Aliens: Colonial Marines Story Trailer Shoots First, Answers Questions Later

[Cognimancer]

Aliens: Colonial Marines Story Trailer Shoots First, Answers Questions Later


Gearbox has some fresh mysteries to add to the familiar formula.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. After receiving a distress signal from a mysteriously deserted spaceship, a small team of elite commandos investigate the disappearance of the crew and finds themselves hunted by a deadly alien species...wait, you do know this story? Blast. Well, Gearbox Software is getting ready to tell it again, but this time they've dropped a few twists into the mix to keep you guessing during the familiar journey.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is a chronological sequel to James Cameron's 1986 film Aliens. If you've seen the movie, you already know what happens aboard the USS Sulaco; however, the titular Colonial Marines in the upcoming Gearbox title do not. Their investigation won't drop many surprises on players already familiar with the movie series, so the game will feature a few new secrets for players to discover. How did the Sulaco end up orbiting LV-426, the alien breeding ground from the movies, when it was last seen half a dozen parsecs away? The cast of Aliens doesn't meet up with this squad of marines, so who exactly does the team find onboard the Sulaco?

These questions are posed in the trailer, but the gung-ho Captain Cruise is less interested in unraveling conspiracies and more interested in shooting up xenos. Still, the video description promises that the marines will "chase down the truth behind a galaxy-spanning deception," which may or may not be another moronic plot by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. The campaign will hit a number of "authentic environments" such as the rocky surface of Acheron (LV-426) and the terraforming colony of Hadley's Hope.

The story probably won't win any awards for originality, but Gearbox certainly seems to be making an effort to keep it from being too predictable. And be honest - it's a game about space marines fighting feral aliens. A cliché sci-fi plotline is practically mandatory.

Aliens: Colonial Marines deploys to PC, PS3, 360, and Wii U on February 12, 2013.

Source: YouTube [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQTxxCnMWJw&feature=player_embedded]

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[Two Angels]

Does nothing to peak my interest. I'm a fan of the whole Aliens mythos but this just seems a bit weak.

 

[Nouw]

Just a heads-up, there's a fairly major spoiler in the trailer. It's easy to miss but it is noticeable. It isn't a split-second shot either.

 

[Bindal]

Just a heads-up, there's a fairly major spoiler in the trailer. It's easy to miss but it is noticeable. It isn't a split-second shot either.

What? That Hicks leaves a message he CLEARLY recorded after the events of Aliens, where he pretty much says "Everyone's dead - stay away"? Newsflash - if you saw the movie, you know that shit hit the fan down there. The only new thing is that he recorded a message. And that is HARDLY really a spoiler.

 

[NathLines]

I gotta say, the game already looks dated. Mind you, I don't see that as a bad thing. I think it fits the game they're trying to make and the aliens look as slick and shiny as they're supposed to anyway.

 

[Nouw]

Just a heads-up, there's a fairly major spoiler in the trailer. It's easy to miss but it is noticeable. It isn't a split-second shot either.

What? That Hicks leaves a message he CLEARLY recorded after the events of Aliens, where he pretty much says "Everyone's dead - stay away"? Newsflash - if you saw the movie, you know that shit hit the fan down there. The only new thing is that he recorded a message. And that is HARDLY really a spoiler.

I'm not sure why you're being so hostile about this. I never mentioned what the spoiler is for obvious reasons but I did say "it's easy to miss but it is noticeable." The opening message of Hicks is hardly 'easy to miss.' I'm still not going to mention what the spoiler is but I will tell you it is at the middle-end of the trailer. It is a subtle visual spoiler.

 

[LordMonty]

well anyhow looks fun might play it

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

I feel kinda resigned over this game. Resigned over the fact that as a fan of the franchise I won't be able to let this installment go unchecked, but also resigned because in the balance of probability it'll promise far more than it delivers.

Still, after so many attempts at least one of the Aliens games has to come good, right?

[sub]Oh, who am I kidding?[/sub]

 

[Therumancer]

I think the problem with "Aliens" is that they try and basically recapture the second movie, and don't want to do anything new, since the guys with the liscence figure that's what fans want. Being a liscence they are also probably extremely limited in what they can do with liscence as far as new developments.

Also to be blunt, 90% of the problem with this mythos is that the movies that defined it relied on a combination of ignorance and contrieved events to make things happen. The only reason the xenos are even a threat to a bunch of marines was because they both didn't know what they were up against, and most importantly largely disarmed themselves (except for a few hold out magazines). If it wasn't for that, it would have been a massacre (in favor of the marines). If this has the marines at least holding onto their weapons (and knowing they are going up against something nasty to begin with) a fairly dull, one-sided, FPS shooter would be an accurate version of what would happen.

It will be interesting to see what happenes, but to be blunt I think Gearbox should stick to their own properties like "Borderlands". To be honest every time they decide to work with a liscence it seems to be a mess, I can't help but think working with "Aliens" which is infamous for turning out mediocre games is more likely to turn out another "Duke Nukem" than anything. The most they can hope for it would seem would be a mediocre "it does not totally suck" game.

 

[endtherapture]

I
It will be interesting to see what happenes, but to be blunt I think Gearbox should stick to their own properties like "Borderlands". To be honest every time they decide to work with a liscence it seems to be a mess, I can't help but think working with "Aliens" which is infamous for turning out mediocre games is more likely to turn out another "Duke Nukem" than anything. The most they can hope for it would seem would be a mediocre "it does not totally suck" game.

Gearbox made Half Life Opposing Force, which was arguably better than the original Half Life game.

If they can capture a little of the magic from Opposing Force, this will be great game.

 

[Abomination]

Everyone knows that Aliens is just Resident Evil in space. Big stupid corporation seeks to weaponise an incredibly unstable and dangerous biological weapon, it creates scary pop-out-at-you-from-darkness monsters. Grunts are sent in to clean it up. One grunt displays uncanny, plucky ability and uncovers yet ANOTHER conspiracy the stupid corporation had that's even more dangerous than the immediate threat and blah de blah.

I just want to wrestle queens wearing an exo-suit and shoot up hordes of xenos with my smartgun.

 

[Therumancer]

Everyone knows that Aliens is just Resident Evil in space. Big stupid corporation seeks to weaponise an incredibly unstable and dangerous biological weapon, it creates scary pop-out-at-you-from-darkness monsters. Grunts are sent in to clean it up. One grunt displays uncanny, plucky ability and uncovers yet ANOTHER conspiracy the stupid corporation had that's even more dangerous than the immediate threat and blah de blah.

I just want to wrestle queens wearing an exo-suit and shoot up hordes of xenos with my smartgun.

Well, there is a little more to it than that. They have made some attempts to add depth to both Resident Evil and Alien (via the Aliens Vs. Predator movies, and recently Prometheus) but I know where your coming from. They have difficulty finding a way to mix it up a bit, but at the same time I suspect it's intentional, they figure the fans want the same thing again and again, so that is what they deliver.

I do hope they deliver what you want, but at the same time I'd be impressed if they actually decided to dig through the various works and tried to come up with a compelling backstory. If they were able to actually tie together all the events from Aliens Vs. Predator, Prometheus, and straight "Alien" movies the right way they might actually be able to redeedm our corperation as being not quite that stupid or evil and add more context to the rest of it.

From the way things sounds it makes me wonder if they are aiming for a Prometheus tie in, using some of the elements introduced in that movie.

 

[Therumancer]

I
It will be interesting to see what happenes, but to be blunt I think Gearbox should stick to their own properties like "Borderlands". To be honest every time they decide to work with a liscence it seems to be a mess, I can't help but think working with "Aliens" which is infamous for turning out mediocre games is more likely to turn out another "Duke Nukem" than anything. The most they can hope for it would seem would be a mediocre "it does not totally suck" game.

Gearbox made Half Life Opposing Force, which was arguably better than the original Half Life game.

If they can capture a little of the magic from Opposing Force, this will be great game.

Ahh, okay. I honestly don't play much Half-Life so I never tried that. I wasn't aware it was a big success. Perhaps it will turn out to be a gem then.

To be honest while I saw Prometheus I'm a little "off" on the entire Cameron-verse (as some call it) no matter who is doing it nowadays. The reason is simply that they managed to do some really incredible things with the universe in comics and such, and then proceeded to fail on pretty much every level afterwards. It's not so much that I expected them to use the comics continuity, it's just that I've seen evidence that you can write this universe well, and nobody doing movies, games, etc... seems to put in the time, they just rehash "Aliens" more or less, maybe throw in some Predators, and call it a product/movie.

I was pretty impressed by the original "Dark Horse" "Aliens Vs. Predator" storyline, which later even bloomed out into a couple of novels and such using the characters. I find that the storyline still holds up pretty well today in of itself. They even managed to do some good comics involving Newt and Hicks coming out of Cryo-Sleep after the "Aliens" movie (which was made impossible in the movie continuity by killing them off at the beginning of Alien 3). Nobody from movie makers, to video game creators, has shown anything close to the spark those comics did in their writing. I have so little faith because it seems like after this many attempts to do as well, if it could be done, it would have been done.

 

[rapidoud]

The Escape multiplayer mode is literally a carbon-copy of left 4 dead down to the class names.

The game doesn't look that interesting though to be honest based on other trailers, just a generic action horror without the enemy diversity nor unique mechanics that something like Dead Space offers.

I suppose if campaign has some procedural generation to it it may be interesting, but they should've focussed a lot more on the Escape mode as the only drawcard to the game is an Aliens version of L4D.

Also, why are there hostile humans in this game? Seriously? I suppose if I want a good marines vs aliens game I'll go play the AvP2 campaign (absolutely scary too, I'm still too frightened to play it on easy and I've played Dino Crisis 1 + 2 + Stalker, RE4, Run Like Hell, Dead Space, FEAR, Amnesia, and Penumbra without being too scared to progress).

Also, it's pique, not 'peak;.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Still, after so many attempts at least one of the Aliens games has to come good, right?

[sub]Oh, who am I kidding?[/sub]

Well...

Aliens Vs Predator (and it's direct sequel)
Alien Resurrection on the PS1 (is better than the movie, also better than every Alien game so far except AvP1, better than most survival horrors and it's the originator of dual stick controls as understood by Halo players... you played it right?)

It's happened before, it will happen again. Besides even if this game turns out to be Left 4 Dead with Aliens and a plot that will be no bad thing.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Just a heads-up, there's a fairly major spoiler in the trailer. It's easy to miss but it is noticeable. It isn't a split-second shot either.

That wouldn't be the presence of a well known model of Android now would it?

If it is he's not a huge spoiler, he's standard issue

 

[Smooth Operator]

What the hell they gave away half the interesting bits of the story, I highly doubt they have much more to offer after that.
And it's not like it looks/plays so great that story won't matter, id say this was about 5 years old or maybe more.

 

[Nouw]

Just a heads-up, there's a fairly major spoiler in the trailer. It's easy to miss but it is noticeable. It isn't a split-second shot either.

That wouldn't be the presence of a well known model of Android now would it?

If it is he's not a huge spoiler, he's standard issue

No it is not. It's much more spoilerific than that.

 

[fix-the-spade]

No it is not. It's much more spoilerific than that.

Alright then, spill it!

 

[silver wolf009]

Just a heads-up, there's a fairly major spoiler in the trailer. It's easy to miss but it is noticeable. It isn't a split-second shot either.

That wouldn't be the presence of a well known model of Android now would it?

If it is he's not a huge spoiler, he's standard issue

No it is not. It's much more spoilerific than that.

Tell us what you see great sage...

And I'm just concerned how this will affect the cannon standing of Aliens: Infestation for the DS. No I'm not.

OT: I don't know, I'll be honest in saying I'd love to see a game based around some Aliens comic book storylines. Especially that one where an infertile drone winds up on earth, and a tribe of Vikings proclaim it to be a dragon. They have a generations long battle with the damn thing, and it's awesome. This just looks unappealing to me as it is.