It's fun for gamers to play the bad guy. But lately, the bad guys are so dark that they aren't any fun at all. Wouldn't it be enjoyable to hearken back to a simpler, more paranoid, incredibly repressed time when people's fear of the unknown tended to manifest in the form of little green men?
In short: You bet it is. In Destroy All Humans!, you play Cryptosporidium-137, an alien stereotype tasked with harvesting DNA-rich human brainstems for… well, for plot reasons, basically. To do this, he'll have to read minds, toss cows around telekinetically, destroy whole towns from his saucer, disintegrate citizens, explode lots of heads, and of course, probe people right up the spout, all across the landscape of the American 1950s.
Destroy All Humans! does McCarthy-era paranoid repression right. A secret government agency naturally blames Communists for everything weird that Crypto does in his pursuit of our precious DNA. The Jazz Menace is denounced as a corrupting influence. And while folks might like Ike, they're not sure he's got what it takes to fight the Russkies. Paranoia even comes up in the gameplay—in one of the more inspired moments, Crypto must dress up as the Mayor to deliver a speech and bring the feeble-minded townspeople under control. Any oratory technique will be entertaining, but for best results, use a period-correct (or is it classic?) appeal to fear and patriotism. As entertaining as the rest of the game is, it really could have used more stuff like that.