Little Green Men landed on the wrong moustache
Stalin vs Martians is a real-time strategy game. Its designers deliberately aimed for the So Bad, It's Good B-movie aesthetics, deliberately attempting to emulate famously bad alien movies such as Plan 9 from Outer Space.The game was panned by critics, sold poorly, and today occupies several 'worst games of all time' lists. The publisher has since done its best to pretend the game doesn't exist, and copies of the game are effectively impossible to find. It is technically an "Operation Barbarossa" expansion/mod for the video game Blitzkrieg, but dropped and converted half-way.
Tropes
- Arbitrary Gun Power: The Soviet units are a random mishmash of various armored vehicle models cribbed from WW2 games and given arbitrary stats; there is absolutely zero relation between a unit's Real Life armament and the amount of damage it does in the game, nor is there any relation between actual speed and ingame speed, actual armor and in-game hitpoints, etc.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Players could eventually field a 50 foot tall Stalin, who is supposedly "as big as the man was in Real Life".
- Batman Can Breathe in Space: Your troops are totally fine in the missions set on Mars later in the game, without any space appropriate clothing
- Captain Ersatz: There are multiple of these:
- Confetti Martians that resemble Pikmin.
- Green three-eyed Martians like the aliens from Toy Story but bodies like Mike from Monsters, Inc.
- Red, floating one-eyed Martians that look like Cacodemons.
- Cruel Elephant: There are elephant-like martians that breath fire.
- Dance Party Ending: The credits
feature a cartoon Stalin cavorting about to Russian techno music. - Fog of War: Standard Fog, you are unable to see enemy activity in areas of the map that you do not currently have units in.
- Game Mod: Though sold as a full game, it's actually a mod of the WWII RTS Blitzkrieg - and not a particularly thorough one, either; all of the alien units are reskinned default units, the maps are Blitzkrieg multiplayer and skirmish maps with 'alien' decorations randomly scattered around, and the interface is effectively identical, except that most functionality has been removed and a few things have been shifted around.
- It is said that the game started as an early-stage (invasion of Poland to Winter 1942) Eastern Front mod, but the artists for the German and Polish factions pulled out.
- Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The final boss of the game is Hitler's giant head with tentacles coming out of it. There is absolutely no explanation given for its existence.
- Impossible Item Drop: Martians drop some stuff one wouldn't expect.
- Little Green Men: Martians in this game.
- Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: An apparently unintentional example - the mission briefings in the single-player campaign have absolutely nothing to do with the missions themselves, giving you advice that doesn't work, objectives that don't exist, and information about the upcoming mission that turns out to be totally false.
- Our Zombies Are Different: They are basically zombified versions of Stalin himself; they have green blood, can be killed with guns and axes, and young women seem to be their favorite prey, though they don't seem to be infectious. However, they only appear in the second intermission.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: Virtually the entire game is set to various electronic tunes and... campy Russian Glam Rock?
- Stock Sound Effects: When an objective gets completed, a stock jingle plays.
- Stupid Jetpack Hitler: The final boss, Hitler's head atop a pair of mechanized spider legs.
- Treasure Is Bigger in Fiction: Sometimes gigantic spinning coins are dropped by enemies.
- Welcome to Corneria: There is precisely one recorded voice clip for every action a unit type can take, and there are only two unit types, so you're going to be hearing the same thing a lot. The most common and infamous is the voice clip your infantry make when killed, a completely deadpan, monotone, bored-sounding "I'm dying."
- We Have Reserves: More cannon fodder is announced when reinforcements appear.
