Aliens: Colonial Marines

As soon as I heard about the Hicks surviving thing, I said to myself, "This sounds like something from a bad fanfic." I could have accepted that, maybe, possibly, but probably not, if it were done well. However, it's done in such a way that the entire premise falls apart as soon as you begin to think about it.

As of the end of Aliens, Ripley, Hicks, Newt and Bishop were all in cryosleep. When Weyland Yutani found their ship, why would they take Hicks? Surely it would have made more sense to take Ripley instead? Why didn't they just shoot everyone while they were asleep, or blow the ship to bits, or stick some aliens on there? Anything else would have made more sense than what they did.

Same. I could accept one of the Marines being only mostly dead. But there is no real logical reason why the Company would go to the aliens 3 prison world, loot Hicks pod and dragging Hicks, and only Hicks back to the colony world.

It's like if UncleBen had a cameo in Captain America The First Avenger...

edited 21st Apr '13 5:04:25 PM by joeyjojo

Called it.

Anyone want to get their money back, guess you can try.

That's not going to fly. People are soreheads. A bad game is a bad game, but you don't get your money back because you didn't like it.

edited 2nd May '13 12:12:17 PM by Fighteer

I knew it was coming. It was only a matter of time.

If not just the matter of personal taste. The designers shown us 'actual game play footage' that wasn't in the actual game.

And went to great pains to keep people from playing it outside of their terms. Like, in the multiplayer demos, only the devs could play the Aliens.

Stuff shown in trailers and demos doesn't always appear in the final game. That's an acknowledged part of the development process. It happens in films, too. It's not litigable.

This is all about people getting mad because a game didn't live up to their expectations. I would be shocked if a lawsuit were successful, and I'd expect the industry to rally around Gearbox should it actually come to a trial, if for no other reason than to protect themselves against future class action lawsuits over "bad" games.

edited 3rd May '13 7:26:32 AM by Fighteer

No, there is a difference between stuff in the demo that has to get cut for time, and flat-out fake footage. Aliens Colonial Marines did the latter.

You would have to prove intent to deceptively market a product. That's pretty challenging without a smoking gun.

As far as I'm concerned, a consumer lawsuit over this is nothing more than soreheads wanting their money back over a crappy game. It won't fly. Now, if Sega wants to get up in Gearbox's grill, that's a different matter. Let the corporations slug it out. But people like you and me can't do shit.

edited 3rd May '13 12:13:26 PM by Fighteer

Thing is, Gearbox have using nothing but that demo as a demonstration of how the game looks and plays. When the game was released, that entire sequence was vastly inferior to the demo, for a variety of reasons that can only be attributed to neglect and incompetence. And many of the things that were "removed" from the demo carried over to the rest of the game, such as the terrible Alien AI.

Scenes and sequences can be cut, but when you're using a section of the game that definately will be in the game and it suddenly turns out that the final product is vastly inferior compared to the demo, and all the advertising has been using that demo to show a game that looks far better than it actually is, then you have a perfectly valid reason to call foul.

The realkicker for me is that, even without the awful AI and level progression, the game would still be nothing more then a typical FPS with licsensed characters thrown in.

Yeah, that'd be the whole "You fight more humans that you do Aliens" thing again.

In fairness, what makes a good film doesn't necessarily make for a good game. There were only two kinds of xenos in the films (well, three if you count facehuggers) , and they won by superior tactics, not by brute force. You can't base a six to ten hour game on that alone. The Weyland-Yutani connection was needed to establish some kind of meaningful story arc — also remember that, even in the films, it was the Company who was the actual villain. The xenos are tools, weapons created for a purpose; they lack moral capacity.

edited 9th May '13 7:06:03 AM by Fighteer

Well, just having the Xenos worked for Aliens Infestation, so, yeah.

Now, I'm not exactly a fan of the franchise, but I get the impression that Aliens doesn't work so well as a straight-up shooter, but rather, it works much better as a horror title. To make an Aliens game really work, you have to make the Xenos a genuine threat even by their lonesome, rather than just a generic series of mooks, and that means stuff like limited ammo, the player being more vulnerable, knowing when it's best not to shoot and retreat instead, etc.

And while obviously the player should at least be given a chance to be able to run or defend himself adequately enough, where and when Xenos show up should at least have some measure of subtlety, unlike Dead Space, where the enemies are nearly always either playing dead or hiding in conspicuous ventilation shafts, and announce their entrance with about as much subtlety as a brick to the face. The motion detector was useless in Colonial Marines' single player, it would be an excellent tool in a horror game as both a means of alerting the player to potential threats and also for Paranoia Fuel.

And while Weyland-Yutani is obviously a big part of the plot, the problem is the way they were implemented just turns Colonial Marines into large sections of what could basically be described as "generic shooter #55436". Humanoid enemies in a game like this should either be use sparingly or in a different way than other shooters.

edited 9th May '13 7:22:46 AM by Cronosonic

I agree with all of that, but it's hard to set an FPS in that kind of scenario. FEAR tried it but still needed disposable mooks, and that's kind of what Wey-Yu is supposed to provide.

Well, that's the thing, I don't think any of the FEAR games were really very good horror games. Sure, they had their moments, but they were mostly just standard FPS games with bullet time.

You kidding? I nearly shit my pants several times while playing them. To each his own, I guess.

Edit: Admittedly, F.E.A.R relies on a lot of Jump Scares, but it does a great job of setting a creepy atmosphere for them. System Shock is another classic example of a game that establishes a scary environment and makes you struggle to survive by limiting resources.

edited 9th May '13 7:36:57 AM by Fighteer

As I said, they had their moments, but that's mainly moments when having a gun doesn't do shit. And even then, they weren't terribly memorable, either, in hindsight.

I just find that giving the player a weapon in general or having enemies that are vulnerable to attack is far less conductive to a horror experience, really. Amnesia scared the living hell out of me and I'm extremely hesitant to play Slender and SCP Containment Breach for longer than a few minutes, but I'm not nearly as unnerved by horror games that either give you competent combat mechanics, probably because of the knowledge that the monsters are vulnerable makes them less threatening. Penumbra got a lot scarier once the second game dropped the melee weapon mechanic.

edited 9th May '13 7:37:31 AM by Cronosonic

I think a first-person perspective actually could work well for a horror game if it took advantage of the limited visibility (limited when compared to a third-person perspective). You could have monsters sneaking up on you from behind at any moment. Of course, I bet some players would complain about that not being fair.

Frankly, I found that A:CM was dark and moody enough that I was having a difficult time picking the xenos out of the background to aim at them, and that was perhaps the one part of the game that really helped me feel like I was fighting a desperate battle. It was also frustrating as hell.

That was thanks to the crappy lighting system, ironically.

Wasn't there a game on the Jaguar about Aliens that actually used the motion detector quite well?

The first FEAR is, to date, the only video game that has made me terrified of progressing further, even though I had an arsenal on me.

The first half of the game, anyway. It lost all terror by the time I started fighting mechs and stuff.

And I've played System Shock and Amnesia (though admittedly only an hour or so of the latter).

F.E.A.R. 2 was the absolute best, IMO. It's the only one that I've replayed constantly.

edited 9th May '13 2:13:04 PM by Fighteer