Jimquisition: A-LIE-ns: Colonial Marines

Piorn

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I always thought the appeal of the Xenomorphs was in their smartness and subtlety.
That they were intelligent yet merciless predators that would stalk you, outsmart you, and eventually get you.

Now they're giant lizards that foolishly jump in front of guns and yell "ooga-booga-booh".
 

LazyAza

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Lies and deception are kinda Gearbox's thing now between this, Duke and Borderlands 2. People forget how god damn amazing Borderlands 2 looked in its trailers and while the actual game got closer to its marketing yet again the ads are incredibly over selling what the game is. I'm definitely not giving any of their products a look until they are released and reviewed ever again.

Thank god I held back on CM or I'd have blown another 50 odd dollars on a lie.
 

Duffeknol

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I bought the 2010 version of Aliens vs Predator on steam today. Though the campaigns are short, it at least feels like freakin' Aliens. The Xenos slither and retreat, and actually stalk you and don't act like mindless bullet sponges.
 

Reeve

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I had to check what day it was today, then realised it was indeed Wednesday and proceeded to get excited. Thanks for the love letter Jim :)

(Zero Punctuation and Jimquistion on the same day! Awesome.)

Regards the game, was it rushed out like Sonic 06? Or is it just that Gearbox are bad at making games? (Remember Duke Nukem: Forever?)
 

Strelok

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Jimothy Sterling said:
A-LIE-ns: Colonial Marines

Sterling walks through Gearbox's walkthrough of Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Watch Video
Really wish I had seen this before I bought it. The ending, the horror... They Clive Barker's Jericho'd, the ending. I mean, Gearbox really?

Winters: Did we get everything Bishop? Please say we got everything, we could really use a win here.
Bishop: We got everything... Roll Credits
Fuck You Gearbox

Did working on Duke Nukem: Forever kill any creativity you had left? Was it a virus? Do you need to be quarantined? What other games are they working on? I will have to avoid them, I think they are working on the Xcom FPS? Well there goes that, I hope I am wrong.
 

SnakeoilSage

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Wow. I think your rage broke, Jim. You seem so dead-pan and calm, I kept expecting you to explode. Are you able to feel anything after this betrayal, or is something else keeping you sane through all this?
 

Imp_Emissary

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Grouchy Imp said:
I'll start right off the bat by saying I don't know when this demo was made, but surely a game that has been in development for seven years will have some content cut from it that was at some point meant to be included? Fair enough if this demo is six months old then there is no excuse for it, but if this demo is older than that and is showing a sequence that was going to be in the game but then got cut after the demo was made, well, is it that bad?

Incidentally Jim, Facehuggers only twitch if it's love at first sight. Maybe this one just didn't feel your vibe. :)
Well my grouchy friend, it's not really so much that they removed the specific part where you "go do whatever", but rather (from what Jim has said in the viedo) it's more about the bigger "long term" things. Like the lack of detail in levels, the aliens not attacking smartly, the aliens not being introduced in such cool ways, and the little things like the facehuggers trying to say ":D HI!" It's more about removing those things, and not so much about just not having the same levels as in the demo.

That's what I think is more of what the issue is.
May you have a nice day.
 

NinjaDeathSlap

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Feb 20, 2011
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Arnoxthe1 said:
OK...

But WHAT ABOUT THE MULTIPLAYER? Is it half-way decent? I've already asked this in a similar thread but everyone's apparently still too busy crying about the campaign. Yes, it's crap. Didn't happen. Sorry. Let's move on now, shall we?
- The official review of this game on the Escapist talked about the multiplayer I'm pretty sure, saying something along the lines of 'It's slightly better than the campaign, but still ultimately a piece of shit'.

- For someone who wanted a more rounded and official view of the game, I'm surprised you haven't already checked out the official review.

- As someone already said, the campaign was supposed to be the big pull of this game. Gearbox wouldn't have made such a big deal of the campaign's story being official Alien series canon if it wasn't.

- I'd say the biggest and most clear cut example of false advertising in the gaming industry in... well, I don't know how long, but I've been gaming a fair few years and I've never seen anything this horrendous before, is something that well worth "crying about" as you so diplomatically put it.

- The game has been out for only 2 days I think. Maybe it's been 3 or 4, but in any case, how long do you think it's justified for consumers to be angry about blatant fraud? I'd say people are entitled to a fair few weeks more of giving Gearbox the ear-full they deserve for this, at least.
 
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Truly a pathetic display by Gearbox.

It might as well have been one of those useless Final Fantasy per-rendered trailers.

Alien vs Predator 2 is still the best Aliens game.
 

wolfyrik

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This was the first game I've ever pre-ordered. I was thinking hmmm £10 less on Steam now or full price after for a game I'll likely get being a fan of the franchise? I was researching the game to decide and saw the "demo" video.

I thought "fuckt it, this is pretty impressive. If my PC can run it even at lowerd settings, it's gonna be great".

My PC is not fantastic. I have to turn the settings down to about medium for many games but can tweak some settings higher.

I can run the actual game of A:CM on highest settings, cos it really is nothing like the demo. I'm never going to pre-order again and I won't be funding any more games by gearbox. Shame cos I was gonna get Borderlands 2, but fuck them. Fuck them right in the ear.

May even reconsider Sega, once it's established how this happened. There needs to be noise about this debacle. A lot of noise. And even the dumbass fanbois who are, even right now, trying to excuse the changes in content and general downgrade that this game comprises, need to stop and thinking about what exactly this means to the gaming indsutry. Cos if they get away with this, then gaming is going to go down hill quickly. Other publishers, will pick up on this tactic if it's successful.
 

Therumancer

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Kyogissun said:
I just... I really don't have words. I did not realize that this shit as bad as it... was. I mean I was getting the jist of it from the reviews but, good god.

When was the last time this big of a disappointment happened for the gaming industry? Like... Driver 3 maybe? Or is there something else non-Aliens related I'm forgetting?

I seriously hope Gearbox is in some deep shit for this, they were probably one of the few remaining companies I felt weren't completely fucking up but with this... I seriously hope there's something that went terribly wrong and that this wasn't just the outcome of laziness.
It happens a lot actually, it's just that people tend not to notice unless it's a game they happen to be interested in or following. Being a big-budget FPS that had FPS junkies drooling due to the liscence attached to it and the cred Gearbox built up from "Borderlands" it's getting a lot more attention because it's comparitively mainstream.

To put things into perspective right alongside this, a company called Gazillion is in the hotseat. They are the ones making the "Marvel Heroes" MMO, which occasionally gets mentioned. They are basically running a "Marvel Ultimate Alliance" inspired MMO where you buy access to specific super heroes and run around in a top-down persistant world beating the crap out of legions of thugs. It's still under development and there have been articles and videos and stuff of it all over The Internet if you look, and it has come up here on "The Escapist".

What Gazillion did was offer people "founders deals" where if you paid to buy characters to play off of them early you'd get these super deals for early adoption. A pretty common gimmick. Well just now they decided to run a deal where they are giving away Jean Gray and Cyclops for free to anyone who buys any level of founder pack from them on Valentines day. This needless to say really slots off anyone who bought those characters specifically to see them being given away free as a promotion for a game that hasn't even come out yet. There is a bit of a storm about it on their forums, I wrote a few messages about it as well.

Then of course we had the entire "Mass Effect 3" contreversy which didn't entirely revolve around the ending just sucking, but that it sucked and was directly contridictory to promises made by the developers as the game was being created, with those promises and statements being used to promote the game. Then there was a "behind the scenes" app showing that the guys doing the game never actually intended for any of those promises to be met... and also a "you can't make crap like this up" bit explaining that the ending they decided to go with was basically coceived by like an
8 year old boy who wrote in to them. At the end of the day it wasn't as involved as a demo showing "this is what our game is" and then not delivering anything close, but it went into the same territory by having guys who are developers and should know their stuff coming out and saying "this will not be an A B or C choice ending", etc... A lot of people don't really get the anger surrounding Mass Effect 3, summarizing it simply as "rage over not liking the ending" doesn't quite cover why this got to be so much bigger than other products with endings people don't like.

Then of course we had "Duke Nukem Forever" and we see how close that product turned out to the promises made and what footage of the game we actually got to see. Gearbox was ALSO responsible for that, and there are already parallels being drawn here, given the information circulated, lies, fan exploitation, pre-order gimmicks, and everything else. I think Totalbiscuit made this parallel last night in a video he did talking about why you shouldn't pre-order. It's paticularly damning when you consider that this is twice we've more or less beeen looking at the same kind of garbage from the same company.

Then of course we have "Dragon Age 2" which wound up being a mess of brawler mechanics, reused maps, and laughably enough loading screens that instructed you with basic "RPG strategy" about using fighters to block for mages and stuff, when this wasn't even possible in the game given the way enemies dropped ninja like off of rooftops, and pretty much ran right past your characters with no effort, etc... almost like the guys writing those loading screens had no idea the game they were writing it for. This isn't even getting into the entire "Hawke contreversy" where Bioware asked the fans if it was okay to remove character generation and have Hawke always be a human in exchange for voice acting, the response was pretty resoundingly negative, but Bioware said it was positive and did their thing anyway.

Then of course we had "The War Z" a game that didn't even have a fraction of the features (character skills, etc..) promised in the game's advertisement page on STEAM... to name a few things. Leading to a whole laughable series of events not too long ago where the guys running the company were trying to weakly justify why they weren't liars.

The point is not to try and start a giga-post of refighting all these tired battles in one thread, but to point out that these contreversies exist, and happen constantly. People just tend to forget about them rapidly, or just don't care unless it involves a game they happen to like or are interested in. Pretty much every one of those examples above involves a gaming company telling, or showing, people one thing, and then delivering something entirely differant, followed by a titanic shitstorm. We keep seeing it because we let these guys get away with it. It's not like Gearbox did anything here that nobody else did, they just took it to another level, which isn't surprising since the sheer audacity on display here has been climbing for a while.

At the end of the day the same thing is likely to happen here. Your going to have fanboys, like the infamous Biodrones, come out to defend their favorite devs and IPs as mindlessly as possible, filling those devs with validation and taking this as a queue that they got away with it and they still have fans. Understand this isn't a crack just on Bioware fans, The War Z even has it's defenders, and crap.. at the end of the day Colonial Marines will have it's fanatical defenders, both of the game, and Borderlands fans rallying behind Gearbox. People not interested in the game the contreversy is about will sit back and laugh about it and call everyone on both sides idiots (up until it happens to a game they are interested in), and things will die down and then another company will pull a huge lie, and the same thing will happen again. Nothing will change because we will not stop them.

Ideally it would be a case where gamers in general would all thrown down against companies like EA/Bioware, Gearbox, Hammerpoint, and whomever else and show them what level "toxic" can be taken to, not just in expressed online (and snailmail) fury, but also by refusing to buy their products, any product, until they make good for the things they have already done. A situation where fanboys defending things like "Mass Effect 3" or "Colonial Marines" would be horribly singled out and pushed out by the rest of the gaming community as leperous pariahs, as everyone, interested in the games in question or not turned on them, and with pretty much one voice we could tell the gaming industry to get it's crap together, and see lies like we've been seeing actually ruin companies as opposed to providing a five minute uproar on message boards and maybe the gaming press.

Of course it's not an ideal world, so we're not going to see that happen. We'll all get POed about "Colonial Marines", noise will be made. When "Borderlands 3" comes out Gearbox will make a fortune, few will care anymore, and those that do will be shouted down by the "I luv Borderlands, the games were good, why should I care because Colonial Marines was crappy?" crowd, missing the entire point that it's the same company, issues like this aren't about the specific product label.

Such are my thoughts.
 

Toilet

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Well that's a shame, at least we still have Alien vs Predator 2 and the recent Alien vs Predator with their Marine campaigns as well as Aliens Infestation and the hundred other games with Xenomorphs. Either way I hope Gearbox answers to this, I don't like it when developers lie.

Have they even released a statement about how shitty the game is?
 

Rad Party God

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Glad I still don't regret buying AvP 2010 on Steam, I actually enjoyed that game and the multiplayer was lots of fun when it worked.

I can't see anything good come from this, Gearbox is in some deep shit and that is an understatement.
 

Arslan Aladeen

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thetenet said:
I love the series too. I am sure it will survive one crappy game and whoever tries to make an aliens game in the future will have this demo as a solid foundation.
I don't know. I grew up up with Aliens and the original Alien is one of the few horror movies that actually scared me. But that was almost 3 decades ago. The AvP PC games were good, but the amount of bad far outweighs the good. For me, I think it's gotten to the point where if I see a new Alien movie or game, that I'll look forward to it with the same amount of enthusiasm as another Michael Bay Transformers Movie or another Call of Duty. Or about as much enthusiasm as banging my elbow on the edge of a table.
 

wolfyrik

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FoolKiller said:
Magmarock said:
Arnoxthe1 said:
OK...

But WHAT ABOUT THE MULTIPLAYER? Is it half-way decent? I've already asked this in a similar thread but everyone's apparently still too busy crying about the campaign. Yes, it's crap. Didn't happen. Sorry. Let's move on now, shall we?
Who cares about the multiplayer? There's enough MP shooter games already we need more single player ones.
Oh... and the MP blows too. Its too glitchy and just isn't properly balanced. It feels like a cool idea, but tacked on with the engine of the weak sauce single player game. The maps are quite tiny and when playing a xeno, you don't feel very mobile considering what you are.
Which is probably exactly what happened and would explain why there's no FPP for Xenos. Why spend time adding a First Person Perspective when you can just tack controls onto existing models?
 

nexus

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I know Jim is a solid Aliens fan, so I can see why he is upset.

I'm a passing Aliens fan, I really just love the atmosphere.. it is perfect for a game, and I was looking forward to this for at least a year. I just *love* movies like this, and I absolutely would love for games to capture the Aliens atmosphere and intensity. Thank God for Dead Space eh? At least we have something.

Sadly I paid $60 for this the day it was released, I heard it was "average"... by the time it finished downloading I visited Metacritic and.. well, my day was over. =/
 

nexus

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SupahGamuh said:
Glad I still don't regret buying AvP 2010 on Steam, I actually enjoyed that game and the multiplayer was lots of fun when it worked.

I can't see anything good come from this, Gearbox is in some deep shit and that is an understatement.
AvP 2010 is actually pretty decent. Very flawed in it's design, in that it feels more like a cobbled-together "arena shooter", and not a true "experience".. if that makes sense. However, the game was very technically impressive and tense. It just gets a little stale...

Dead Space is as close we'll ever get to an "Alien" experience, and it's not a bad one to be perfectly honest.
 

babinro

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Easily the best episode of Jimquisition I've ever seen.
Your point was made clearly and you didn't have to troll about it to keep attention and interest.

On Topic:

As a gamer.
This is extremely upsetting. We only have so many tools at our disposal before we commit to a full game purchase. If this practice somehow becomes the norm than there's no reason to follow a games production until we get the final hands-on review. They might as well just show cinematics and withhold ingame footage until launch.

As a general consumer.
It's pretty amazing we haven't seen this stuff happen until now.
Look at a burger commercial and compare that to the served product.
Look at the absurdly misrepresenting labels on the groceries. The reality here is sickening.
Look at how much a movie trailer can misrepresent the movie
Gamers have had it great when you consider other products. This demo comes off as an infomercial product. Amazing to watch but doesn't even remotely deliver. See: Slap Chop vs video's mocking the real thing.
 

Kyogissun

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Jan 12, 2010
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Therumancer said:
Kyogissun said:
I just... I really don't have words. I did not realize that this shit as bad as it... was. I mean I was getting the jist of it from the reviews but, good god.

When was the last time this big of a disappointment happened for the gaming industry? Like... Driver 3 maybe? Or is there something else non-Aliens related I'm forgetting?

I seriously hope Gearbox is in some deep shit for this, they were probably one of the few remaining companies I felt weren't completely fucking up but with this... I seriously hope there's something that went terribly wrong and that this wasn't just the outcome of laziness.
-snip-

Such are my thoughts.
Damn son, thanks for the refresher, I hadn't thought about that. And while I might say some of those were 'didn't live up to expectations but we still enjoyable/good', it is odd that not only did A:CM fail to live up to expectations but is a BAD game in general.

It's one thing for a licensed property like this to be 'okay' or 'mediocre' but for it to be as bad as people are calling it just has me kind of shuddering.