AVP
Gaming is caught between twin gods, tech-futurism and retro-worship, but are they Gemini or Janus? Or are they Twinrova? While I’ve been playing and writing about various modern Alien games I’ve been maintaining on Twitter that the best Alien game ever, and unassailably so, is Capcom’s Alien vs. Predator arcade machine. I have been saying this because I like saying things that are silly but that make a sly point about aesthetic experience and judgement and the way people hold certain things to be truths.
That AVP is the best Alien game ever is an indefensible position; both because it is almost certainly untrue and because it is, as with all aesthetic judgements, a subjective position. Because I am an idiot and a wind-up merchant I am making the paradoxical claim that one game is intrinsically better than other games at the same time as claiming that those games are only able to be judged as aesthetic experiences centred upon the individual who experiences them and the cultural context of their life. But also, claiming AVP’s supremacy, while simultaneously praising the experience that is only possible with a technologically superior game such as Alien Isolation makes a political point. It marks out the realm of the aesthetic, and the inaccessible world of my youth, as being more important than progress, systems and the false futures advertised on the backs of current game boxes.
The grand future of play that AVP promised has already failed to come to pass and so is no longer a thing to be afraid or cynical of, but the future that Isolation markets is still around in potentiality, so it can still disappoint us by not being realised. Isolation is the egg, AVP is the dead facehugger below a bound and trussed colonist. The colonist themself? That’s you — and you’ve got the Alien inside you now and you have no idea how it is changing you as we speak.
AVP is the greatest game because I used to play it on an arcade machine at Wavelengths leisure centre in Deptford in the early 90s after swimming with my best friend who I haven’t seen in 20 years and who I will almost certainly never see again. Its greatness is not in the fact that you can punch Aliens repeatedly in the head, although that is cool, but in the feeling of my skin as the chlorinated water evaporated off it. In the sense of excitement over whether we would die before my friend’s mum arrived to pick us up.
I found an emulated copy, and I played it. Its alright. Its an arcade game so it is both stupidly hard and yet, when you have the unlimited cash of emulation stupidly easy. You can punch Aliens in the head until they die, and eat roast beef meals to regain your energy. What more could you want?
I watched Prometheus and the 2004 film of Alien versus Predator back to back recently. They are instructive taken together, as they are both attempts to control and to take ownership of not only the body of the Alien but the universe in which it resides. Naturally, AvP is a better film.
Prometheus is beautiful and deeply silly. It would be an amazing film if Aliens had never happened; if there wasn’t an extended universe almost big enough to rival Star Wars out there. It is Ridley Scott’s attempt to close Pandora’s box, but as in the myth he was too late and the monsters are already out there, in full view. They wouldn’t be monsters otherwise. Where they came from is no longer something to worry about. Prometheus is the desperate cry of a man who wants to gather all of his toys back into their box, stop you from playing with them and tell you what he thinks their names are.
AvP wants to show you its monsters, and that is its great strength. It takes the Alien for what it is, allows it to be itself. And then makes it fight a Predator. Forget the badly lit, incoherent sequel, AvP is adamant that the Alien should be celebrated. Although, as always, it ultimately loses, AvP lets the Alien win again and again.
The lesson here is that we destroy the things we love by living. Time cannot be wound back and the world as it was is not the world as it is now. We can only learn to love the world that we create anew, and hope to carry forward the imprint of that which was once precious to us so that it can be precious once more when we glimpse its future echo.
