Zero Punctuation: Aliens: Colonial Marines

Vault101

I'm in your mind fuzz
Sep 26, 2010
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the antithesis said:
I tell you, I am shocked by the dogged attachment to brand recognition that the current market hold onto white-knuckled. But I am depressed at how right it is for developers and publishers to do it. I actually watched the review of the new Tomb Raider based on brand recognition alone and I never played the original games. Seriously. It's just sad when even someone like me who points out this failing in others also has that same failing. Human nature is shit, apparently.
what the fuck are you rambling on about?

a game that captrued what was good about Aliens could have been really good, true the franchise feels tired but again the potential was there

a reboot of tombraider while uneccicary might make for a good reimagining of the charachter AND get us a female lead (somthing I'm always wanting)

oh and Ive only ever seen the extended cut of Aliens and it was awsome
 

scorptatious

The Resident Team ICO Fanboy
May 14, 2009
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Aardvaarkman said:
sushkis2 said:
Am I the only one who thinks, that the bar in video game industry is now so low, that we allow such atrocities to be released?
Yes.

Such atrocities have always been released. It's the fact that the bar has been raised that this game has been so widely denounced. Check out any gaming generation, and you'll find games as bad or worse than this.
Agreed.

Anyone remember Action 52? 52 broken games for the mere price of 199 U.S. dollars. What a deal! :D
 

Sheo_Dagana

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Aug 12, 2009
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I'm not sure if it counts as a glitch, but there was a scene where some Weyland-Yutani soldiers were running down a hallway towards me, like they were trying to get off the exploding ship. I watched them run through a door, which closed behind them. I walked up to a nearby window to look outside and see where they went... turns out there WAS no corridoor, hallway, or anything.

...Where did they go? Narnia?
 

Erttheking

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Oct 5, 2011
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You now this thread really shows how angry the Escapist can be, with them lashing out against just about anyone, saying that they want companies to go under and how they hate people for buying a game in a certain manner. Oi.
 

Ham Blitz

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May 28, 2009
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I haven't been far in the campaign, but there have been some interesting ones. The only one I have a clip of is this:
http://www.tubechop.com/watch/974878

It's not as big or hilarious as some of the other glitches I have heard of, but it is kind of funny still.
(Yeah, I didn't want to have to make people hunt it down through the whole video, so the tubechop has it and only it)
 

IamLEAM1983

Neloth's got swag.
Aug 22, 2011
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It's not a glitch per se, but a pretty severe narrative derp. At the game's onset, you're making your way through the umbilical and towards the Sulaco. One of your guys suddenly is afflicted with a Chest-Burster; nevermind how a Facehugger never even entered the picture!

"Uuuuh, Randy, we gotta use that animation! We gotta!
- But it makes no sense in the current build!
- WE GOTTA USE IT OR IT'S GAME OVER, MAN! GAME OVER!
- Okay, fine! Use it! Jeeze!
- Kthnxbai!" *gleefully proceeds ahead with the murder of an already moribund plot*
 

Vigormortis

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-Dragmire- said:
Now, I shouldn't really involve myself in this but...

I don't think any of the developers did the ad campaign. Sounds like the publisher side of things.

I do agree though, that blame should fall heaviest on the shoulders of the last people to work on the game before release. Having to go over layers of preexisting code must have been a ***** to deal with though, then again, they said it was done...
Oh, sure, the publisher was likely responsible for much of the ad-space ads. As in, adverts on the television, website banners, etc. I'm not forgetting that. That's why I said Sega is as much to blame as Gearbox.

However, Gearbox has been doing their own adverts and hyping. Some of it via Youtube, Twitter, etc. Some of it via the blog-o-sphere. Much of it, however, in the form of Randy Pitchford getting out in front of the gaming community and doing the PR shuffle by saying, "Oh man, this game is so sweet! We love Aliens and we're making sure this game is the best thing to hit the franchise ever! Trust me, I'm Randy Pitchford!"

Why anyone still trusts what that man says after the travesties and broken promises of Duke Nukem Forever, Aliens: Colonial Marines, and all the other nonsense he spews forth is beyond me...

[edit]
Don't misunderstand me, though. I have no beef with many of the people over at Gearbox. They have quite a few talented artists, designers, programmers, and engineers over there. Many of my issues are with the corporate side of things.
 

Bindal

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May 14, 2012
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Vigormortis said:
Hardly their game - they just did about 10% of it as the game when they got it was more or less finished. You can't blame them for that.
...Just as it was their fault Duke Nukem Forever released in such an awful state.
Except I was talking about DNF?
 

RedDeadFred

Illusions, Michael!
May 13, 2009
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mike1921 said:
RedDeadFred said:
mike1921 said:
RedDeadFred said:
General Vengeance said:
1. I hope this crushes Gearbox, they have no integrity.
The following is a massive amount of sarcasm:

Ya lets just make a whole bunch of people lose their jobs because of decisions made that are way above them! Who cares if they need the job to feed their families, their bosses lied to us!
Businesses should fall and rise with their products. Otherwise the consumer always gets fucked. If a business is untrustworthy and does shitty things like BLATENTLY FALSE ADVERTISEMENT in the form of a demo than it should cripple them.
While I agree that they should definitely lose money and maybe even get fined (wishful thinking probably) over their business practice, to condemn their entire company to death would be a major overreaction and just plain barbaric. And quite honestly, people wouldn't be getting screwed over if they didn't pre-order and actually took time to research the product they are buying. I mean, you can't honestly say that Gearbox has a track record worthy of pre-order trusting (Duke Nukem!?). When you pre-order, you are gambling your money and sometimes you lose. Is it fair? No, of course not but that doesn't mean people shouldn't realize the risk.
Losing money past a certain point is the death of the company.

I've said it before that you need to treat pre ordering as an investment and decide on risk vs reward, and that A:CM is incredibly high risk for the incredibly petty reward. I don't honestly see it as unfair either that there's a risk. You are , by preordering, deciding that you are convinced that the game is good enough for you to not wait for reviews to give them your money for whatever reward they're giving you.

Although in the case of Colonial Marines: Anyone who preordered the game should be god damn entitled to a full refund after that fucking demo faking false advertisement.
Well of course losing money past a certain point make a company go belly up but considering how well Borderlands 1 and 2 did, I don't think that's really a problem for them. I was just saying that there should be repercussions for this.

Anyway, I completely agree with everything you said. The false advertising is why I said it was unfair.
 

MortisLegio

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Nov 5, 2008
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Sadly, I bought this damn game. Great review Yahtzee, it really needed a good thrashing.

Favorite glitch: Alien teleported into a closed off room, froze, and became immortal. It was just moving its head back and forth like it was looking for enemies.
 

hermes

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Mar 2, 2009
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Bindal said:
hermes200 said:
Bindal said:
hermes200 said:
Bindal said:
Thank you for the MASSIVE Spoiler-warning in the middle of the review about Hicks. Oh, wait. THERE WAS NONE!
You are welcome.
Unless you actually paid for this thing, in which case... You had it coming.
Sorry but here, I am peed off out of princible. If Yathzee reveals such a huge part of the plot (and pretty big twist in the canon), then yes, I expect a freaking spoiler warning. It doesn't matter how good or bad the game is - it is still wrong to do.
You do realize this game is not part of the cannon, right? FOX distanciate themselves as far as they could of this turd (who can blame them?) even before it was revealed to be that bad. In fact, it is exactly the point Yatzhee makes: that by bringing back a character that was established to be dead in Alien 3, they reduced the story of A:CM to the level of fan fiction, where they can retell the cannon to include the characters they like...
Bindal said:
geier said:
One bad game ?
Have you allready forgotten THE DUKE ?
Hardly their game - they just did about 10% of it as the game when they got it was more or less finished. You can't blame them for that.
Which is exactly what they are doing to justify this game. Blame TimeGate and Sega about the status of the game...

Do you see a pattern there? Because it makes me doubt the excuses they give to Duke Nukem. It seems the blame game is the best game Pitchford knows how to play...
1 - No, it is canon. Deal with it. Was stated a billion times and was even a selling point.
2 - No, DNF was an entirely different. They were never even related to it until they decided to purchase what was done (a game about 90%) so it could finally get released after 14 years of waiting and it about to die.
1 - My fault then... I thought I read somewhere that Fox has decided to distance themselves from the game and only sold the rights for the IP. At the end of the day, I would expect them to consider this canon the same way Star Wars: Force Unleashed is canon (which is, until some movie directly contradicts it, at which point it stops being such). In any case, I would advice you to take "selling point" from gearbox with a grain of salt; the chances of being spoiled of such "experience" with a more gratitude spirit; and the Alien canon with less sacrosanct respect, since Fox, after 2 AvsP movies and this glorified fanon, obviously doesn't.

2 - No, just no. That is only an excuse from Pitchford to cop out some blame, which I will not accept. There were 9 months from the announcement (September 2010) to the release of the game (June 2011), with a delay in between. There are games that are completed in that time. Are you going to tell me that, in all that time, no one in Gearbox looked at the game and said "this is crap"? A game that has been in development for longer than MS has a gaming division was now "90% complete"? How about the CEO of the company threatening people that didn't like the game (http://www.gamefront.com/gearboxs-randy-pitchford-reviewers-who-dont-like-duke-nukem-forever-will-be-held-accountable/)? Or comparing it to Half Life 2 http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-13-duke-nukem-forever-a-discussion-with-randy-pitchford ? Or interviews where he says all the work they did updating the game and its humor to the present (thank god, if the final product is any indication I don't want to think what was left on the cutting room floor)? Please note that most of those interviews were published around (or after) the game release, so ignorance is not a valid excuse. When shit hit the fan and the game quality was inexcusable under the 2K and Gearbox standards, he turned around and started pointing fingers at everyone but themselves (in stereotypical executive fashion): "the journalists don't get it", "the humor is not for everyone", "the other guys were the guys that REALLY developed", "we only bought it", "next time, we will get it right". And now, its all over again... I could almost predict his moves based on the timeline of DKF, but this time it took them 6 years, not 14.
 

HepatitisQ

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Feb 28, 2013
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The glitch Yatzhee mentioned seemed to be something common [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddEiIM-GKEk&feature=youtu.be] in Gearbox games.
 

Rblade

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Mar 1, 2010
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he pretend not to like being characterised like a personal attack dog for shitty games. But this review was top form. It clearly brings out the best in him.
 

Canadamus Prime

Robot in Disguise
Jun 17, 2009
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I'm thinking that Weyland-Yutani based their business model on that of the Umbrella Corporation. ...or vice versa.
 

GildaTheGriffin

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Jul 4, 2012
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I would like to know, why the hell everyone bitches about this game? Not once in my both playthroughs did I ever have a glitch. The controls are fine, the weapons are fine, the AI needs a bit of a touch up (Works well enough), and the adventure on the planet was fun. You people just don't appreciate what people TRY to do for you. The game was to give a backstory of what happened after Aliens 2 and Gearbox worked hard on this. I bet some of you didn't even go through the first damn mission and came up with some 'review' just because a graphic mesh didn't pop in. You people are unbelievably stupid and arrogant. The whole gaming community is filled with petty little children and ignorant people.

It's a game. Not everything is going to work out all the time just because you expect it to.
 

GildaTheGriffin

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Jul 4, 2012
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General Vengeance said:
1. I hope this crushes Gearbox, they have no integrity.
2. I hope this ends people preordering games, it just encourages assholes like Gearbox to make cash grab games.
3. I hope Yahtzee starts to review good games, constantly reviewing bad games is cute and funny but its like shooting fish in a barrel.
Really? No integrity? Gearbox is an asshole? Gearbox is like the uncle of the video game revolution. Half Life, Counter Strike, Borderlands, Borderlands 2, Halo CE, and Brothers In Arms.

Don't down talk a company that was involved in so much of the video game's history.