Colonial Marines Storm the Sulaco

Andy Chalk

One Flag, One Fleet, One Cat
Nov 12, 2002
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Colonial Marines Storm the Sulaco

The new Aliens: Colonial Marines gameplay trailer is pretty groovy, but haven't we done this before?

In all fairness, the new Colonial Marines trailer looks good. I'd go so far as to say it actually looks pretty hot. And yet it doesn't have me trembling with anticipation. There is no drool on my keyboard. Money is not ricocheting off my monitor.

Why? Because it's all been done before. The chime of the motion detector, the hollow hiss of the pulse rifle, the cool military talk that turns to frenzied screaming when the xenomorphs come out to play - this stuff just doesn't carry the weight it once did. Same thing with the setting. Aliens: Colonial Marines takes place just a few months after the events of Alien 3 [http://www.amazon.com/Alien-3-Blu-ray-Charles-Dance/dp/B004RE29WW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1342714764&sr=8-3&keywords=Alien+3], as more marines are dispatched to search for Ripley, Hicks and the rest of the gang. You'll find and search the Sulaco, trip down to LV-426, check out the wrecked alien ship from the first movie and visit some "unnamed futuristic cities."

Players will command a squad of four marines, each packing a different primary weapon like the pulse rifle, the smart gun or the flamethrower, as well as a secondary weapon, grenades and a sidearm that can be equipped in conjunction with the motion tracker. Players can take control of any marine at any time (assuming he doesn't have anything stuck to his face, I'd imagine) and issue context-sensitive commands to the others.

It sounds cool, it looks solid, and yet there's a very distinct part of me that wishes that we could do something a little different for once. Wouldn't it be nice, say, to go on Hudson's bug hunt? Ah well, maybe next time.

Aliens: Colonial Marines [http://www.amazon.com/Colonial-Marines-Collectors-Edition-Xbox-360/dp/B007P0X7IA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342714839&sr=8-1&keywords=aliens+colonial+marines] comes out on February 12, 2013, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. A Wii U version is slated to follow "at a later time."

Source: PCGamersWorld [http://www.pcgamersworld.com/2012/07/alien-colonial-marines-new-action-packed-gameplay-trailer/]


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Falterfire

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Jul 9, 2012
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If the Coop is good, I'll get it anyways. Having new campaigns to coop through is always a great thing, and even if the game itself is only mediocre, playing something new beats going through the Borderlands campaign for the 8th time.
 

Scorpid

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you know I agree with you. It looks good but been there done that. I mean it looks kinda neat and if they incorperate lots of distinct movements you can do like metro 2033, but otherwise it looks like a more polished thing of what we've done. Personally I think they need to make the Aliens scary again not just targets. Make it like Amnesia sort of but like you don't see the Alien ever till his tail is sticking out of your chest. Also why does it need to be fighting waves of Xenomorphs why not a handful kinda of like a scary version of Shadow of the Colossus. That's just what I think. But maybe aliens are no longer packing any mystery some thing that is OH so important to survival horror but I think it still could be done.
 

Jeyl

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Issues that Jeyl has with ALIENS: Colonial Marines.

1. It acknowledges Alien3.
2. It assumes we care about Alien3 as much as the first two movies.
3. No female single-player PC, and no female characters in any of it's publicity material.
4. As said, this game has been done before.

I know I'm bashing Aline3, but that film was a terrible idea to continue the franchise. It turned Ripley's daring solo rescue of Newt into a mistake because bringing the Queen onboard lead to some random egg being planted on the ceiling which eventually lead to everyone's deaths. This game feels less like a "Continue the story of the Alien franchise!" and more like "Iconic female hero screws up royally, male marines sent in to do her job properly".

At least Star Trek Elite Force gave players the option of playing as a female officer fully voiced.
 

Tiamat666

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Dec 4, 2007
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I'm looking forward to this game, but the blood splurts are so explosive and massive, it looks ridiculous. This is Aliens, not some hyper violent zombie-splatter FPS.
 

Senor Smoke21

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I don't really care about the story, I just wanna go on a bug hunt with my friends like the ultimate badasses we always dreamed of being.
I also like the alien animations, they look a lot better than in AvP.
 

ccesarano

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I feel like I've seen this trailer before (and not just because this is all taken from the gameplay segment demonstrated at PAX East).

Didn't Gearbox come out and say the original squad idea has been left on the cutting room floor? Or am I remembering wrong?
 

Buizel91

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Aug 25, 2008
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If i get to play as an Alien, I'm sold.

AVP was okay but the missions felt repetitive after a while.
 

Bindal

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DVS BSTrD said:
Why would they dispatch more Marines to look for Ripley after Alien 3 when
Everyone saw her fall into the smelter?
1. Why mark a spoiler? By now, everyone knowing about the franchise should know about that.
2. It's mentioned that there was A LOT of red tape, causing the rescue-mission to slow down a lot. So, it is very likely that for the same reason, they couldn't cancel that mission anymore in time.
Or they will deliver the reason in-game (just as they are going to explain why the Sulaco is still in one piece or why Hadley's Hope is not a smoking crater)
 

Namulith

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DVS BSTrD said:
Why would they dispatch more Marines to look for Ripley after Alien 3 when
Everyone saw her fall into the smelter?
I suppose that depends on if this squad was sent out within the 17 day time frame that Hudson gave for a rescue operation after the Sulaco would be declared overdue.
 

Felgy76

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Oct 29, 2008
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The trailer states that the Sulaco is in orbit around Lv-426, where the crew of the Nostromo found the Space Jockey's ship, and where Aliens took place.
At the beginning of Alien 3 the Sulaco is passing the prison Fiorina 'Fury' 161 on its way back to earth when the lifeboat is ejected with Ripley and co.

Won't stop me from buying the game, but that's a pretty huge continuity error.
 

Wicky_42

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I was really excited for the recent AVP, played the demo and realised it was clunky and terrible - a poor effort at both a game and console porting. I remember the classic AVP 1 and 2 fondly, but they haven't aged well. Maybe this can re-ignite the passion I once had for the Alien franchise, but it really does look like it's just re-treading the same material again, rather than doing something a bit different, like Prometheus did.

Dead Space has been doing the space shooter-horror thing for a while now; it's not enough just to hit the tropes and assume people will lap it up.

Well, I at least hope that that's the case...
 

crazyrabbits

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Jeyl said:
Issues that Jeyl has with ALIENS: Colonial Marines.

1. It acknowledges Alien3.
2. It assumes we care about Alien3 as much as the first two movies.
(puts on fanboy hat)

I'm not sure if the game actually acknowledges A3 or not, for several reasons:

1) As mentioned earlier, A3 had the Sulaco two weeks out from LV-426 before it suffered a massive fire that resulted in the evacuation of all the lifepods. There's really no way to assume that everyone is dead if the bodies aren't even there in the first place.

2) According to prior interviews, there's supposedly a reason for the ship coming back to LV-426, but I find that very difficult to believe. If a Weyland-Yutani team came aboard, they probably would have stolen/contained any xenomorphs and either left the ship to drift off or destroy it outright. There's no reason for them to turn the ship around and send it back to its target destination.

3) What looks to be Bishop's (half of a) body is still lying in the same place where he was at the end of the Queen/Powerloader fight in Aliens. Unless something's changed, that's a significant departure from the third film (where his body was on Fury 161 and was subsequently acquired by Ripley and left unplugged in a medical bay).

It seems like the game is more a retcon than anything else.
 

ryo02

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crazyrabbits said:
Jeyl said:
Issues that Jeyl has with ALIENS: Colonial Marines.

1. It acknowledges Alien3.
2. It assumes we care about Alien3 as much as the first two movies.
(puts on fanboy hat)

I'm not sure if the game actually acknowledges A3 or not, for several reasons:

1) As mentioned earlier, A3 had the Sulaco two weeks out from LV-426 before it suffered a massive fire that resulted in the evacuation of all the lifepods. There's really no way to assume that everyone is dead if the bodies aren't even there in the first place.

2) According to prior interviews, there's supposedly a reason for the ship coming back to LV-426, but I find that very difficult to believe. If a Weyland-Yutani team came aboard, they probably would have stolen/contained any xenomorphs and either left the ship to drift off or destroy it outright. There's no reason for them to turn the ship around and send it back to its target destination.

3) What looks to be Bishop's (half of a) body is still lying in the same place where he was at the end of the Queen/Powerloader fight in Aliens. Unless something's changed, that's a significant departure from the third film (where his body was on Fury 161 and was subsequently acquired by Ripley and left unplugged in a medical bay).

It seems like the game is more a retcon than anything else.
There could be any number of plot related reasons for the Sulaco being back over LV-426 we wont know till we play the game.

Bishops legs are on the Sulaco his upper body is on Fury 161 why is this an issue? we saw him ripped in half.
 

ScruffyMcBalls

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I like that this'll be a co-op title, always love those games, makes for a great backup experience if the single player sucks balls. But, and this is a big but (¬_¬), having the squad in single player annoys me, and not for the "survival horror can't be done in a team" argument, which in all fairness, I don't buy, I think effective horror can be done with more than one character, but I digress. No, my issue is that each character has a specific primary weapon, a specialization. Which is ok, right up until the point that you realize that if you want to use a different weapon, you're switching to a different character, not just dropping your shotgun and picking up a pulse rifle. Doesn't that kinda strip away any personality that character had? Essentially just degrading them to a walking, talking inventory item? And doesn't that go against what we saw in the movies where each character was more than willing to use any weapon they had at hand, to be adaptable and go with whatever's most effective, rather than taking pot-shots at a xenomorph at extreme range? I'm getting a bit sick of every game trying to profile characters into "classes" and giving them specific roles rather than leaving them flexible. It almost feels like developers are trying to add "RPG-like mechanics" to every game, if you're gonna do that, go all the way and make an Alien RPG.

I dunno, maybe I'm wrong and I'm just blowing it out of proportion, but this one fact alone means that the game is almost a no sell for me unless I can persuade enough buddies to buy it with me for the co-op.
 

crazyrabbits

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ryo02 said:
There could be any number of plot related reasons for the Sulaco being back over LV-426 we wont know till we play the game.

Bishops legs are on the Sulaco his upper body is on Fury 161 why is this an issue? we saw him ripped in half.
You're right about the body - I was thinking it was the top half. That said, maybe they'll surprise me about why the ship is suddenly over the planet, but if it wasn't W-Y that sent the ship back, it would have to be an all-new antagonist/group threat. I just hope it doesn't come out of left field.
 

Bindal

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Felgy76 said:
The trailer states that the Sulaco is in orbit around Lv-426, where the crew of the Nostromo found the Space Jockey's ship, and where Aliens took place.
At the beginning of Alien 3 the Sulaco is passing the prison Fiorina 'Fury' 161 on its way back to earth when the lifeboat is ejected with Ripley and co.

Won't stop me from buying the game, but that's a pretty huge continuity error.
Except it's not an error at all - the Sulaco was ASSUMED to be over Fury or destroyed. The only thing we know for sure is the rescue-pod was there. They even mention that the Solaco shouldn't be over LV-426 in the first place in this very same trailer but somewhere else (or nowhere at all). And the reason that damn ship is there instead where it's assumed to be will be given. Just as we will be given a reason why Hadley's Hope is still fine and dandy (or at least still exist) instead of being nothing but ashes.