Muzman on 27/2/2013 at 17:39
This always was the folly of sticking rigidly to canon that casts the alien as Space Termites. Everyone's too enamoured with the film to notice it is fairly cheesy at its core.
Still, it's not wildly different from some fast zombie scenario, plus some climbing. Avoid the teeth, avoid the blood, try not to freak out in the dark etc. And that sort of thing can work.
With a little imagination it could be done (see above remark on canon re: imagination)
catbarf on 27/2/2013 at 17:48
I thought the fear from fighting them in an FPS should come from their sheer lethality at close quarters, and their speed and stealth. A horde of aliens running down a narrow corridor isn't a huge threat if you have a gun ready (as the sentry gun scene shows), but an alien popping out of the floor beneath your feet is certain death. Even if you can fight off the 800lb strong-enough-to-bend-sheet-steel killing machine and shoot it, you're just ensuring your own death by acid. Game over.
Whereas in the 2010 AvP and Colonial Marines, you can fight them off in melee with a short quicktime event, smack them to the ground, shoot them in the face, and avoid the tiny acid splash. There's little actual threat, because the aliens aren't specialized close combat killers that get mulched by gunfire, they're just cannon fodder.
I think we discussed it some time ago, but have any of you guys played Space Hulk 2? In its own way I think it's a great Aliens-esque game. Your character is an extreme badass and very powerful in ranged combat, and there is a quicktime event when an alien gets up close, but it's a difficult quicktime event and failure means instant death. You can have an entire squad get wiped out because the guy in the back had his gun jam at the wrong moment, and it was a very tense game as a result.
DDL on 27/2/2013 at 17:58
Ah, space hulk.
"We shall equip our marines with the biggest, bulkiest, least-convenient for navigating twisty space-wreck corridors ever, terminator uber-armour. Also, the enemies we are up against go through said armour like tissue paper, so I'm not entirely sure why we bothered." :p
I still think surHorr with the player as the alien works best: stealth is relatively easy to do if the player is the stealthy element. It's when the enemy needs to be stealthy that it falls apart, because AI just isn't that good.
Muzman on 27/2/2013 at 18:07
They're jarheads (and -bodies) it's all about the pride of the corp and the uniform, about being the best, of the best, of the best, sir!
Actually I don't think you could make a proper fist of a game like this in these military loving times. You need to find the whole thing faintly absurd and revel in normals like Ripley doing just as well with good old fashioned moxie and mum hormones.
The 80s still had Vietnam and Cold War for some proper military fatigue. These days, not so much.
Phatose on 27/2/2013 at 20:33
You know, canonically, they're not really all that great at close combat either. They manage to take out Apone quickly, but by and large they're pretty slow about it. Ferro has time to pull her pistol despite being strapped in for flight, Hicks beats a xeno in close twice. Vasquez manages to do it with a boot and her pistol (albiet at great cost). Hudson and Dietrich get dragged off but it takes an awful lot of time, despite being a surprise attack in both cases. And in Alien, the thing is flat out leisurely in it's approach to close combat.
Probably a good case based on Spike Jr. from A3 - the whole "It's like a dog cause it hatched from one" made it a lot more vicious. But even then the black guy at the end is still alive and punching when the lead pours in.
Meh. Maybe just ditching canon wherever convenient is a good thing. Starting to wonder if these things are threatening mainly because they've got great visual design and giant penis shaped heads, and not because they're actually all that dangerous.
catbarf on 27/2/2013 at 21:59
They're pretty absurdly strong, picking people up by the head with one arm and pulling open the APC doors. I'd chalk up their slow movement to a matter of pacing and style. They also seemed pretty nimble in Resurrection and AvP, if that counts for anything.
Angel Dust on 27/2/2013 at 22:01
You could also chalk up some of there slow movement to the limitations of men in suits.
I think it's quite clear they are intended to be extremely lethal in close quarters but the nature of the horror genre is you often want to drag those deaths and encounters out.
icemann on 28/2/2013 at 06:02
I think Aliens games can work if done effectively. AS mentioned AvP 1 & 2 are kickass games. The rest since then not so much, though games prior were pretty damn good in their own right (AvP in the arcades, Alien the Gun, there was a Aliens game on the commodore 64 that was excellent etc).
What I would like to see is a game set within the fiction of the books that for a large portion dealt with awesome themes such as the alien infestation of Earth (due to a major fuckup by Weyland Corp after a terroist attack by an alien lovers cult), colonial marine operations to both attempt to stop the aliens taking over the planet and then later on when humanity abandoned earth of their operations to take it back. I think alot of what has held the games back is that they are so tied down by the movies and are too scared to try something different.
Now imagine a game done in a XCOM type style with you commanding the attempt to save the earth against a Xenomorph invasion, with the base bits done XCOM standard style, but then the missions done in FPS but still dynamic. Unlike every other Aliens game in existence this would have you dealing with multiple aliens hives rather than just one singular one, have varying alien types based on world location, indigenous animals present in that location etc and not just confined to LV-426 looking bases and instead being actual cities and villages. That would be AWESOME. Get some fucking creativity in there and new ideas rather than just attempting to rehash "Aliens" in videogame form for the 2000th time.
In the books there was an Alien war of 2 different types of the Xenomorph's (basically standard Xeno's vs a Red-ish variant). A game set within that would be interesting.
Muzman on 28/2/2013 at 06:23
Yeah, that's one thing about all this; the retrospectives pointing out the much cleverer and more interesting games made from the series back in the day. The 8bit Alien and Aliens games were kinda cool and felt no need to have your favourite characters live to the end or whatever just like the movie.
The Obsidian game would probably have been quite interesting. They make 'em a bit clunky but throw a few years of polishing at it and it probably would have been pretty spiffy. Of course they have to throw good money after bad and massage to boring commercial game into release form instead.
(there's a lot of comparisons to Duke Nukem Forever around this. Aside from the outsourcing farrago the situation seem a lot more reminiscent of Daikatana to me)
Phatose on 5/3/2013 at 04:04
Well, I've been slowly plodding my way through the campaign - at this point, more out of morbid curiosity and a lack of better games to play then anything else.
And man, no matter how bad it is at any point, it always manages to get worse.
Eventually you get the smartgun. Iconic weapon from the movie. All you have to do is pull the trigger, it aims itself. Fast moving wall climbing nimble enemies who who structures into horror architecture that they blend in with. Classic setup for a set piece with aliens climbing everywhere and you reliant on your gun to pick up the targets coming from every direction, right?
The only way they could fuck this up is if they put you in a long, narrow featureless hallway and just had the xenos run right at you.
So, of course, that's exactly what they did.
And even worse, they put enough suicide xenos in that long narrow hallway to guarantee you will use up all the ammunition in the thing in that stupid turkey-shoot hallway. That way, when you get to the complex chamber with the lurkers at the end - where the smartgun might actually be useful - you're already out of bullets. And since you can't switch away from the smartgun, you can't use another weapon earlier to save ammo.
Had they actually sat down and said "What the single most wasteful, annoying thing we could possibly do with this weapon?" they could not have come up with something worse.
