Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds

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Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds

Developer(s)	Team17
Publisher(s)	Ocean Software
Release date(s)	1996
Genre(s)	First-person shooter
Mode(s)	Single player, Two player via network connection (Co-operative and Competitive)
Rating(s)	N/A
Platform(s)	Amiga
Media	5 floppy disks
System requirements	4MB RAM, Graphics accelerator card recommended
Input	Joystick, CD32 Joypad (optional), Keyboard, Mouse

Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds (sometimes AB:TKG or TKG) is the fifth and, to date, final game in Team17's Alien Breed franchise, a series of Science Fiction-themed shooters largely inspired by the Alien films. It was published in 1996 by Ocean Software.

Team17 had originally intended this to be their final Amiga title. Following the success of Worms, Team17's first multi-format release, the company were looking to get out of the Amiga game market, which had become stagnant over the years. As it transpired, TKG was not Team17's final Amiga title - Worms - The Directors Cut was released the following year, but that it only sold 5,000 copies shows the state the Amiga games market was in at that time.

Team17 made the sourcecode for TKG freely available in 1998.

1 Gameplay
2 Cancelled Sequel - Alien Breed: Conflict
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Gameplay

With the success of Alien Breed 3D, Team17 decided to follow it up with a sequel. This time they were aiming even higher, hoping to recreate something similar to the Quake engine on a humble 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 (but it wasn't really the case, the game was too slow).

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 hardly be played with high details in fullscreen. 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. TKG is generally held in low regard by Team17 fans and Amiga enthusiasts alike.

[edit] Cancelled Sequel - Alien Breed: Conflict

A PC/Dreamcast follow-up to TKG, entitled Alien Breed: Conflict (referred to internally as Alien Breed Action, ABC or ABA) began development in 1999. The development was cancelled due to the size of the project. To date, ABC remains the only title in the series that was developed specifically for the PC, and the only PC game in the series developed by Team17 themselves (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, ABC was also planned to be a first-person shooter and, presumably, would have followed on directly where TKG left off.