A 4-part survey of the Alien franchise in computer, video and lightgun games (amongst other things…)
Jump back to Part 1! Zoom back to Part 2! Leap ahead to Part 4!
Well marines, it’s been a long, crazy ride, but hang tight, we’re finally nearing the end. We left the base in Part 1 for a look at the first ever Alien game, Fox’s own Atari 2600 Alien cartridge in 1982, and ended with the last of the licensed Alien 3 games and the now-legendary first of Rebellion Developments’ Alien versus Predator games for the Atari Jaguar, all in 1994. That was also the year in which a particularly interesting sub-set of id Software and Counterstrike-based fan-made Alien mods took off, with a Doom TC (total conversion) that was so good, several developers offered its author a job. In Part 2 we blazed a bloody trail through loads of arcade cabinets, cartoons, toys, console jobs and Aliens versus Predator stuff. That battle ended in 1998 with the fabulous Aliens Online, which brings us now to 1999, and the third AvP game (but the first for PC). And yes, finally, it’s the one we all know and love so well. Lock and load people, it’s time to meet the queen!
Known since 2010 as Aliens versus Predator Classic 2000, following its first enhancement and repackaging as Aliens versus Predator Gold in 2000, Rebellion Developments’ 1999 PC/Mac/Linux/Amiga classic was their second run at the Alien, following their brilliant-but-tied-to-a-doomed-console Atari Jaguar version in 1994. Originally announced to the world around Christmas 1997 for the PlayStation, SEGA Saturn and PC, it’s not hard to imagine Rebellion (and Fox) wanting to re-tool the superb Jaguar version for machines that were less likely to fail quite as loudly as the Jaguar did (Atari ceased production in 1996, just over three years’ from its North American launch in November 1993). Primary development of the game was focused on the PlayStation, although this was eventually scrapped when the engine written for it proved unworkable in the PSX. This then caused the Saturn version to be dropped and the PC version to be delayed whilst the team re-focused their efforts on getting the PC version right. The game was finally released on two CD-ROMs (which were still very futuristic and exciting back then), with the second disc needing to be left in the drive to play all the videos. Personally, I remember this as being the first game that I used a command line switch on, to remove the necessity of wading through all the splash screens (themselves cumbersome videos spun up from the second disc).
Aliens versus Predator was rightly hailed as something of a masterpiece. The three separate campaigns (an idea carried over from the Jaguar version), the lighting, the mood — never before had anyone tried to offer us a realistic take on the Alien, and what Rebellion gave us was a deliciously fascinating three-course homage to both the sweaty terror and the gung-ho action of the Alien and Predator films. Technically, it pushed our GeForce 3/4-era rigs as hard as any triple-A title pushes today. The Marine’s ammo counters were a superb touch, rapidly ticking down with that awesome pulse rifle sound effect and adding huge amounts of tension to the proceedings. The under-slung grenade launcher made the perfect ‘thwump’ sound when it fired, and the game had an almost perfect implementation of the iconic motion tracker too. Of course, there were weaknesses. Some of the Predator’s missions were a bit dull, and the difficulty tended towards WTF? even in Normal mode. But that’s probably the worst I could say about it now. Aliens versus Predator was the first game for years to deliberately set out to recreate the atmosphere and tension of the films in a way that didn’t involve waves of iridescent, rubber-necked Aliens and constant, hold-the-fire-button-and-spray-everything gameplay. It was the first Alien game to try and put the primal horror of Giger’s creation back in to the equation, and on that count it succeeded brilliantly.
Rebellion understood that a human sharing a space with the Alien was about surviving in the face of overwhelming terror, and then applied that not only to actually being an Alien, but also to being the one other species in the galaxy capable, mentally and physically, of going toe-to-toe with it. The game shifted you from extreme vulnerability as the human, to maximum capability as the Predator, via the fulcrum of the Alien’s strange, savage perspective. And of course, scuttling along darkened ceilings before dropping down behind a cowering wreck of a human and tearing them apart was enormous fun. Even today, the Marine campaign is an exercise in paranoia and jumpiness that would go unrivalled by other Alien games until Creative Assembly’s jaw-dropping Alien: Isolation fifteen years later.
It would be about a year and a half before our next visit from H.R. Giger’s baby in the 2000 Alien Resurrection film tie-in, which arrived three years after the actual film itself. Following one of the very best Alien games of all time was always going to be a tough act to follow, especially when shackled to such an incredibly dodgy film. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s contribution to the canon was, like David Fincher’s wrongly-maligned Alien 3 (see Part 2 for more on that), ultimately hamstrung by the mother hens at Fox, although to nowhere near as great an extent (In a 2015 interview with indiewire.com, Jeunet said that “I had almost complete freedom. It was rare, I had nobody on set”). The legendary Joss Whedon, who wrote five treatments of the screenplay, originally as a story about a cloned Newt with a third-act battle with the Aliens actually on Earth, has his own ideas about what went wrong with it, but needless to say it mostly suffered from a case of unnecessaryitis. Everyone from the series’ original producers David Giler and Walter Hill, to the eventual director, all thought that a fourth Alien film was a bad idea. Still, it is what it is, and I personally have a fond memory of sitting alone in the cinema and watching it a day or two before its run was due to end. Say what you like about the Newborn Alien at the end, the concept of an Alien-ized Ripley is a brilliant one, and any film with Ron Perlman in it is worth watching at least once, too.
But what of the actual game? The original design document for Alien Resurrection describes it as a third-person survival horror job, slated by Fox Interactive (rebranded as such since 1994, prior to which they’d long been Fox Video Games) for release on the SEGA Saturn, PlayStation and Nintendo 64. At some point, the entire plan was thrown out of the window, and development began again from scratch as an FPS, this time for the PlayStation, SEGA Dreamcast (then still very new) and PC, although the latter two ports were dropped following the PSX version’s lukewarm reception. One of the main criticisms, apart from the murky graphics, was of the awkward controls — Alien Resurrection was one of the first console shooters to use one analogue stick for movement and the other for aiming (instead of just tying your view to your aim). Either the sticks on the PlayStation’s Analogue controller were unsuited to the job, or we were all just really cack-handed back then.
No no, it’s not an Alien game — see below!
The final item of note in Alien Resurrection’s case is the developer — Argonaut Games. Argonaut was founded by Jez San, a legendary figure of the English home coding scene. By the age of 13 he had taught himself Assembly language on his first computer, a TRS-80. Later, he helped design the Super FX chip for Nintendo’s SNES, hand-in-hand with developing the legendary Star Fox for Nintendo’s new baby too. He also gave Amiga and ST owners scads of awesome games to play, most notably Starglider. Argonaut also wrote a custom graphics renderer, BRender, which was used to give the world Carmageddon, amongst other things. And in 2002, he became the first person specifically from the computer gaming industry to be awarded an OBE.
Now, if you’ve read Part 1 of this series, you may remember Argus Press Software Ltd. as a co-developer and publisher of the second-ever Alien game, the really rather good, well-received and fondly remembered 8-bit Alien. The reason I’m mentioning all of this now is that the 8-bit Alien is credited in some places to Argonaut Software (the original form of Argonaut Games, which was founded in 1982). San named his company as a play on his own name and the Greek legend (J-San — Jason and the Argonauts, ba-dumm tsh!). Jason’s ship, the Argo, was named for its builder, Argus… Argus Press, the owner, is a British publishing company that was established in 1966, thus predating San’s formation of Argonaut Software in 1982, so that’s probably just a nice coincidence and one which could seem quite appealing if San’s company was to be bought by Argus Press to head its new software publishing division back in the 1980s… What I’m (finally) getting at is that it looks possible that Argonaut, or perhaps just San himself, worked on both the 1984 Alien and the 2000 Alien Resurrection, which would be, you know, really kind of cool.
The next Alien game to come squelching out of the Alien Game Queen’s egg sac was the 2001 Game Boy Color title, Aliens: Thanatos Encounter. This was by all accounts a fun little number that had you exploring the Thanatos, an Alien-infested freighter (Thanatos being the name of the Greek god of death, hint hint marines!). Players could choose from a pool of specialised marines, and when each one was finally overwhelmed by Aliens, he or she was dragged off to be cocooned. At that point, you had 200 seconds to choose another marine and rush off to rescue your fallen comrade, or else lose them from the pool of available marines altogether. Despite some dodgy Alien AI, it’s a well-regarded title and was another small hit for THQ (before they died in 2012).
Before we get to the Monolith-developed Aliens vs Predator 2, I wanted to touch on an interesting trend in Alien gaming history that extends from 2001 until 2011. In this time, every purely Alien game released (as well as some AvP titles) featured a colon in its name, from Aliens: Thanatos Encounter in 2001, to Aliens: Unleashed and Aliens: Extinction in 2003, Aliens: Extermination in 2006, and Aliens: Infestation in 2011. Of course, there’s also Aliens: Colonial Marines and Alien: Isolation in 2013 and 2014 respectively, but they stand well enough on their own that I don’t consider them part of this trend of Aliens: Word naming. Other than boring coincidence, one explanation could be the influence of the Dark Horse comics, which tended to favour this type of short, sharp, brutal naming convention themselves — for example, Aliens: Reapers, Sacrifice, Crusade, Countdown, Salvation, Havoc, Purge, Labyrinth (also notable for lending a concept to the execrable Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure), and so on.
Anyway, after Thanatos Encounter came Aliens: Unleashed in 2003. This was a mobile game that tasked you with shooting ‘Synths’ — synthetic Aliens created to give the USMC something to practise on. Of course, the dummy Aliens do a Westworld and turn on you, requiring you to wipe them all out (both of which points sort of seem like what you were doing to each other anyway, but oh well). A further three years after that, in 2006, San Jose, California-based company Global VR unleashed the Aliens: Extermination arcade cabinet on us. Like SEGA’s Alien 3: The Gun back in 1993, this was a light gun game. It also featured rogue androids, an Alien 3-style “Dragon” Alien, was set in the wreckage of Hadley’s Hope, featured a climactic battle with an Alien Queen, a gigantic explosion at the end of the game, and some unseen drool menacing the survivors as they flew off into obscurity again. Still, the cabinet looked pretty nifty, and unlike Alien 3: The Gun’s generic plastic machine guns, this one had cute little pulse rifles to shoot with. Nice.
There then followed something of a drought for Alien games, with the only titles released between Aliens: Extermination in 2006 and Aliens: Infestation in 2011 being some Predator mobile games (including two 2010 Predators film tie-ins (we’re in the Gameloft era now)), an AvP: Requiem film tie-in for the PlayStation Portable (also by Rebellion, but this time very poorly received)) and Aliens vs Predator (2010). But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, so let’s rewind back to 2001, just after Aliens: Thanatos Encounter.
[Image Credit: Monolith Productions, Sierra On-Line]
2001 is the year of Aliens vs Predator 2, which also offered three separate campaigns for Aliens, Marines and Predators, but this time around tied them all into one story. Development duties went to Monolith Productions, creators of the LithTech game engine and purveyors of some excellent games in their own right, including No One Lives Forever 2 in 2002, Tron 2.0 in 2003, and The Matrix Online (Rest in Peace, dude) and F.E.A.R., both in 2005. Most recently, they made the astonishingly successful, critically acclaimed Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor in 2014 and it’s follow-up Middle-earth: Shadow of War. So, no slouches, Monolith. Certainly, their work on Aliens vs Predator 2 was very well received, with the biggest criticism being simply that it was too short. But the game saw a Mac port in 2003, as well as a Gold Edition bundling the original and the expansion together a little while later.
Whilst the story was different, the gameplay was pretty much the same, which is no bad thing. The graphics were a bit crisper, the UI more colourful (for better or for worse), and the Aliens themselves more in line with the slightly stylized, ‘ribbed’ look that had evolved over the years since the Aliens film in 1986. (These are described in Alien lore as being Warriors, as opposed to the original Alien’s smooth-headed, bronze-coloured Drone). An expansion pack, Aliens vs Predator: Primal Hunt, this time developed by Third Law Entertainment, was released exactly 12 months later, in August 2003. The expansion added maps and more weapons to the Multiplayer, and a new single-player campaign that began slightly before AvP 2, explaining some of the events leading up to it. Unfortunately, the expansion was not very well received, with many critics calling it uninspiring and linear, and lamenting the playable facehugger as being hard to control. Not much is known about Third Law Entertainment, but it seems likely that it’s some form of Third Law Interactive, a Dallas-based firm founded in 1998 that used the LithTech engine to make the bonkers KISS: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child (and yes, that is KISS the famous rock band).
[Image Credit: Third Law Entertainment, Sierra On-Line]
As we creep cautiously forward into the new millennium, 2003 brings us the PS2/Xbox Aliens versus Predator: Extinction from Zono Incorporated (note the full spelling of ‘versus’, possibly done to avoid confusion/litigation). Zono was a relatively short-lived California outfit, best known for the 1997 SEGA Saturn classic Mr. Bones, as well as the PC port of the Patrick Stewart-voiced D&D beat ’em-up Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone in 2004. (That woke up the D&Ders and the Trekkers all at once). So far, so forgettable. But apart from the ever-popular one-word naming motif, Extinction is also notable for being none other than an RTS!
Although it wasn’t hugely well received critically, being mostly damned with the faint praise of being ‘alright, but could have done with a few more months in the oven’, I think it deserves a bit of love for daring to be different, not only from other Alien, Predator and AvP games, but also from RTS games generally. There was no base building or construction in Extinction, with each of the three adversaries having their own unique means of generating new units. For the Marines, this meant spending credits earned for killing enemies on reinforcements that were booted out of passing dropships. For the Predators, it was all about accruing honour for their kills, which would then attract more Predators to come and join their glorious hunt. And for the good old-fashioned Alien, this was all about their Queen, who could stay in the hive to lay eggs or even come out to attack. In a really nice touch, the facehuggers spawned from the eggs would then create new types of Alien units depending on what they’d face-shagged for breakfast that day, up to and including Predaliens. Comparatively, only Chris Taylor’s classic 1997 Total Annihilation or Relic Entertainment’s first Warhammer 40,000 RTS, Dawn of War in 2004 stand out as being so innovative so early in the RTS genre, so it seems a shame to me that Aliens: Extinction didn’t do better, or at least get a PC port (we could always emulate it, I suppose).
So, now we skip forwards again from 2003 to Aliens vs Predator (2010), Rebellion’s fourth entry overall in their series of tripartite inter-species disagreements. Peering through our APC’s armoured viewports, we crash through seven years’ worth of mobile games, arcade cabinets and handheld titles, mostly Predator-based, but with a few (already mentioned) AvP games too. Although Fox’s movie monsters are never too far from our gaming screens, it’s arguably all chaff to the few pieces of wheat we got in the last decade. (One particularly delicious, golden bundle of wheat that we all missed out on was Bioware’s Aliens RPG (a temporary name), which by the middle of 2009 was announced to have been cancelled, presumably as part of the Aliens: Colonial Marines fiasco). Surely 2010 would be kinder to Alien gamers?
Skidding to a halt with a broken trans-axle in February 2010, we are confronted by Aliens vs Predator (2010). For their third outing on PC (and also this time on PS3 and X360), Rebellion took a leaf from the Alien Resurrection playbook and gave the playable Alien a name, Specimen 6, similarly making it an escaped experiment. The three campaigns this time tell separate tales that overlap in places to form a larger narrative about human scientists studying the Aliens they find in a Predator pyramid, and (predictably), the acid hitting the fan and bringing down the wrath of both the Preds and the Marines on their heads. (I think at this point in Alien gaming history, we have to wonder at anyone employed by Weyland-Yutani who willingly goes to work on such a project). Development on the title was announced in a 2008 Kotaku article that describes Aliens vs Predator (2010) as SEGA’s first licensed Alien game following their acquisition of the license in 2006, and also hints at the colossal Aliens: Colonial Marines fiasco to come: “The new Aliens vs. Predator will be the first title released as part of Sega’s Aliens franchise, meaning that the eagerly anticipated Aliens: Colonial Marines isn’t going to make its original 2009 release window.”
(Screenshot by Moby Games user BurningStickMan, here)
Further portents of the impending A:CM craziness were perhaps given in Aliens vs Predator (2010)’s poor critical reception. Many a critic stood unimpressed by the shiny graphics, wondering how Rebellion could have bungled the gameplay. Some found it odd that the Marine could push attacking Aliens away, whilst others moaned that the Predator’s ability to leap from place to place through the jungle was restricted to limited grappling ‘hot spots’. Overall, the words written about the game in the wake of its release were not happy ones. The numbers, however, were ecstatic: it topped the UK and US retail charts, was №1 on Steam, and within three months of its simultaneous worldwide release in February had sold 1.69 million copies everywhere, raking in GBP 14m in the UK alone. According to the game’s long out of date Wiki page, this made it the best-selling Alien game of all time, although I’d like to hear what Alien: Isolation has to say about that.
Apart from this slight mis-step, 2010 also saw a Predators film tie-in for Apple’s range of iThings, before clicking over into 2011, which brought us just one title — Aliens Infestation for the Nintendo DS. Note the lack of punctuation in the title — only the Alien Resurrection film dispensed with that excited little pause. Unlike the fourth Alien film though, Aliens Infestation is generally reckoned to be a good game, despite (or perhaps because of) the reappearance of our old friend the Gorilla Alien from the 1993 SNES Alien vs Predator. Since his debut back then, the Gorilla Alien had enjoyed a career as a Kenner-produced toy and all-round fan-favourite. Aliens Infestation was brought to the DS’s two small screens partly by Gearbox Software, as part of SEGA’s overall plan to fill the world with Aliens: Colonial Marines games. When that latter game was cancelled, the DS version was scrapped, and when Colonial Marines was picked up again, the DS version was resumed, completed and rebranded as Infestation. But speaking of Aliens: Colonial Marines…
Aliens: Colonial Marines began (in name anyway) back in 1993, with a 12-issue Dark Horse Comics run that was notable for featuring the first-ever appearance of a family member of a film character, in the form of Carmen Vasquez, sister of Jim Cameron’s Aliens’ Jenette Vasquez. Other than starring a bunch of USMC marines, there’s really no great similarity between the games and the comic. But, as we’ve seen before, the games have drawn on the comics for inspiration several times, and the next time A:CM appeared 9 years later in 2002, on the PlayStation 2. Or rather, it didn’t appear, because it was cancelled by Electronic Arts before release. Developed by Check Six Games, another California team whose only other software credit is the first Spyro game on the PS2 and Game Cube (Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly), little to nothing is known about it (you can take a look at the solitary available screenshot of it 3 pictures down from here).
Finally, it is December 2006. SEGA announced that they were the new digital rights holders for the Alien franchise, and made a joint announcement with Gearbox Software a few days later that their first order of business would be to blow us all clean away with the awesomeness of their first Alien game. Given Gearbox’s pedigree up to that point (Opposing Force and Blue Shift for Half Life, the Brothers in Arms WWII squad shooters, the Mac port of the original Halo), there was much rejoicing. Code-named Pecan throughout its development cycle, it was all quiet on the western front until February 2008, when the fateful name of Aliens: Colonial Marines was first specified.
One of the PAX Prime pictures that got everyone salivating
During this time, SEGA excitedly told us that the new game was working from a script that had been approved by Fox, and was considered by the studio to be part of film canon. This enthusiasm from the studio could perhaps be explained by the fact that the story for A:CM, set in-between Aliens and Alien 3, retcons Hicks’ utterly pointless death at the beginning of Alien 3 and re-establishes him as the lovable ass-kicker we all remember from Aliens. This decision was a sign that clearly, someone at the studio had been listening to the years of fan rage at his and Newt’s death, and had seen a way of bringing him back to life, paving the way for more Hicks-flavoured Alien products, be they a fifth film or whatever. Of course, we now know that any kind of Alien 5 they may have been thinking about (and Cameron, Scott, Whedon and latterly Neil Blomkamp, had all been thinking very much about it at various points) was shelved in favour of the first AvP film, released in 2014 after a long period of development at the studio that had begun even before work had begun on 1997’s Alien Resurrection.
Some time later, in November 2008, the gaming press reported that A:CM had been delayed, presumably due to some recently announced layoffs at Gearbox. At the same time, SEGA also declared that Rebellion’s Aliens vs Predator (2010) would now be their flagship Alien title. Time passed, until the first half of 2010 and the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), where Gearbox showed the gaming public five new screenshots from A:CM and reiterated their commitment to the game. A year later, in June 2011, they gave us a teaser trailer, declared that we’d see more footage at E3 that year, and slated it for a Spring 2012 release. But when January 2012 rolled around, SEGA announced that they were pushing back the release date to Autumn/Fall 2012. Oh, and at that year’s PAX, Gearbox chipped in with some more screenshots and the promise of a new trailer. A few months later, in May 2012, Gearbox changed the date again — this time, we were told, A:CM would be in the hands of PC, PS3 and X360 owners in February 2013, with a Wii U announcement to follow soon. This latest 13-month delay was explained by Gearbox president Randy Pitchford as being necessary to re-assemble some of the original Aliens actors to reprise their roles in the new game. These included the legendary Michael Biehn as Hicks, Al Matthews as Sgt. Apone and Lance Henrickson, who would be voicing a different Bishop android.
So, that’s the Kosher version. Lots of delays, but everything sounded reasonable, and despite some lengthy periods without much to go on, gamers and Alien fans everywhere remained excited and largely hopeful for a good product, bolstered in their optimism by the amazing news coming out of SEGA and the awesome videos and screenshots from Gearbox. Now here’s what really happened.
Keen to get on with Borderlands, an original new IP dreamed up by Gearbox for themselves, they began shifting personnel and resources from the Pecan team to the Borderlands team. The latter game was announced in 2007, so this juggling act was probably going down quite early on in the SEGA/Gearbox job. It’s safe to assume that SEGA would not have liked this, otherwise Gearbox would not have hidden this fact from them. So when SEGA found out that Gearbox were still taking the regular milestone payments from them, despite working with a smaller-than-contracted team and resources, they pitched a fit and suspended development. That was 2008, the time of the first delay announcement. In their rush to fill the void left by A:CM (including the Nintendo DS version which would become Aliens Infestation and Bioware’s Aliens RPG), they obviously grabbed Rebellion’s collar and pushed them into the breach, making the Englishmen’s Aliens vs Predator (2010) the first SEGA Alien game, also as per SEGA’s November 2008 delay announcement.
Of course, SEGA weren’t the only ones burned, as Borderlands publishers 2K were also issuing cheques to Gearbox based on under-cooked work. The net result of all of this was the reported layoffs at Gearbox. Eventually though, Gearbox aww shucks!-ed its way back into everyone’s good books, and development was resumed. But wait! That’s not all!
[Image Credit: Fox Interactive, Deep Six Games, Electronic Arts]
(Image courtesy of Gamespot)
The game was finally released in February 2013, as Pitchford had finally said it would be. Now, if it had been as mind-bogglingly good on release as it looked in all the pictures, this would be a very different paragraph. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Even if you didn’t buy it, or play it at all, you probably know that it was in fact a complete disaster. Obviously, the A:CM-buying portion of the Internet flew off the handle so far and so fast, they almost made it to deep space themselves.
In the midst of the furore, an anonymous Redditor (who seems to have been subsequently proven correct), claimed that after being put off or temporarily shelved by Gearbox many times in favour of other projects (including Borderlands and Duke Nukem 3D), with significant do-overs each time work was resumed, Gearbox was finally so far behind schedule that they started outsourcing the work. TimeGate Studios, a Texas-based studio known for the original two F.E.A.R. expansions, Perseus Mandate and Extraction, were given the single player campaign to do, whilst Gearbox would handle multiplayer. Two other teams, Demiurge Studios (who ported Mass Effect to PC) and Nerve Software (lots and lots of work on id Software titles) would handle the DLC. But time ran out on the project, and Gearbox were dismayed to discover that the contracted work was dismal and broken and laughable. At the last second, they did whatever they could to scrape the whole thing though testing and certification, and watched in dismay as A:CM was finally released as a gigantic joke of a game. While SEGA initially denied all claims of outsourcing, they were eventually taken to court in the US in a class action suit in April 2013 (the same month they finally announced that no, there wouldn’t be a Wii U port), for misrepresentation of the product. Ultimately, they settled the thing for USD 1.25m, thus bringing what I like to call The Colonial Marines Saga to an end. More or less.
Well, that’s the nutshell version. If you want to, you can read all sorts of hilarious mud-slinging, accusations and counter-accusations between the four studios involved online. And there is something of a happy ending here too. Subsequently, Aliens: Colonial Marines received a massive 8 gigabytes of patches from a severely chastened Gearbox, and the game is now not only properly playable, it’s also incredibly good fun. Of course, there are still people moaning about it, and the Steam reviews currently stand at ‘Mixed’, but then for every one person who was properly screwed in that deal, there are ten more who just love to bitch and whine for the sake of it. That’s just how the Internet works. But if you weren’t burned by a pre-order (in which case, it’s totally understandable that you’d have been upset), then there’s no reason not to pick it up cheap in a sale, slap on the optional TemplarGFX’s ACM Overhaul mod for improved AI and sharper textures, and enjoy some really meaty Call-of-Duty-vs-Aliens shooting action. For the multiplayer enthusiasts, there’s a dedicated Steam Group for the game who hold regular, planned MP sessions, and if you want to really do a deep-dive, get the single-player Stasis Interrupted DLC, which — like Blomkamp’s cancelled Alien 5 story, retcons Hicks’ death and makes him the star of the show again! (And more Michael Biehn is always a bonus).
The final item of note here (phew!) is that A:CM hit the news again in the middle of 2018, with the revelation that for all of this time, it was possibly a single typo in a single line of code that had caused the Alien AI to be so bad in the vanilla game. James Dickinson, the Australian modder behind the Overhaul mod mentioned above, discovered a typo in the game’s code. Anyone can fix it themselves, and instantly have much more aggressive, challenging Aliens to fight (although you’re probably better off getting the Overhaul mod anyway, it really is worth it).
Next Week we examine Alien gaming in 2010–2019, and meet Ripley’s daughter and current face of the franchise, Amanda Ripley. See you then!
An earlier version of this article was previously published by this author at XP4T.com in 2015
