Aliens: Colonial Marines

and what ever happened to the "next-gen lighting system" the game was supposed to have... vaporware like the rest of it :facepalm

As guilty as Sega is over not keeping a better eye on Gearbox a lot of the issues in all this are Gearbox and Gearbox alone. They sure don't seem to be doing much right now game wise, probably going to wear out Borderlands with another game. http://www.hardcoregamer.com/2014/0...oftware-does-not-own-the-duke-nukem-ip/79777/ Apparently gearbox is getting sued by 3d realms over duke nukem too. What a shady bunch.

They're doing a new game called BattleBorn. I hope no one buys it.
 
Steam has a big sale on the Alien franchise games this weekend. Like, for $8, you can buy AvP (2010) and Colonial Marines, along with all of their DLC packs (which I gather were only multiplayer maps and game modes).
 
I think Borderlands is going to be the only thing they're known for that has quality, sorta like Bungie only being known for Halo or Destiny.
 
I actually ended up taking advantage of the sale on Steam. I figured for $8, what the hell? At this point, my expectations are so low that as long as it's a moderately functional shooter, I'll likely enjoy it well enough.
 

Eurogamer: Yes! If we look at the E3 2011 gameplay demo for Aliens, there were certain graphical effects we didn't see in the launch version.
Randy Pitchford: We need a laptop. We can't do this.
Eurogamer: Oh come on. You must know what I'm talking about.
Randy Pitchford: I can't remember every effect. I can't possibly remember.
Eurogamer: Okay, but the general point is that it didn't look as good when it launched as it did in those videos.
Randy Pitchford: I think that's subjective.

Clearly this guy is delusional.

They were boosting about the "next-gen lighting system" A:CM had! Proof?
http://www.destructoid.com/aliens-colonial-marines-to-use-next-gen-lighting-225194.phtml
http://www.1up.com/previews/e3-aliens-colonial-marines-preview
http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/04/04/how-gearbox-got-the-jump-on-the-next-generation

video showing how it looked:
https://youtu.be/6lGXDM3LGnk?t=1m8s

"Everyone's going to do [this lighting], he wanted to do it now, and see if he could do it on these existing platforms." "On Xbox 360 and PS3, we get about 90% of the way there. It obviously looks a lot better when you're playing it on PC, but it turns out the consoles are powerful enough"

Yet the PC version does not have this....

I actually ended up taking advantage of the sale on Steam. I figured for $8, what the hell? At this point, my expectations are so low that as long as it's a moderately functional shooter, I'll likely enjoy it well enough.

You have a marine following you around... sometimes getting in the way, literally. Standing in a doorway you need to get through, only he does not move, at all. And he cannot be killed either.
 

Randy Pitchford: "I think I felt about Alien 3 what presumably you and a lot of other people feel about Aliens: Colonial Marines. And I think David Fincher's a great film maker, and I'm glad that didn't end his career as it started, because he's done a lot of great things. But I thought the movie was terrible."​

Really Randy? You had said in this article by Game Rant that, and I quote,

Randy Pitchford: After this game, Alien 3 is a better film. I think [Alien 3] is a great film, but I think that when we came off of Aliens, some of us wanted something different. Also, there were some weird things that we didn’t quite make sense of. Inconsistencies with the canon that were created. And it turns out that they’re not inconsistencies — there are reasons for things. And we get to be the ones that get to connect all that up and make it clear […] The fact that we can do it in video game form is just amazing.”.​

Want to know how properly handled one of those 'reasons for things' was dealt with?

Hicks: The four cryo-pods ejected safely, but I wasn't in mine.
Winter: So whose body was in your cryo-tube?
Hicks: That's a longer story.​

That's it. That is all you get from the main game. However, if you purchase the DLC "Stasis Interrupted", it actually covers this 'longer story'. Problem? It introduced a whole bunch of inconsistencies of it's own!

  • When Hicks is pulled out of cryosleep, he is wearing his ragged military attire. But at the end of Aliens he is put into the capsule wearing only his underwear.
  • At the end of Aliens Hicks’ forehead and eye are bandaged. This is missing when he is awakened.
  • Hicks is replaced in the cryotube by another character (‘Turk’) who is shirtless and bandaged, to match Hicks’ wounds. However, he is not wearing Hicks’ dogtags, which are found on his corpse after the EEV crashes on Fury. This is presumably how his corpse was identified. In Alien 3 his tags can be seen hanging on his morgue locker door.
  • The fire in the cryogenic compartment is caused by stray pulse rifle fire. Alien 3 indicates that the facehugger somehow nicks its ‘finger’ on the tube’s broken glass.
  • The armour-piercing explosive-tipped rounds also refrain from ripping Ripley to shreds – even with a bleeding facehugger enveloping her head.
  • The compartment’s fire alarm has been completely redesigned.
  • There is no actual fire aboard the Sulaco. At all.
  • The Sulaco’s emergency computer has underwent an accent exchange: English in Alien 3, American in Colonial Marines.
  • For thought: in Alien 3, Bishop can access the EEV’s flight recorder to find out what happened aboard the Sulaco. He can determine the presence of a facehugger but not the awakening of Hicks or the presence of several mercenaries, nor even the fire fight.
  • The end of the DLC campaign recreates a scene from Alien 3′s finale, with the ‘dog-catcher unit’ from the film replaced wholesale by Colonial Marines’ PMC mercs.
  • The door that Hicks and the other guy run through in the leadworks on Fiorina isn’t in the film (courtesy of SM).
  • The mesh fence between that area and the spiral staircase has disappeared (courtesy of SM).
  • Morse is absent from the gantry (courtesy of SM).

To sum up, Randy believes ALIEN 3 is a terrible film. So instead of ignoring it which he should have done, he chose to have his "True sequel to ALIENS" embrace it and actually try to fix a lot of the film's inconsistencies... through DLC.... THAT INTRODUCED EVEN MORE INCONSISTENCIES.
 
You have a marine following you around... sometimes getting in the way, literally. Standing in a doorway you need to get through, only he does not move, at all. And he cannot be killed either.

That'll be annoying, yeah. But, bear in mind, I paid $8 total for A:CM plus its DLC packs. Or at least most of them. So, you know, the bar's not very high to begin with for me to get my $8 worth of fun out of it. :)



Anyway, reading the interview is actually really interesting. I didn't follow the development of this game, and I'm not SUCH a huge Aliens fan that I view it as an affront to my fandom that the game turned out the way it did. I gather that people are....put off...by Randy Pitchford and his attitude and demeanor. I can understand why, since he doesn't exactly seem the diplomatic type. I mean, he's no Derek Smart, but he's certainly outspoken about his own products.

The thing is, I find it really interesting that he actually seems to fully accept the blame for people not liking the product. But he seems to do it in a way that I expect ticks people off.

When he denies the outsourcing thing, he unpacks that statement and recognizes -- accurately, I'd say -- the implicit belief that if Gearbox had done the game, they would've knocked it out of the park. But instead, they handed it off to someone who dropped the ball. Instead, he says "Nope. That was all us. We are the ones who dropped the ball, if you think anyone dropped the ball. We love the game, but if you don't, you've got no one to blame but us."

The thing is, that mea culpa of sorts gets lost behind the swearing and the "But I love the game" attitude.

I can understand why this is frustrating for people, especially people who are so strongly convinced that the game was crap. I feel that way about art sometimes. To this day, I loathe the end of How I Met Your Mother, and the structure of its final season. There's a part of me that really, really wants the creators to come out and say "We ****ed up. We really, really ****ed up. We should've done it differently, and I wish we had." But they don't. (Well, one of them kinda sorta did, but it was in passing and kind of veiled.) And that....really pisses me off, actually, because it's like "COME ON! How can you not admit that?! We all know you ****ed up! You know you ****ed up! Just admit it!"

Basically, it's like hardcore fans want not merely a mea culpa but almost a public shaming. And with certain fandoms, I'm absolutely guilty of that. I still want George Lucas to fix the damn Special Editions and undo the "Greedo manages to shoot" thing, but the guy just...won't. And it's really frustrating.

I suspect that's a big part of what's at work here. Some people want him to say "It's true. We lied. Oh God, I'm so sorry!!!" but that's not gonna happen. Likewise, some people want him to say "We made a terrible game and I acknowledge that it's terrible, and I don't even like it," but that's also not gonna happen. The guy likes his own game. It's not surprising, really. He's not gonna say he lied because, even if he did, what kind of idiot would admit that? So, basically, he says "we tried our best...and it wasn't good enough." I think that's about as much of an apology as anyone can reasonably expect.
 
This guy is why i refuse to buy a game from his company brand new, i'll play them but i'm not going to give them my money. Gearbox showed how halfassed they are with Duke Nukem and this game. If they hadn't made so many inconsistencies maybe just maybe the Hicks being alive thing wouldn't seem so silly.
 
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