It Came from the Desert (1989) - TV Tropes

It Came From The Desert is an 1989 Amiga game by Cinemaware about a young man discovering the existence of giant ants hell bent on taking over the world. With help from a scientist and some friends, he will need to collect evidence within a time limit to convince the mayor to take action. Gameplay segments include interacting with NPCs, knife fighting with a gang member, disabling giant ants with your pistol before getting attacked, fending off said ants with the help of thrown explosives, and eventually infiltrating the ants' base and blowing up the queen.

While mainly an Amiga game, with a follow up made for the system, it was also released for the IBM Personal Computer. Two remakes were completely different: a Turbo Grafx CD version Interactive Movie version that had little to do with the original game (Retsupurae riffed on it), and a Sega Genesis version that was an over-head shooter and was canceled by Electronic Arts when almost finished.

In 2017, a low-budget film was made, changing much of the story. It does play snippets of the original Amiga game during the end credits.

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This game provides examples of:

• Attack Its Weak Point: Ants in the face-to-face shooting encounters can be killed by shooting off their antennae.
• Badass Bookworm: The main character of the first game is Dr. Greg Bradley, a geologist who only wanted to study the meteor which crashed outside of Lizard's Breath. Instead, he ends up fighting
• Big Brother Instinct: The plot of the second game is kicked off by the player character, Brick Nash, stealing a tanker truck of plutonium from the military. His motive for this is simply to protect his younger brother, who is stationed at the test site and will more than likely die from the radiation if the tests are performed.
• Bug War: Naturally. The player characters in the two games wage a one-man war against the invading insects, but are eventually able to convince the army to become involved.
• Cassandra Truth: As you'd expect, the protagonists in both games are dismissed when they claim that giant ants are plotting to attack the town.
• Clear My Name: The sequel has the main character on the run from being accused of starting the incident. Turns out the Antheads are spreading this to quietly resume their invasion.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: In the first game, you play as Dr. Greg Bradley, a geologist who is generally well-liked and only happens across the mutant ants while studying the meteor that crashed near Lizard Breath. Come Antheads, you are now playing as Brick Nash, a soldier who is on the run after stealing a tanker truck of plutonium to prevent it from being used in nuclear testing which could kill his younger brother, and now has to avoid the law and clear his name while also stopping the invading ants from using the plutonium as part of their own plans. In terms of personality, Nash is also far less polite, snarkier and more antagonistic than Bradley ever was.
• Greaser Delinquents: The local gang known as "The Hellcats" will make your life hell on the roads until you defeat their leader.
• Hint System: The town's fortune teller acts as an in-game hint system for what is happening and what you should be doing on any given day.
• Homage: The entire game is a loving homage to not only Them!, but the entire genre of giant radioactive monster films and 50's B-movies as a whole.
• Mini-Game: Not surprising, as it was released in the golden age of mini games.
  • Face-to-face shooting: When you encounter an ant at a location, you have to fight it with your trusty pistol. Unless you successfully shoot its antennae off, you'll get chewed on and end up in the hospital.
  • Firefighting: If you pick one specific action on one specific day (the first), you have to use a hand-held extinguisher to try to extinguish a house fire before it lands you in the hospital.
  • Flight: You can rent a plane at the local airfield and fly around the entire map to e.g. try to look for the location of the nest.
  • Game of Chicken: Until you fight and best their leader, the local greasers will regularly interrupt your travels to challenge you to a game of chicken. Swerving will cost you several hours of time and crashing will land you in the hospital - you need to make them turn first.
  • Hospital Escape: If you end up in the hospital, you can either accept the time loss or try to get out early by escaping. If you choose the latter, you play a stealth-based mini game where you hide from hospital staff and try to sneak out while they have their backs turned.
  • Knife Fight: Certain characters can turn hostile and pull a knife on you. Interesting in that even a small amount of damage will make you (or the opponent) start bleeding out, so it isn't so much about directly lowering your opponents' health bar to zero as getting a few blows in and then surviving long enough for it to drop to zero by itself.
  • Top-down ant-fighting: After an ant attack, you usually have to fight more ants coming to the scene by throwing hand grenades and dynamite at them. If you manage to kill enough of them, the rest will flee. If you manage to convince the mayor of the seriousness of the situation, you also gain access to tanks and airstrikes.
• Ignoring the Doctor: When the protagonist collapses, the nurse/doctor wants the player to rest for a day, even if it's the final invasion by the ants. He can still walk off any injury without ill effects, and try escaping the hospital in a Stealth-Based Mission.
• Immoral Journalist: Bert Lamont at the Lizard Breath Star is implied by other characters to be one of these.
• Magic Meteor: The source of the ants' mutation is not nuclear testing like in Them!, but rather the meteoroid Stohlheinz A221357 which impacts just outside the town of Lizard Breath, California.
• Mayor Pain: The local mayor is incompetent and cowardly, and convincing him that there is anything amiss takes a ton of evidence.
• Mission-Pack Sequel: At the time, to get the sequel to the original game "Antheads, It 2", you had to contact the publisher and purchase it from them directly. The story continues off right after the first game and has the same engine.
• Ms. Fanservice: The busty candy-striper who is obviously flirting with Dr. Bradley when he's recovering in the hospital. But he must escape: there is work to do!
• Mundane Made Awesome: In Antheads, you have the option to pez any human you suspect to be an anthead. The option? PEZ HIM/HER.
• Non-Lethal K.O.: No matter what happens to you - car crash, plane crash, losing a knife fight, being chewed on by a giant ant - up until the end you won't actually die. The worst thing that'll happen is you'll end up in the hospital and lose time.
• The Patient Has Left the Building: This is the minigame to leave the hospital, and escape by the front doors. The player is fully cured when they escape, only losing a bit of time.
• Point-and-Click Map: The map uses a cursor for selecting which location to travel to. Each location does have a certain amount of time that passes while traveling, but waiting on the map also costs time.
• Prospector: Geez, who brings you the first clues. In full Wild West garb with a grey beard and a donkey.
• NPC Scheduling: One of the first games to feature this. Learning where everyone is going to be at what times is crucial to conducting your investigation.
• Nuclear Mutant: The game's antagonists are harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex rugosus) mutated into giant size by a radioactive meteorite.
• Red Herring: Some of the clues are red herrings, such as the mysterious lights out at the pump station.
• Stealth-Based Mission: Trying to escape the hospital has the player character run from medical staff, who will chase him if they see him. He can also hide under bed covers to avoid detection.
• Shout-Out:
  • The title is one to It Came from Outer Space.
  • If you visit the drive-in cinema while it is open but the Hellcats aren't there, it is showing fellow Cinemaware games Rocket Ranger and Wings.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Zig-zagged. The Mayor doesn't believe Bradley's claims about giant ants roaming around and will dismiss them anytime they try to convince them. Only when he's given substantial evidence of the ants' existence will he finally cave in and aid him. However, considering the sheer amount of physical evidence of the ants' existence—including multiple witnesses and countless dead ant bodies lying around—convincing the Mayor takes far more effort than one might expect.
• Timed Mission: The entire game is a timed mission: you have 15 days to avert the antpocalypse.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The game and its sequel essentially merge the plots of Them! (giant mutated ants running amok in the desert) with It Came from Outer Space (a meteor landing in a desert near a small town, a scientist whose warnings are ignored, and—in the sequel—people being possessed by the alien presence).

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