CB2001
Master Member
Anywhere between 5 days to several weeks. The immediate area of the blast zone (i.e. where the amosphere processor and Hadley's Hope is located) would be unliveable for years (best example: Cherynobal).
Sorry, you asked.
Aliens: Colonial Marines
- Thread starter Sean Hebein
- Start date
Anywhere between 5 days to several weeks. The immediate area of the blast zone (i.e. where the amosphere processor and Hadley's Hope is located) would be unliveable for years (best example: Cherynobal).
Sorry, you asked.
msleeper
Sr Member
The problem is that I don't think Fox wants a horror game. Every single Aliens game is always about the shooting and the action, which people seem to forget was only maybe 15% of the actual movie. The suspense and the fear which made the movie memorable, it's totally lost on games from the IP.
I agree and you can see in the Dead Space games that there is inspiration from Alien and Aliens in there. It's a damned shame. Then again they coulda gone with Bioware and then you'd have an Alien make you pick a color for an ending.:lol
Scareb
Sr Member
The smartgun Is also a one time use only weapon. If you pick it up, you can't switch weapons and if you do, you drop it on the ground. Once you've expended all the ammo/power of the weapon, you drop it and that's it. You only get the weapon once (twice if you find vasquezes but if you do another play through, it disappears)
Same goes for the regular flamethrower/frosts flamethrower.
I still think the best weapon in the game is the preorder bonus Ripleys Pulserifle/flamethrower. Its devastating online.
Same goes for the regular flamethrower/frosts flamethrower.
I still think the best weapon in the game is the preorder bonus Ripleys Pulserifle/flamethrower. Its devastating online.
I have only played through "the Raven" so far but I have mostly enjoyed it, mostly. I should mention that I haven't really played video games since the '90's so if I hadn't read all the negative comments I may not have noticed how bad it is. My 17 year old son thinks it is kind of lame but he has humored me by starting a co-op campaign with me, if nothing else it should provide some fun father/son moments.
The really bad thing (for my bank account) is that it renewed my interest in Aliens and I ordered an air soft Pulse Rifle from Evike yesterday. I found this forum while researching that purchase and now I'll spend more money "customizing" it, tracking down a SD grenade, and who knows what else!
The really bad thing (for my bank account) is that it renewed my interest in Aliens and I ordered an air soft Pulse Rifle from Evike yesterday. I found this forum while researching that purchase and now I'll spend more money "customizing" it, tracking down a SD grenade, and who knows what else!
Finished the game last night, some final thoughts.
The ending was a solid meh....I literally was thinking "that's it?".
The end credits roll for almost as long as it took to play and beat the game.
Overall, I enjoyed it, and while a large majority seem to hate it, I thought it was worthy. I enjoyed the story, the soundtrack etc. I understand that it's considered canon and I could definitely see the tie ins to not only the original films, but to Prometheus as well.
My one lingering gripe is in the weapons. While it was fun that you get to get your PR on, they never got up to the screen accurate 99 rounds, mine maxed out at 60. There were NEVER enough grenades for the PR, despite the fact that at any given time, you can pop the cap off of one and use it as an alternate weapon. When you reload the PR, the grenades don't reload out of the imaginary stock you can apparently hurl at the Xenos from your hand. You have to keep finding grenade reloads in the game, and when you do, they're generally onesie twosie.
It also sucked that you didn't get to keep any of the really cool weapons. You only get to use the smartgun in one mission, and then it's gone. Likewise, you get the flamethrower for one mission, then it's gone. You find these awesome weapons, get the use of them for the length of one ammo charge and then just discard them. Incredibly stupid.
Now that I've beaten the game, I'm content to wait for the cheat codes to start showing up. Once I can unlock and use all the weapons at will, it will be a hell of a lot more fun.
The ending was a solid meh....I literally was thinking "that's it?".
The end credits roll for almost as long as it took to play and beat the game.
Overall, I enjoyed it, and while a large majority seem to hate it, I thought it was worthy. I enjoyed the story, the soundtrack etc. I understand that it's considered canon and I could definitely see the tie ins to not only the original films, but to Prometheus as well.
My one lingering gripe is in the weapons. While it was fun that you get to get your PR on, they never got up to the screen accurate 99 rounds, mine maxed out at 60. There were NEVER enough grenades for the PR, despite the fact that at any given time, you can pop the cap off of one and use it as an alternate weapon. When you reload the PR, the grenades don't reload out of the imaginary stock you can apparently hurl at the Xenos from your hand. You have to keep finding grenade reloads in the game, and when you do, they're generally onesie twosie.
It also sucked that you didn't get to keep any of the really cool weapons. You only get to use the smartgun in one mission, and then it's gone. Likewise, you get the flamethrower for one mission, then it's gone. You find these awesome weapons, get the use of them for the length of one ammo charge and then just discard them. Incredibly stupid.
Now that I've beaten the game, I'm content to wait for the cheat codes to start showing up. Once I can unlock and use all the weapons at will, it will be a hell of a lot more fun.
For you guys playing on PC with decent rigs, check out the DirectX 10 and 11 mods for improved visuals:
AliensDX10 and 11 HD Better Grafik and Lights mod for Aliens: Colonial Marines - Mod DB
I've been enjoying multiplayer quite a bit, and find myself quite addicted to the Survivor mode. Survivor requires teamwork and strategy, and can be really fun with a good group of people.
Marines have to do things like seal up doors, activate security shutters, deploy sentry turrets, install motion detectors, and revive other Marine players if they get incapacitated. Marines do not respawn, and it is game over once they all go down. Smartguns, flamers, and rocket launchers can be found (or picked up from downed Marines) as well.
Aliens do respawn, on a variable timer, and have to work together to try to swarm the Marine defenses. It can be tough, and the aliens tend to die a lot, but I have a ton of fun trying to figure out better routes past their defenses, being stealthy, and taking out sentry guns and such. The aliens get better to play as you rank them up and unlock abilities. Higher rank aliens are pretty deadly.
The smartguns are great, but I can absolutely see why they limited them. They are fairly over-powered.
AliensDX10 and 11 HD Better Grafik and Lights mod for Aliens: Colonial Marines - Mod DB
I've been enjoying multiplayer quite a bit, and find myself quite addicted to the Survivor mode. Survivor requires teamwork and strategy, and can be really fun with a good group of people.
Marines have to do things like seal up doors, activate security shutters, deploy sentry turrets, install motion detectors, and revive other Marine players if they get incapacitated. Marines do not respawn, and it is game over once they all go down. Smartguns, flamers, and rocket launchers can be found (or picked up from downed Marines) as well.
Aliens do respawn, on a variable timer, and have to work together to try to swarm the Marine defenses. It can be tough, and the aliens tend to die a lot, but I have a ton of fun trying to figure out better routes past their defenses, being stealthy, and taking out sentry guns and such. The aliens get better to play as you rank them up and unlock abilities. Higher rank aliens are pretty deadly.
The smartguns are great, but I can absolutely see why they limited them. They are fairly over-powered.
I was just getting to that spot! Thanks for the heads up. You need to crouch by the stasis tube with the cane and hat to make the chest burster in the tube in the other room have them on. Fun! Still really enjoying the game, getting my ass handed to me by soldiers on a few spots. One complaint is when you zoom in for a shot and can see the guys head hiding behind something, you often can't hit him.
It was fun....but I had alot of gripes with it too.
For as long as it took? they should have done better.
For as long as it took? they should have done better.
Jedi2016
Sr Member
And the hits keep coming. Looks like Sega's going to be after them soon if this is even remotely true.
Solo4114
Master Member
Hold up. The aliens "unlock" abilities?!
Ok, yeah, I'm definitely passing on this one. It's bad enough having unlocks in games like Battlefield and such. But aliens "unlocking" abilities is just unconscionable in my opinion. I'm done with this "feature" in gaming. It's ridiculously overused and now acts as a disincentive for me to buy games.
Multiplayer colonial marines should be basically L4D with aliens and marines. The end. None of this unlocking bulls**t.
Jedi2016
Sr Member
This is the same company that cut the Horde multiplayer mode to make it a $15 DLC. They cut horde mode... from an Aliens game. That makes about as much sense as... well, nothing. Ever. Except for "Hey, we can milk them for another fifteen bucks even after they bought our sixty dollar game".
Solo4114 said:
I was somewhat surprised that they went this route as well, considering how long the game was in development. I would guess it is something they added in later in development to keep up with the Joneses.
The weird part of it is that the single-player campaign ranks up your Marines. Playing through the Ultimate Bada$$ difficulty, I got my Marines rank up into the 30s. So, starting multiplayer I had much of the Marines stuff unlocked, but nothing for the aliens.
At launch, everybody was saying that the aliens were too hard to play, but over time the balance has been shifting as people begin to rank up their aliens. You can tell some people never even touched the campaign, and have been exclusively playing multiplayer and favoring aliens.
While the Marines ranking up is exactly like the Call of Duty or Battlefield model, the aliens are much more like World of Warcraft (which is actually what we were trying to ape on Call of Duty). For example, the alien lurker starts off with a pounce move that is his bread and butter. With rank, you can start to tailor your lurker to how you want to play. Eventually, you can choose to pounce a longer distance but with less accuracy, or pounce a shorter distance but have an AoE stun/knock-down where you land, etc. Likewise, the basic claw swipe can be upgraded to a more powerful heavy strike that is slower. Combo the stun pounce with the heavy strike and you have a good situational strategy that comes at a cost for other situations.
I can't say I object to any of this, personally. It makes the game more interesting, and should give multiplayer longer legs. I like having goals to work towards, and I like the challenge of having to start out with less and earning my way to new abilities and appearances. It adds a certain social dynamic to the game. I only have my aliens rank up to 10, and I am doing much better now as the aliens than I did when I started, but I also keep encountering higher ranked aliens that are just shredding Marines with nasty abilities and have more unique and scarier appearances to go with it. When these players are on my alien team, I know who to stick around, and I have motivation to keep at it until I can be that guy. Bottom line, multiplayer has been more interesting and continually getting better as a result of the ranking up.
I have to give Gearbox some credit for this too. Keeping the game balanced with these ranking up schemes is tough, and doing this with such different opposing forces makes it that much tougher. I think they did a pretty decent job with this so far, but I guess we'll see with time if it doesn't get horribly unbalanced as players reach the rank caps.
Solo4114
Master Member
I am against treadmilling mechanics in games. On principle, and on matters of design, I am against them wholeheartedly. They're manipulative, and they trick gamers into thinking they're getting "more" when they're actually getting less.
Ask yourself this. You mention that the unlock/ranks thing will give this game legs. Doesn't that suggest something to you? If you play the game not for the fun of the game but because you want to "rank up" or unlock this or that, doesn't that suggest that the game itself isn't all that fun to play for the sake of playing?
Put it this way. Would you play a game of baseball or tennis or whatever to "rank up" in some meaningless way? I don't mean playing within a league where you're ranked IN COMPARISON with your fellow players. I'm talking about just some mechanical tracking thing where, for every 20 balls you hit, you get a check-mark, and when you get 20 checkmarks, you upgrade to a star, and when you get 20 stars, you upgrade to a smiley face on your ranking sheet. When you get five smiley faces, you rank up to the next level! Fun, right?
Wrong. It's stupid and meaningless. You don't play those games to rank up in some pointless meta-game way. You damn sure wouldn't play if that was the only way to get, say, balls that didn't suck or a better racket or bat or whatever. You'd probably say "Screw this, man. I play because I want to have fun."
Video games used to be like that.
You used to play just because playing the game itself was fun, not because you had this meta-game incentive to unlock this or that and hit the button 20 times so that you get rewarded with your food packet, Dr. Skinner. If the game has to rely on these things to keep you playing....maybe it's not such a good game after all?
Ask yourself this. You mention that the unlock/ranks thing will give this game legs. Doesn't that suggest something to you? If you play the game not for the fun of the game but because you want to "rank up" or unlock this or that, doesn't that suggest that the game itself isn't all that fun to play for the sake of playing?
Put it this way. Would you play a game of baseball or tennis or whatever to "rank up" in some meaningless way? I don't mean playing within a league where you're ranked IN COMPARISON with your fellow players. I'm talking about just some mechanical tracking thing where, for every 20 balls you hit, you get a check-mark, and when you get 20 checkmarks, you upgrade to a star, and when you get 20 stars, you upgrade to a smiley face on your ranking sheet. When you get five smiley faces, you rank up to the next level! Fun, right?
Wrong. It's stupid and meaningless. You don't play those games to rank up in some pointless meta-game way. You damn sure wouldn't play if that was the only way to get, say, balls that didn't suck or a better racket or bat or whatever. You'd probably say "Screw this, man. I play because I want to have fun."
Video games used to be like that.
You used to play just because playing the game itself was fun, not because you had this meta-game incentive to unlock this or that and hit the button 20 times so that you get rewarded with your food packet, Dr. Skinner. If the game has to rely on these things to keep you playing....maybe it's not such a good game after all?
Things that continue to drive me away from this game.
1. First and most obvious, acknowledging Alien3. I think it's rather funny how everyone involved with this game kept saying "TRUE SEQUEL TO ALIENS!" yet still go out of their way to include the events of the third movie. Not only do I think that was a bad decision, but they didn't even do it well with the drastic changes to the dramatic narratives (Ripley having a life or death choice, Hicks getting killed) without so much of an explanation.
2. Female marines were a "last minute" addition. I don't care how much you claim to love the ALIEN movies or how much you want to honor them the best way you can. Having your Player Character (PC) be another dull white male space marine, that's one thing. Not including female marines from day one? You don't deserve the title of fan.
3. Weyland Yutani's army. Let me get this straight. From what I've seen in this game, Weyland Yutani has a bunch of mercenaries, scientists, doctors, pilots, advanced studying equipment and a crap ton of space to house their experiments in. Yet in ALIENS, when the Marines are dispatched to investigate the Hadley's Hope, their method of taking control of the situation.... is sending a guy like Burke..... With this kind of power at their disposal, why did they even bother involving marines in the first place?
4. Blind aliens. Because now we can see the aliens clear as day and they won't even bother to attack us unless we make noise. This isn't really scary.
1. First and most obvious, acknowledging Alien3. I think it's rather funny how everyone involved with this game kept saying "TRUE SEQUEL TO ALIENS!" yet still go out of their way to include the events of the third movie. Not only do I think that was a bad decision, but they didn't even do it well with the drastic changes to the dramatic narratives (Ripley having a life or death choice, Hicks getting killed) without so much of an explanation.
2. Female marines were a "last minute" addition. I don't care how much you claim to love the ALIEN movies or how much you want to honor them the best way you can. Having your Player Character (PC) be another dull white male space marine, that's one thing. Not including female marines from day one? You don't deserve the title of fan.
3. Weyland Yutani's army. Let me get this straight. From what I've seen in this game, Weyland Yutani has a bunch of mercenaries, scientists, doctors, pilots, advanced studying equipment and a crap ton of space to house their experiments in. Yet in ALIENS, when the Marines are dispatched to investigate the Hadley's Hope, their method of taking control of the situation.... is sending a guy like Burke..... With this kind of power at their disposal, why did they even bother involving marines in the first place?
4. Blind aliens. Because now we can see the aliens clear as day and they won't even bother to attack us unless we make noise. This isn't really scary.
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