HUD removal on the highest difficulty is mostly fine, but health indicator should have stayed. She would always know the shape she is in.
Other AI is actually dumb. The humans see their buddies getting killed by the alien in the same room and still they shoot at Ripley when she's discovered and draw the alien. Developers don't think enough about behavior when designing AI.
Elaborating on the middling level design that's reliant on the pointer... Without the pointer, it took me an annoying length of time that I'm too embarrassed to specify to get from the Martial's Office back to Ski/Med Tower. Yet using the pointer feels too much like hand-holding. Sevastapol is a bad maze that really needs proper signs and maps on the walls, like any international airport. I couldn't use the pause map because Nightmare disables it. If getting to the map progression standard of something like old Resident Evil makes the game somewhat shorter, so be it.
Don't know how the IGN writer can possibly say that it wasn't too long. There's too little variety in the things you do (fixing the most broken down space station in the universe, next to the one in Dead Space) to carry the game for that long, too many tedious baby puzzles.
Stupid that an old handgun blows up an alien's skull in Aliens, but all the guns in this game do nothing. If they wanted an invincible enemy, they shouldn't have put guns in the game. So goofy. But they were very liberal with the alien. It's much bigger than in Alien and Aliens and doesn't stand the same. Stands like a dinosaur instead of a hunched over human. Look at the feet.
Making Amanda Ripley the protagonist was a mistake. Now I have to think she went through this big adventure when I watch that short scene in the Special Edition of Aliens. Actually, who am I kidding? The theatrical cut is the default. It's a better cut. Ripley didn't have a daughter, because if she did she'd be the worst mother for leaving her for months or years on end. Also makes Newt feel like a weird replacement and makes the mother-daughter theme too on the noise. It's not like Ellen Ripley needs that motivation to protect Newt, after they bonded. A good adult should do that anyway.
The exploration of the derelict is actually dull, because it plays out almost exactly like in the movie and doesn't let you do anything but walk forward. Aliens came out seven years after but still didn't waste the viewer's time by showing that again. There is only an external shot of it with Newt in the big vehicle with her family in the Special Edition. You also play that chapter as another character, who could have simply told Ripley/the player what happened.
Really wish they would have used egg-morphing. That they had shown it. The developer said in an interview that there is a queen somewhere on the ship, but the positions of the eggs don't make sense for that. It's implied in the original Alien, either cut, that the alien can reproduce, but for some lame reason all media after Aliens has to say there is a queen. How far-fetched is it that the one facehugger that the ship brought back was a queen? The solitary alien in the original movie was scarier.
Basically this:
"Aliens is a fun movie but what frustrates me about it is that it takes a concept that was inscrutable, symbolizing an uncaring universe, and diminishes it so we can relate to it. The aliens are now just man-sized bugs with a hive and a queen. It's unclear to what extent the creature in the first movie even thinks, or if it does if its thoughts could ever be understood by us, but in Aliens the queen clearly has a bitchy domineering personality and sort of becomes a Disney villain, fighting Ripley at the end over who gets to be Newt's new mother. Cameron has a way of turning everything into a cartoon."
He could have also talked about some of the technical issues. The (choppy) cutscenes looked like the devs ran them through the lowest settings in Handbrake. Check out those marcoblocks.
I extracted one of the USM video files and found it's MPEG-1. Who in their right mind still compressed videos for PC monitors and HD televisions in MPEG-1 in 2014? I wanted to compress a video in MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and 4 to see what the visual difference is, but Handbrake doesn't even have an option for outputting in MPEG-1, because it's so dated and obsolete. 12 Mbps for 1080p is kind of low, but I've seen videos at the same bitrate that look much better, only they aren't in MPEG-1.
The extracted MPEG videos are a solid 30 fps, not below 20 as rendered in the game. Knowing nothing about game code, I tried simply renaming the extension on the extracted file to see if the cutscene would play smoothly, but it didn't work. Don't think it's a problem with the USM format. Witcher 2 had USM files that played fine. Isolation is just broken, can't play the videos back right.
Hand. I find it funny they do these defense videos, yet only after everybody else on YouTube has long defended these games. Who the hell you are trying to fool IGN?
