George Something...

Brought to you in central alignment because left adjust appears to be broken. Don't blame me. [SiTye]

So with the launch of Aliens Colonial Marines on the eve of release, I thought i'd take a look back at some of the Alien franchise games that has had me "mostly cumming at night... mostly." 

Alien games have been around almost as long as the films dating back to 1982. Sadly I wasn't even the glint in the face huggers eye then, so my first taste of Ripley and her ability to get trapped in confined spaces with Queeny came in 1996, with the release of Alien Trilogy by Acclaim. 

Now I was 12 when I owned a Sega Mega Drive, Mega CD and 32X; Sadly though, the game was just too awesome to be released on my consoles. 

Luckily I had a friend who had recently bought a Playstation, so we spent many an hour walking through corridors pooping ourselves every time we heard the Motion Tracker's infamous 'pip' sound. Looking back at it, it's quite funny to think this game used to keep me up at night with its 2D Alien Sprites, but back then we didn't have anything better and I feel what makes a game (or a film) scary isn't necessarily the visual but the combination of sound, suspense and atmosphere.  [And fucking huge, dripping with ooze, monsters? - Si Tye]

Now this game scared me off Aliens for sometime; My next encounter came in the form of Rebellion's, Alien versus Predator (gold edition) for the PC in 2000. Now there was a release of the game a year earlier but I apparently missed that release which now looking back I'm glad about, as the original didn't have a save game feature. 

This game allowed you to play 3 different species: Aliens, Predator and the poor old Marines, stuck in the middle. 

In the 4 years between my last encounter graphics and game-play had come on leaps and bounds and gone were the days of 2D Alien sprites jumping their way towards you. Playing 3 different species was really nice and made the game feel very different depending who you were. The Marines was still scarier than a night with Jamie in a dark room, with only the motion tracker and flare gun to help you navigate the dark areas of the maps, it really made you think that every dark corner would mean game over. 

Playing as the Alien was fast paced and disorientating and even though you relied on melee you felt like nothing could kill you. 

The Predator was the tank of the 3, armed to the teeth and with more visionary senses than Derek Acorah; those dark corridored buildings seemed like nothing but fairy tale princess castles. 

A FEW YEARS LATER... 

...10 to be exact.

 Rebellion released another Alien vs Predator. Having not played this franchise for a decade I was really looking forward to this one. So imagine my disappointment if you played it...

...Unfortunately the single player Campaign was mediocre at best, and the multiplayer was a pain to connect to at release; but they eventually sorted the multiplayer out with dedicated servers. By then though the majority of the population had moved onto other games, so the servers started to thin out. Which was a shame, because I thought the multiplayer was fun, especially infestation, where you and your fellow online players teamed up as marines. One player was chosen at random to be an alien and his job was to kill as many marines as possible and when a marine was killed, he would become an alien as well and join the fight. There was another multiplayer mode called survivor which you and 3 other marines had to survive AI waves of aliens. This i was really looking forward to, but sadly it didn't push my buttons, the arenas were small, very limited and was extremely hard to even survive the first couple of waves. 

So now 3 years later, on the eve of Aliens Colonial Marines. I wait with anticipation as to what Gearbox has created for me the scaredy crow. 

George.