Let's Play Aliens: Colonial Marines
your evil twin
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Registered User regular
VIDEOS
Mission 01: Distress
Mission 02: Battle for Sulaco
Mission 03: Sulaco Falls
[img]http://lpix.org/t/1434376/Sulaco Falls image.jpg[/img]
I love Aliens. And I love Opposing Force, the Half-Life expansion pack that was essentially Aliens set in the Black Mesa Research Facility.
Guess what? Gearbox Software have made an Aliens game. 20th Century Fox considers the game's storyline to be a true canon sequel to Aliens, and it's going to explain various mysteries surrounding the events of Aliens and Alien 3. Of course, every true Aliens fan needs to get the Collector's Edition...
Click here for the full 2000x1534 image
A statue of a Marine in a Power Loader wrestling with a Xenomorph! A replica USCM patch to wear! A Plasma Rifle! A Pulse Rifle with a flamethrower strapped to it! Yessssss. Take my money!
This is going to be the best thing ever.
Aliens: Colonial Marines had amazing preview videos and screenshots a year before release, loads of hype and a big marketing campaign. What we eventually ended up with was a buggy mess that looked dated on PC and outright horrible on consoles. Patches fixed most bugs and improved the AI, and a couple of months after release the PC version got a huge 5 gigabyte patch that completely overhauled the graphics. (Of course there's no 5 gigabyte patch for console gamers, so their version still looks terrible.)
The gameplay is essentially Left 4 Dead crossed with Call of Duty. That's not necessarily a bad thing; in fact it is perfectly possible to have a good amount of fun in this game, but it is a far cry from the tense and challenging marine campaigns of the old Alien vs Predator games. (Even the disappointing 2010 AvP game did a better job of delivering an authentic Colonial Marine experience.)
My previous Let's Plays have been "underrated" games, such as Wolfenstein 2009, TimeShift, and Inversion. Those games didn't get much hype, were overlooked or panned by reviewers, and didn't sell well, but I found them surprisingly enjoyable and thought that they were worthy of more attention. Aliens: Colonial Marines is not that sort of game.
Still, for an Aliens fan, there's some entertaining fan service, and revisiting the locations from the movie is cool. There's some fun to be had here. Just keep your expectations low. Reeeaalllly low.
I am playing the game on the hardest difficulty setting, Ultimate Badass, as on lesser settings the aliens are literally no threat whatsoever. On the normal "Soldier" difficulty Xenomorphs die from one or two bullets, and if they do succeed in reaching you their claws and teeth barely hurt, and you can simply punch them to death. On Ultimate Badass the enemies are actually dangerous, and as a result, you will see me die a few times, but that's what you should expect if you go up against an army of alien killing machines.
I played and recorded the first two missions a couple of months ago, before the huge 5GB patch, which means you'll get to see the game's original graphics and AI. The rest of the game will be with the patch. (I shall also do another video of the first mission to highlight the improvements in graphics and AI.)
Mission 01: Distress
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Shame, really; it at least looks like it's trying to play it close to the source.
Similarly, for A:CM it seems like someone decided that for the game to be succesful it had to meet certain modern gaming conventions, and the gameplay was designed around that instead of what was seen in the movie franchise. They thought the way to have the game be "scary" was to give it an atmosphere and environments similar to Doom 3, and make the fights against monsters be like Left 4 Dead, and to also include human opponents and have those fights be like Call of Duty.
In the old AvP game from 1998, Rebellion didn't take the easy route and imitate established FPS gameplay conventions of the time, instead they based the gameplay and the behaviour of the enemies on creating an experience faithful to the Alien movies. AvP 98 isn't like any other game, before or since, and while the graphics are dated the gameplay still holds up well today. If instead Rebellion had gone the safe route and just made a standard FPS using the Aliens license, the result would have been Duke Nukem 3D or Quake, but with monsters that look like xenomorphs.
The sad thing about Aliens: Colonial Marines is that Gearbox didn't actually need to be very original, they just had to imitate old AvP (for a good creepy atmosphere and faithful xenomorph behaviour) and cross it with their own game Opposing Force (for the squad experience). Instead they decided to imitate a bunch of other games that were far less appropriate.
Is this an incorrect assumption? I do feel "blue key / red key / yellow key -> elevator, level over" gameplay is pretty dated.
Oh sure, coloured keycards ARE dated and I'm glad to see the back of them. (Exploring a maze, being ambushed my monsters and finding secrets is fun... but finding the exit you can't open yet is frustrating.)
No I was was referring to the fact that Doom 1 and 2 were about shooting monsters and searching for secrets, but for Doom 3 they felt that gamers needed a deeper "story-driven" experience so they decided to imitate Half-Life, and replaced keycards with audio logs from System Shock 2. That could have been a recipe for success, but id software didn't do a good job of imitating those games. It failed at being Doom because it lacked the old skool gameplay, it failed at being Half-Life because it didn't have smart enemies and the entire facility consisted of dark metal corridors, and it failed at being System Shock 2 because there wasn't a fascinating backstory or interesting characters for the audio logs to reveal.
An example of System Shock 2 audio logs
An example of Doom 3 audio logs
This is what Doom is supposed to be about:
That's original doom with a mod that adds some special effects. The only thing that is dated is the old sprite graphics, the gameplay is still great. Imagine that remade with a modern 3D engine, that's what Doom 3 should have been.
Anyway enough with the Doom I guess (for this thread anyway hah), I'm enjoying the LP. I usually don't watch these things because if I'm interested in a game I usually plan to play it at some point. This I'm not sure I'll get around to, but from what I've seen so far of the game it's not the absolute crapfest I was expecting. It's not exactly inspired but what I'm seeing doesn't make it one of the worst games of all time. So far it seems like something I could enjoy playing coop on a decently hard setting.
Also, Jim Sterling did a playthrough of the new DLC episode. Spoilers for anybody who didn't play/follow the game obviously.
I rather doubt that many of the people who worked on Opposing Force are still there, it was like 15 years ago
The recent AvP game (2010) isn't great, but the xenomorphs themselves are done well, they've got decent AI and behaviour etc. Rebellion had the right idea, their heart was clearly in the right place, but they simply didn't make it that well. While Gearbox/TimeGate/whoever had the wrong idea, and they didn't make that well either.
It plays exactly the same as I remember Doom to be, and I refuse to play actual original Doom as that would spoil my rose-tinted memories!
You're right, the people that say it is the "worst game ever!"are obviously overreacting. It's just distinctly average, it's like one of those movie tie-in games that are rushed out to to come out the same time as a film hits the cinemas. Except this is a game based on a movie that is decades old, and Gearbox were supposedly working on it for years. (There are old screenshots of a PS2 version!) They hyped it up as being the authentic Aliens experience that Aliens-fans had been waiting for, but the end result was inferior to all the AvP games. In fact even the old Doom-clone Alien Trilogy game for PS1 did a better job of capturing the tense atmosphere of Aliens.
Hehe. And yep, here it is for everyone:
Mission 02: Battle for Sulaco
Someone decided that we didn't really want an Aliens game. We wanted Medal of Duty: Future Warfighter Ops.
So they were a pleasant change of pace from the Xenos, who were all rather disinterested.
[img]http://lpix.org/1434376/Sulaco Falls image.jpg[/img]
Astonishingly, things start to look up! We get a chapter that's half decent, an enormous 5GB patch enhances the graphics... and the game encourages us to use a flamethrower.
Of course, things aren't looking up for our protagonists. For them, things just keep getting worse.