. The best feature of this game is the fact that they bundled in Another World for free and allowed Freitas to create a new redbook soundtrack specifically for it. When you finish the first game, it automatically goes into the second game melting them together as one, which would have been a great idea had the sequel been worth playing. Sadly, once the intro for Heart of the Alien rolls around, you are better off shutting off the game and not letting it influence your mind.

Though only officially released on SEGA CD, it would eventually be reverse engineered and portable to other consoles by Gil Megidish under the name Heart of the Alien Redux. Using SDL library language, the game can potentially be ported to homebrew capable system such as Wii, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, Dreamcast and GP32.

Source: Hardcore Gaming 101: Another World

Sad ending of the main character of the original game. He did not deserve such a fate and I agree with the reviewer of the game. It would be cool if he could return to planet Earth or at least he had a more dignified and less hilarious and ridiculous destiny. I highlighted some excerpts from the review in bold.

It is here you find the greatest flaws with the art style and animation because unintentionally, Lester's death is a hilarious performance of Looney Toons proportions. When Buddy is knocked out by the evil red eyed alien, he decides it's time to kick some butt and jumps onto the back of the red eyes villain. Lester then proceeds to cover the alien's eyes and hit him with hammer punches to the top of his head in true Bugs Bunny fashion. Unfortunately for Lester, he is thrown into a force field where he is zapped to death while his skeleton is flashing as he dances the deadly samba till he can dance no more. To illustrate the impact this gruesome event has, the game continues on without making any further mention of Lester until the end cut scene, treating it as an afterthought. You eventually catch up with ol' red eye, and the final showdown with him is played for laughs to further run the story into the ground.

By the way, since the reviewer mentioned samba, what about calling Carmen Miranda (neither Merenda nor Mirinda ) to the event?