Aliens Colonial Marines: Nuke your expectations from orbit

[schild]

The best Aliens game remains Aliens vs Predator on the Atari Jaguar. Well, if you don't count the amazing arcade game.

[Hoax]

That arcade game was so good, the first and second AvP for pc were fine too if you didn't play with the predators or played one pred against the entire server of marines/aliens.

[Yegolev]

The best Aliens game remains Aliens vs Predator on the Atari Jaguar. Well, if you don't count the amazing arcade game.

I'll counter with the xenomorph gameplay from  the 1999 AvP for PC by Rebellion.  I don't even need to put the rest of the game on the table.

[Fabricated]

AVP2's Marine campaign is really good too.

[Yegolev]

I'm not saying the rest is necessarily bad, and I enjoyed the Predator in AvP2, but every xenomorph since 1999 was basically a pile of crap.  Apparently due to whiners.  No, it wasn't very easy to control something that could stick to any surface and leap forty feet straight up from a crouch, but god-damn was it fun.  For the xenomorph.

[UnSub]

A:CM saves being wiped on the Xbox 360 version for some players.

Gearbox really went all out here.

[Goreschach]

The AVP1 marine campaign is the only game I've ever been too frightened to play. A few years ago I picked it up on steam and finally finished it.

[apocrypha]

Played a few hours of the 2010 Sega AVP multiplayer lastnight with a few friends and had an obscene amount of fun. 1 predator vs 3 marines was a good balance, as was 2 aliens vs 2 marines. Very tense, scary stuff.

Not touching A:CM with a barge pole though.

[Samprimary]

someone made this for us and made me laugh until I cry

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=E7sXMHCzoCo

[Trippy]

Would've been better if he changed his clothes. But otherwise was a decent live-action version of one your cartoons.

[rk47]

[Tarami]

Oh, RK.

[Bzalthek]

<laugh track>

"This episode of rk47 has been filmed in front of a live studio audience!"

[Merusk]

It was too easy and beneath his usual bizarre.  Aliens are a rape metaphor using H.R. Geiger's - king of penis/ vagina morphs - artwork.  Of course there's tons of 'lol penis/ vagina' jokes to be had.

[rk47]

OK, how about we view a clip of another alien game that sega cancelled?
maybe it's funnier?

[Ironwood]

What the hell was that shit ?

[rk47]

its a cancelled Aliens RPG from Obsidian... 

[Yegolev]

I want to play.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJnH71PXIMk

[Samwise]

I want to play.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJnH71PXIMk

Now I miss NS1.  :(

[KallDrexx]

Oh man, that totally reminded me I still have my AVP2 + expansion cds around.  Now I kinda want to install them again.

[Yegolev]

How old do I feel when people are getting nostalgic about sequels to amazing games?  Some amount.

[Trippy]

I feel the same way when people talk about System Shock 2 (the original was better).

[Kitsune]

I feel the same way when people talk about System Shock 2 (the original was better).

Ma, get the children inside.  There'll be blood on this here street.

[Ironwood]

I feel the same way when people talk about System Shock 2 (the original was better).

Yes, but alas, not as accessible.

[Yegolev]

I agree with that.  Similar to how I know Daggerfall was better than the later ES games, but holy fuck at the interface now.  I used to climb some serious hills to get my PC entertainment, but now I can't be bothered.

[Ironwood]

Daggerfall was pretty much THE open ended, giving the geeks what they want, wondrous RPG ever.

Fuck me, the time I put in making the Red Daedric shit and making sure my Dark Elf paper doll looked awesome.  I'll give them props for trying as much as they can to stick to that original vision (see, Skyrim), but if you actually compare the two, there's so much that's been dumbed down and is missing due to the 'New Age'.

Ah well.

(I mean, you could buy a horse and cart.  A fucking Horse and Cart.)

[Paelos]

I think JC2 is pretty much the size that all current games should be measured against in terms of world to play in.

[rk47]

Daggerfall was pretty much THE open ended, giving the geeks what they want, wondrous RPG ever.

Fuck me, the time I put in making the Red Daedric shit and making sure my Dark Elf paper doll looked awesome.  I'll give them props for trying as much as they can to stick to that original vision (see, Skyrim), but if you actually compare the two, there's so much that's been dumbed down and is missing due to the 'New Age'.

Ah well.

(I mean, you could buy a horse and cart.  A fucking Horse and Cart.)

amen . seeing tits for the first time in RPG was an awesome experience.
and who could forget the Real Bazenriah, UNCENSORED version?
The first time I read that...  "I'm glad mom doesn't know english."

[Fabricated]

Daggerfall was pretty much THE open ended, giving the geeks what they want, wondrous RPG ever.

Fuck me, the time I put in making the Red Daedric shit and making sure my Dark Elf paper doll looked awesome.  I'll give them props for trying as much as they can to stick to that original vision (see, Skyrim), but if you actually compare the two, there's so much that's been dumbed down and is missing due to the 'New Age'.

Ah well.

(I mean, you could buy a horse and cart.  A fucking Horse and Cart.)

To be fair the more complicated the systems you have in a game the further you reduce mass appeal, and the harder it is to put the system together in a way where you can't just break the game in two accidentally.

In Morrowind you could start the game, break into an alchemist's store or someone's house, steal like 50 sujamma/skooma, then drink/smoke it all at once and run so fast you become one with the speed force. At level 1.

[Teleku]

And then after doing that, go straight to the end boss and kill him, winning the game.  In like, 4 minutes total.

[Ironwood]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ingmar]

Ehhh, Morrowind's systemic flaws are not because of them being complicated, it's just got a lot of shitty and/or sloppy design involved. The pants-on-head leveling system in those games, for example, doesn't add any extra gameplay value just because doing it optimally is counterintuitive or complicated. Looking at the changes made to it in Skyrim shouldn't be considered 'dumbing it down', because in order for that pejorative to make any sense the original way of doing things has to actually be better.  

The only thing the later games miss out on compared to Daggerfall, really, is scale. Fewer factions to join, smaller area, etc. - but that isn't so much a question of systems design, just a question of whether you want to spend your time as a developer making lots of randomly generated but individually less interesting areas, or polishing the shit out of a smaller number. I don't think there's a single right answer there.

EDIT: Losing custom spells in Skyrim is the one area where I think they really did lose something by simplifying a system, I'll say that.

[Sky]

/obligatory I love Daggerfall's random dungeon generator

[Soulflame]

I completely broke a game save with a horrific bug due to the horse and cart, so I don't exactly have fond memories of that.

Nor of Daggerfalls dungeons.

[Kail]

Ehhh, Morrowind's systemic flaws are not because of them being complicated, it's just got a lot of shitty and/or sloppy design involved. The pants-on-head leveling system in those games, for example, doesn't add any extra gameplay value just because doing it optimally is counterintuitive or complicated. Looking at the changes made to it in Skyrim shouldn't be considered 'dumbing it down', because in order for that pejorative to make any sense the original way of doing things has to actually be better.  

The only thing the later games miss out on compared to Daggerfall, really, is scale. Fewer factions to join, smaller area, etc. - but that isn't so much a question of systems design, just a question of whether you want to spend your time as a developer making lots of randomly generated but individually less interesting areas, or polishing the shit out of a smaller number. I don't think there's a single right answer there.

EDIT: Losing custom spells in Skyrim is the one area where I think they really did lose something by simplifying a system, I'll say that.

I don't grieve for the changes to Daggerfall's weird as fuck levelling system, but there was a lot of fun to be had in the openness that the game offered.  The random quests and the MASSIVE gamespace made it feel a lot more like a virtual world than something like Oblivion, where you know before even booting up the game that you get quest X from visiting town Y and talking to guy Z exactly like last time.  I read that the idea with Morrowind was to make that tradeoff, as you said, between boring random quests and fewer, higher quality quests, but what we ended up with was mostly just fewer, more boring quests.  There's just something about the nature of the massive world, where you might realistically be the first player to actually see a specific dungeon or village, where there is no walkthrough because nobody's seen the shit you're seeing, that really appeals to me.

Skyrim has done a lot better than Oblivion in that regard, but I still wish someone would just go nuts with it and give us something more in the vein of Daggerfall.

And I don't mind being able to break the game at level 1, that was one of the most fun parts of Morrowind, to me.  It's not like the average newbie is going to somehow accidentally figure out how to beat the game in 5 minutes and ruin their experience, it's just something to mess around with sometime, one more option to explore.  Weird, crazy shit like Morrowind's alchemy system or Daggerfall's broken as fuck custom classes are sometimes fun, and if you feel like they're messing with the balance or something, it's a single player game, so you don't have to use them.

But I'm pretty sure I've said all this before...