The Tragedy of the Xenomorph

Almost all my favourite movies were released before I existed: Bladerunner, Aliens, Star Wars, Terminator, Predator, and many others. I watch these movies at least once a year and Aliens hit a real chord with me after I played Rebellion's Aliens versus Predator on my 10th birthday and was told that the titular races were based on movies. I rented every damn one of them and watched them all in one day. I loved everything about them and own every game featuring either xenomorphs or pulse rifles. Gearbox Software has made some of my favourite games: Half-Life's expansions Opposing Forces and Blue Shift, Halo: Combat Evolved's PC port, Borderlands and Borderlands 2 and more and when I heard they were doing an Aliens game I had an erection to make the Hulk feel inadequate to She Hulk. I'm not going to focus on Aliens: Colonial Marines because it's been thoroughly pistol whipped as it is, at this point it'd feel like a hate crime.

Who ever heard... of the sad alien?

My contention is with the way licensed Aliens games are handled. Every one of them does one thing really well, and drops the ball with almost everything else. The universe that these special creatures inhabit is so rich with characters, themes, technologies and worlds that making a game from them should be the easiest thing ever. Class based cooperative games, survival horror, competitive multiplayer, turn based strategy... shit even a point and click adventure could work. In spite of this no developer seems to know what makes these movies great. I constantly live in hope that someone is going to hit the jackpot with these unique critters, I just hope it happens before I fucking die. What do the previous games do, and how can we merge them?

Aliens versus Predator (Rebellion, 1999)
One word: atmosphere. At the tender age of ten I was shitting my pants playing this game. You're alone, it's dark, the enemy moves lightning quick, your pulse rifle can jam, you're attacked from nowhere. Even replaying it recently I had to take frequent breaks. It had an authentic feel in the environments and missions as well. The guy giving you instructions on the screens, the sounds of the doors opening, the alarms and the aliens themselves all felt very familiar. That being said, the game has its issues. Aliens have trouble navigating the terrain smoothly and can end up vibrating on some terrain and they move very erratically making them very hard to hit. Not only that but the marine can run almost as fast as the aliens. At the end of each level there's an average run speed statistic. I was clocking in 12 metres per second.  That's 43 kilometres per hour. It was like Usain Bolt joined the USCM.

I really hope this image isn't offensive.

Aliens versus Predator 2 (Monolith, 2001)
Okay so now the run speed was pulled back a bit to represent a normal human wearing equipment and that was great. The sounds were also much improved and the story was delivered in a more cohesive way. The missions felt more connected and all the races met up at some point in the game and the aliens' movement was a little less erratic but still had issues. It retained some of the pant-shitting fear as well but the atmosphere wasn't as good. Everything about it felt a little cartoon-like, like it took more from the comics than the movies. Brighter colours, well-lit environments and human enemies took the tone of the game in a different direction. It was almost as if the influence was more Alien: Resurrection than Alien or Aliens.

Aliens vs. Predator (Rebellion, 2010)
It took another nine years for another Aliens game to get made but we finally saw the xenomorph in all it's high polygon glory and we finally sorted out its movement troubles. Aliens transitioned smoothly from different surfaces, ran very convincingly and lurked in shadows and utilised hit and run tactics. The sounds were all greatly improved from the pulse rifle to the screeching. The fidelity was really the winner in this iteration but everything else was tainted by the movies. No, not the Aliens movie the Aliens vs Predator movies. The visual diarrhea set in Antarctica in present day, the feculent films that didn't even feature a damn pulse rifle and had aliens coming from Mayan pyramids or something I don't fucking know. I passed out from vomiting so I can't be sure of all the awful things those movies did.

The film equivalent of cancer.

 Aliens: Colonial Marines (Gearbox, Nerve, Timegate, Demiurge, 2013)
Aw yeah, we get to revisit the Sulaco, Hadley's Hope and the planet LV-426 itself. We finally had the environments from the movies with some really nice character models. The weapon sounds were also top notch, at least as good as 2010's Aliens vs. Predator and they felt great. The pulse rifle sounded great to shoot, Hick's shotgun had a satisfying punch and the smartgun was as powerful as one would expect. We also saw the motion tracker become its own independent tool instead of being just a part of the HUD.  The lighting was also very thematic and really captured the look of the Aliens sets. Flickering lights and flashes of lightning briefly illuminate the oncoming horde beautifully. The downside is the narrative, characters, pacing, and almost everything else. I try not to be negative so let's just leave it at that.

So what we need is a game that has the atmosphere of Aliens versus Predator 1999, the pacing of Aliens versus Predator 2, the animation and visuals of Aliens vs. Predator 2010 and the environments of Aliens: Colonial Marines. What sort of game can we make from this? How about this:

Timeline: running concurrent to Aliens but on another planet
Plot: You play as a security guard posted on some backwater planet being terraformed by Weyland Yutani. The start of the game has you doing guard stuff. You wake up, clock in, wander around the facility and respond to some normal menial tasks like some worker not locking up properly. You get into the mindset of a guy who is working a shitty job on a shitty planet purely for a paycheck to send back to the folks. Then you're alerted that an anomaly was detected near the planet. No one was notified of any ship or anything so you fill out a form and send it back to earth which is going to take two weeks (ha! Remember in Aliens when Lydecker is faced with a similar problem of communicating with the company because it takes so long to get a response and it's always "Don't ask"?). Then weird shit starts to happen.

Some colonists stop checking in from outlying outposts and you get sent out to see what's up. Lights are off as you approach the building and sensing something amiss you take your side arm with you (because the heavy guns are either locked up or non-existent as no one expects a 'shake and bake' colony to require weapons). You have a torch and a pistol and move through a pitch black and quiet outpost. No one is about and then you see some foreign resin on the ground. When you follow it you find a room full of it and a dead colonist on the wall, their chest burst open. A hiss behind you makes you spin around and yell as some thing lashes out at you. You race for the door, engage the lock and run for the exit but before you can escape it crashes through the ceiling and advances. You get lucky and mange to take it out and you dash back to the buggy and radio back to base. You get a garbled message telling you to get the fuck back there and shots in the background.

Now this scenario has you in the dangerous and unenviable position of facing a threat without proper training or equipment, and it's going to take two weeks for the marines to arrive. This could be sped up by having the planet closer to earth than LV-426 or something. The introduction to the game is like Half-Life's start with Freeman doing just another day. Then it transitions to survival horror where you're evading the aliens like Newt and when the marines arrive you can start to kick some arse before nuking the site from orbit. Alternatively the start of the game can serve as just the tutorial and then you take control of a marine and it plays like a tactical cooperative shooter. Have classes like a pointman who is in charge of the motion tracker, a smartgunner to yell "Let's rock", an engineer to set up turrets and open doors and a medic to patch your shit up. All these roles are shown in Aliens, all have proven mechanics in other games like Battlefield.  God damn I wanna play a good aliens game.



Shit how am I still unemployed; these ideas are solid fucking gold.

A Sense of Achievement

There is a large misconception among people who do not play games that anything that happens in a game is fake. It's not tangible and therefore holds no value or purpose and is seen as a waste of time. Perhaps even some gamers feel this way as well and treat games as just something to fill in the time but it's not at all true. Just because you can't touch something doesn't mean it's not real; I can't touch gravity but I firmly believe it's there. The brain is a complex organ and holds a lot of secrets that we are yet to unlock and it can be tricked quite easily and games can do this well. When I think back on a battle in a game, in my mind's eye, I don't remember seeing the edges of the monitor or my hands on the keyboard. I don't remember any outside stimuli; only what was happening in the game. As far as your brain is concerned, this shit matters.

Holy shit our brains are gullible.

I was firmly against the idea of achievements and trophies when they first cropped up. I saw them as little more than hamster wheels to keep people playing the same game, like bits of coloured ribbon given to soldiers, and not worthy of wasting my time and I think this is an attitude held by many PC players. Unlike consoles, nothing gets bigger when you get an achievement on the PC. On the 360 your 'gamer score' gets bigger and on the PS3 you gain levels as you get trophies. On PC the achievement gets marked off but that's about it. Sure it means that other people on Steam can go to your profile and see what achievements you earned but, come on, how many people actually do that? Most people I know who play on PCs are not social creatures when it comes to games. There's no incentive to deliberately go after achievements and I saw them as an irrelevant and superfluous addition to the gaming sphere. Then I got a console.

"Wow 'grats dude!" - said no one ever

Achievements meant a lot more on consoles than I knew and after a while I started to go a little bit more out of my way to get an achievement or two. I started to see the value of achievements apart from earning a few 'gamer score' points or another intangible trophy: it wasn't about giving you a reason to play a game a different way. It introduced a meta game where you did things differently, looked for alternated solutions and changed the nature of play. Some requirements for an achievement were ridiculously complex and I viewed these as impossibilities such as trying to play Metal Gear Solid with no kills, no alerts, as fast as possible and no reloading; I'd never be that keen on getting a silly achievement. But then you find yourself replaying a game you've played several times and you realise you're in a rut. You're doing the same thing all the time and you bring up the achievement list to see what you haven't got, something to aim for this time, make this playthrough mean something.

 If I've not already made it clear, I'm an ardent fan of Metal Gear Solid and recently got my first 100% completion, a Platinum trophy, for Metal Gear Solid 3. This was the first time I'd ever fully completed a game. Seeing that little icon pop up at the finale heralding the fact that I had bested everything this game had to offer made me swell with pride. It got me thinking, 'I should try to get 100% on Metal Gear Solid 2', the game I was planning on playing next. To get that, you have to do a lot of tediousness like collecting every single soldier's dog tags on every difficulty and completing every virtual reality mission (of which there are about 350), something I never thought I would do. It was hard, and I mean fucking stupid difficult, but when I finished that final VR mission and the little icon popped up heralding another challenge met, I swelled up with pride. Just two more playthroughs and it's another Platinum trophy. The allure of trophies made me do something I never thought myself capable of doing.

The sense of accomplishment, or achievement if you will, is not artificial. The feeling of relief when you finally complete something that was previously seen as impossible washes over you like a cool breeze. The sheer joy of never having to do those fucking VR missions ever again made me cry tears of joy. Those salty tears were real. All the emotions and sensations I felt by playing these games and conquering these challenges were created in my mind. To most people having these little trophies and achievement points are meaningless and a waste of time. To gamers it represents a lot of good times, nightmares, and a degree of skill and dedication. They don't have monetary value and you can't polish them in a cabinet but doesn't stop these virtual trophies being as important as the physical ones. You don't get participation trophies in games; you earn that shit motherfucker.

Achievement unlocked: being a little bitchª

there's no way I'm fully completing Peacewalker...



ª http://quinseyblog.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/participation-trophy-generation.html