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Aliens: Colonial Marines

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"Before beginning, we usually have a sense of what the engine will be for the game and what "type" of RPG we're creating (action, turn-based, 3rd person party, etc.)."

Massive LULZ. Like they would ever do a proper TB game. The closest we might get is South Park and unless you are already a South Park fan (I am), it's meaningless (and I still think it's meaningless).

The closest they ever got to having "the freedom" to do TB in a proper RPG was PE and anyone who had any idea already knew that they would go for RTWP.

At any rate, I don't see what your point is in quoting Avellone. You thought that it "sounded very promising" and showed more understanding of the "license" than anything else we've seen. But in actuality, he was telling a pretty story and it costs nothing to tell a pretty story. We all heard similar stuff from him and others about AP. "one of our main influences for Alpha Protocol is Syriana". End result? A piece of shit game with interesting cutscenes. And what they meant when they referenced Syriana probably was Middle-Eastern guys with beards and blowing some shit up in Middle East. Yeah, they certainly got that part right. :thumbsup: Obsidian.

And do you think it's a coincidence that the shitty looking Aliens: Crucible tech demo looked so much similar to Alpha Popamole? And from the looks of it, it might have featured the same trademark quality writing found in AP as well:

"That didn't sound good"
"No shit. Do something about it"
"Like what? Push the button faster?"
"Quit flirting. We've got incoming!"

(upon discovering a civilian trapped in Alien-thingies that cover walls)
"Looks like one of the Almayer civies got smoked. Dean? Jean?"
"Her name was Bean, shithead"
"Oh no, did I get your dead girlfriend's name wrong?"
"It's okay, Santos. I'm sure when I see you hanging from a wall like that, I'll forget your name, too"
QUALITY DIALOGUE CHOICE TIME!!!
"Enough Santos!"
"Both of you knock it off."
"Better get used to this, DJ."

"You better get used to this, DJ. Bean's not the only one who died here"
"[Loyalty Loss: DJ] Wow, I don't know what I was thinking, giving a shit that my friend died. Thanks for opening my eyes, Parris"
"[Loyalty Gain: Santos] Nice try, Parris"

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxmb1s_ac_videogames?start=1#.USTAdaWqbMd

Alien Effect: Crucible? :yeah:

Placeholder text (complete with placeholder voice-acting) ? Maybe. Then again, isn't writing like one of the things that has a priority during pre-production? If I didn't know better, I could have even thought that those lines were from A:CM. Then again, you could put half the writing in AP into any other shit game and none would be the wiser. I can't think of a more overrated game by Obsidian.

Well, at least we know now, from the mouth of Obsidian no less, that they fucked up on that front as well (eg. lack of design documents during pre-production and hey, surprise surprise! Feargus just admitted that they are doing the same with PE as well, despite having admitted in a previous interview that it was a mistake with AP).

Not to mention how the tech demo illustrates Obsidian's deep understanding of the license: instead of barricading and setting up a tactical defensive parameter or being on the move, they stand still at choke points at a certain place, probably of some importance to the player, to rain firepower on the incoming swarms. Yeah, that is very Alieny. Now, I'll admit that the context in that particular segment of the video is not clear to make a tactical assumption but at any rate, standing around and mowing down incoming waves of aliens doesn't feel like "staying true to the license" at all to me (and oh look, a hovering turrent gun that you can move around!). In the films, people better equipped with better training drop like flies doing just that.

Not to mention how ineffective the aliens seem to be in there. Both AI and speed wise. So how is that any better than A:CM now? Maybe the aliens were dumbed down on purpose so they could make a clear milestone demonstration, maybe they would say "obviously we have slowed down aliens so you could see them with clarity here but we will speed and smarten them up for the final game". But then again, that obviously was not the case with AP. And FFS, look at that one-on-one alien encounter at around 2:00. What travesty is this? It looks like the entire game would be more like Alien Protocol: Crucible.

Also, it is obvious that significant amount of work went into that tech demo and it still feels way too bland, boring, clunky and non-Alieny to me. Not to mention the generic looking environments. Just as AP was bland, boring, clunky, generic and non-espionage-y. Obsidian quite simply doesn't have what it takes to make a good action game. You can disagree, of course, and I would be most interested to hear why as to how Obsidian succeeded at making a good espionage action game.

Also:

"Following that, I try to absorb as much about the genre as possible, including any tangential or off-the-beaten path explorations of that genre (for example, I studied the Expanded Universe in Star Wars extensively"

"The wound in the Force". Yeah. Great job. Thankfully, KOTOR 2 was still a good game despite that derpiness. I understand and appreciate that it was Obsidian's own addendum but then again, people have been bitching about SW EU for exactly that reason; that it is full of diarrheic amounts of shit. Thank you Obsidian, for contributing to it!

At very least Obsidian would have respected the license and made a cool, if flawed game.
When they don't even know what stealth means? I don't think so.
Aliens was about stealth?

That's what Obsidian said. Stealth and survival. Which, as they explained later, meant blowing shit up. Sadly, not the orbital kind. These days, what survival means is action and stealth means is long distance killing. At least when Obsidian is involved.

Overall, I can't quite see how anyone at all would think that A:C might have been a good Obsidian game when they fail at basic gameplay. Oh, but maybe they would redeem it with a quality expansion eg. "Aliens: Crucible: Mask of Weyland-Yutani"?
 
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Publishers and developers should be licking journalists' asses in the hopes they don't slam their games, not the other way around.

To be fair in this instance, the demo that was shown really looked much better than the released game, so I wouldn't put this one on the journo's backs.

Only if you measure and compare graphical quality. The demo looked just as shitty as the final product. The same Call of Duty inspired shit design. The same mediocre writing. The same shit alien variety. And the fact that the demo looked scripted all the way through. At various parts during the demo, the player literally moves around rapidly and shoots at literally nothing to make it look like there is some action going on. It's unfortunate that people focus so much on just the graphics.
 

tuluse

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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
If the world was sane, you would actually be able to live off writing brutally honest reviews without taking part in any pre release theatrics.
This is sort of what Yahtzee does.
 

tuluse

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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Is this gonna be some kind of semantic argument? He plays games and then tells his audience what he thinks about them. How is that not a review?
 

evdk

comrade troglodyte :M
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Codex 2012 Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Hmm, different argument then: people do not watch Yahtzee's videos for game reviews, but for his antics. I guess you can say that if you do consistently scathing reviews, in the current state of the industry you will be sidelined as an amusing act, nothing more.
 

tuluse

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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Fair enough about people not watching for the review content. However, I think he affect's his audience's buying decisions more than you think. When he does give a game some kind of praise, it's usually a big deal.
 
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Yahtzee is just another piece of shit with mostly shitty preferences in games and even shittier overviews or "analyzes" of games. His opinions are next to worthless. His antics can be funny once in a while, though. Like once every fifteen times. That reminds me, he is still around? LOL. Can go only so far doing the same retarded shit.
 

Kem0sabe

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Yahtzee is just another piece of shit with mostly shitty preferences in games and even shittier overviews or "analyzes" of games. His opinions are next to worthless. His antics can be funny once in a while, though. Like once every fifteen times. That reminds me, he is still around? LOL. Can go only so far doing the same retarded shit.

:flamesaw:
 

racofer

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Yahtzee is just another piece of shit with mostly shitty preferences in games and even shittier overviews or "analyzes" of games. His opinions are next to worthless. His antics can be funny once in a while, though. Like once every fifteen times. That reminds me, he is still around? LOL. Can go only so far doing the same retarded shit.

:flamesaw:
2uige2x.gif
 

Pika-Cthulhu

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PbXvqg2.png

Hey, it is not a gun! It is a Cosmonaut Assistance Tool. :bounce:

It also has a floppy drive on top of it:

TYLQbog.jpg


Aww it's a floppy disk at 0:33:), would be cute if it weren't on a FUTURE SPACE STATION LOL.

It's an 80s retro-futuristic game.

*HRRRRNNNNNKKKKKKK* *KTHNK* *KTHNK* *KTHNK* *KTHNK* *KRRRRRRRRRRRRRKKKKKKKK* "Shit, Misfire!"

Heh. I'm hoping it doesn't double as a weapon. It looked to me like some kind of diagnostic tool. Has a screen on the rear. I think the floppies are either for saving diagnostic data, or for loading different firmware/functionality updates. I'm wondering if that tool will serve a function similar to the camera in Fatal Frame. Maybe you will need different floppies to detect different things.
 

dnf

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If the world was sane, you would actually be able to live off writing brutally honest reviews without taking part in any pre release theatrics.
This is sort of what Yahtzee does.
But Yahtzee doesn't review games.
He is just the other side of the coin. Nobody will take seriously someone who review a game as a schtick like "well i need to find the bad things in this game so i can talk funny witty things about it", and often he will criticize a game for all the wrong reasons, just like our fellow dumb journalist:

Does Anyone Hate Anything Anymore?

By Alex Kierkegaard / April 14, 2008

I found Matt's latest commentary (Does Anyone Like Anything Anymore?, April 6) quite illuminating. We both more or less keep an eye on the same sites/blogs/forums (i.e., from time to time, all of them), but whilst all he seems to see is people bitching and moaning about how crappy games these days are, all I seem to see is people frothing and gushing about how awesome games these days are. Which of us is right, and which is wrong?

Before I answer this question (and no, the answer is not as clear cut as, "Duh, me of course"), let me just give some examples of what I mean by "people frothing and gushing about how awesome games these days are". Matt gave plenty of examples to support his view of the situation, so I should do likewise before we go any further.

The first example I will bring forth is No More Heroes, a game for which the lowest score on Metacritic is still nearly twice what I ended up giving it. In fact, and this is no exaggeration, I might as well be the only person on Planet Earth who thought the game was overall "bad" -- in contrast, the lowest score on Metacritic is 60/100, still a healthy distance above the average, and there are multiple-page "discussions" in every single videogame forum out there praising to the heavens this cheap, shallow, simplistic heap of trash (by comparison, Square's terrible early-PS2 brawler The Bouncer had more complex and rewarding mechanics than NMH, not to mention it didn't force you to spend half the gametime going back and forth around a ghost town, or playing some unbearably godawful mini-games just so it could set you up for the next animu clip).

And yet, apart from my review, and the subsequent lollerific forum thread on this very site, you would be hard pressed to find another dissenting voice across the vast expanse of the internet -- from corporate journalist whores to the legions of functionally illiterate blogoroids and forumroids, they all lapped that shit up as if it was going out of style (PROTIP: It isn't).

No More Heroes is merely the most flagrant recent example, but shit like that happens all the time. I couldn't even begin to list all the sub-mediocre crap which the internet unequivocally ends up loving every other day: from Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, which pretty much inaugurated the modern trend of low-budget, indie, "arcade" hipsterism, to such overhyped, overproduced and underdesigned pap as Prey or Resistance: Fall of Man, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings or Lost Odyssey (the latter of which still got 78/100 on Metacritic, despite being perhaps the worst videogame of the last two decades) -- I think it's safe to say I have as many examples to prove my point as Matt has to prove his, if not more.

And yet, as any astute reader of our work will have realized, we are not really, at heart, disagreeing. Me and Matt are both viewing the same situation, but we are only seemingly interpreting it differently (which fact, incidentally, ends up telling you more about us than about the situation). Because Matt's main complaint was that the people trashing the latest games were doing so on arbitrary, untenable grounds, which is when all is said and done also my own main complaint. At the end of the day I am pouring scorn on the rest of the internet not because they enjoyed No More Heroes, but because their reasons for doing so were some pretentiously "funny" animu clips, or the fact that they got such a big kick out of shaking the controller around like monkeys, in other words that that they were unwilling -- nay, that they were unable -- to see past the pointless novelty, and realize that the underlying game design had about as much conceptual complexity as an FMV game from 1996.

What it comes down to in the end is the quality of criticism available, and that is what, when all is said and done, is really bothering both me and Matt. What the people who write game reviews and the people who read them need to realize is that -- just as there are wrong reasons for condemning something (which was Matt's point), there are wrong reasons for praising something (which is my point). In the end, the condemnation or praise are not important. The reasons are.

A concrete example is in order here: IGN's recent review of Ikaruga, on the event of the game's release on XBLA in North America, which in the words of a friend of mine who is an expert on shooting games can be summarized as: "It's hard, you have to do good to do good, there's patterns in it, general opinion is that it's good so who am I to disagree. 9/10" This so-called "review" is basically a regurgitation of the game's Wikipedia entry with a score attached at the end reflecting established "opinion", written by someone who has no idea how the game even works -- that is to say by someone who cannot even play the game.

And yet that review still had all the monkeys at Shmups.com jumping up and down, whooping and hollering and passing around free bananas. "A shoot man game gets 9/10 from a major gaming website! Whoop-de-doo!" -- Until the next operatic shooting masterpiece rolls around that's not made by Treasure, and IGN and everyone else goes back to the standard "WTF, this game is over in twenty minutes. 6/10" reviews.

And when I tried to talk some sense into them -- these people who, being members of a highly specialized forum devoted to a single gaming genre, really should know better than to be fooled by a mere number -- by stating that I would rather read a review by an expert trashing the game and giving it 0/10 because he hated its mechanics, rather than a 9/10 review by someone who hardly even acknowledges their existence (let alone attempting to pass judgement on them), all but three or four people had no clue what I was talking about.

This is what I mean by 'reasons'. Our hypothetical expert would be trashing the game for the right reasons, while the IGN simpleton is praising it for the wrong ones. It is the reasons that's what criticism has always been about.
And yet what does the modern videogame internet even know about reasons? You have the corporate cretins on the one side, who, even if they could come up with proper reasons, wouldn't be allowed to voice them; the fanboy shmucks on the other, who can't even be bothered to look up the word "criticism" in the dictionary, let alone recognize the value of actual criticism when they happen to come across it (see, for example, the comments here and here); and finally the "New GamesArtfags" on the other side, who are so dense that they can't even tell apart the video clips that play between pauses in the game from the game. In the end, whether people are "liking" or "hating" modern games is irrelevant. People have always liked and hated stuff, and always for stupid, nonsensical reasons. It's criticism that's at stake here.
 

Flanged

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To be fair in this instance, the demo that was shown really looked much better than the released game

Problem is, both looked shite.

But the released game at least seems to be entertainingly shite. I will get years of joy from it without ever buying or playing, all from the justified outrage and loathing it is already generating, and will generate in future. Like with Oblivion.

Something bothering me though. In Alien and Aliens, when you glimpsed the xenos full body, moving around, it was kind of obvious that they were guys in suits. This technical limitation meant they looked, well, a bit fat - or at least fat compared to what a xenomorph should look like. They're supposed to be incredibly spindly and insectoid, barely human shaped at all, sharp edges everywhere. Yet Gearbox seem to have stuck with the "guy-in-a-rubber-suit" look, despite not being hampered by the same limitations as film.

It looks as though they fight like guys in suits as well, which is worse. But funny.
 

Konjad

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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
To be fair in this instance, the demo that was shown really looked much better than the released game

Problem is, both looked shite.

But the released game at least seems to be entertainingly shite. I will get years of joy from it without ever buying or playing, all from the justified outrage and loathing it is already generating, and will generate in f uture. Like with Oblivion.

Something bothering me though. In Alien and Aliens, when you glimpsed the xenos full body, moving around, it was kind of obvious that they were guys in suits. This technical limitation meant they looked, well, a bit fat - or at least fat compared to what a xenomorph should look like. They're supposed to be incredibly spindly and insectoid, barely human shaped at all, sharp edges everywhere. Yet Gearbox seem to have stuck with the "guy-in-a-rubber-suit" look, despite not being hampered by the same limitations as film.

It looks as though they fight like guys in suits as well, which is worse. But funny.
You are wrong.
The first Alien movie is only three years older than The Thing and the alien looks like a-guy-in-a-rubber-suit, while The Thing had also much more interesting creatures.

Just compare:

thing-2.jpg

the-thing-1982-pic-41.jpg

the-thing-1982-1080p-mkv_snapshot_00-33-19_2011-06-10_20-29-06.jpg

Vlcsnap-2011-12-30-07h22m25s38.png

the-thing-1982-kurt-russell.jpg



VS


Alien-1979-alien-aliens-8255327-654-283.jpg

sf-alien.jpg

alien+9.jpg

AliensSigourney_gallery_primary.jpg

N4MQKB81pHRQVum.jpg
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
The first Alien movie is only three years older than The Thing and the alien looks like a-guy-in-a-rubber-suit, while The Thing had also much more interesting creatures.

True, but Alien was the first film where the Bad Guy From Outer Space didn't instantly make you think "Rubber suit!" and steps were actually taken to try to reduce that image. For a first-time viewer, Alien pulls that off perfectly, at least when compared to what came before it.

Speaking of predecessors, I doubt that The Thing would have had such interesting creature designs as they did, if not for Alien. Before CGI, there was this thing called "ambition" in the SFX and VFX sectors, where each filmmaker would try to beat the one that came before it. Alien set new standards in creature look and design, The Thing only took it to a higher level.
 

sea

inXile Entertainment
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Something bothering me though. In Alien and Aliens, when you glimpsed the xenos full body, moving around, it was kind of obvious that they were guys in suits. This technical limitation meant they looked, well, a bit fat - or at least fat compared to what a xenomorph should look like. They're supposed to be incredibly spindly and insectoid, barely human shaped at all, sharp edges everywhere. Yet Gearbox seem to have stuck with the "guy-in-a-rubber-suit" look, despite not being hampered by the same limitations as film.

It looks as though they fight like guys in suits as well, which is worse. But funny.
They were shot in ways that made it very hard to tell they were guys in suits. The illusion is very real and consistent if you are simply watching the movie. Sure, once you get to analyzing it it starts to look fake, but you can say the same thing about the effects in any movie. Suspension of disbelief etc.

Also, the creatures in Alien and Aliens have to be far more ambulatory and move much faster than the ones in The Thing. The Thing relies mostly on shock horror scenes and still shots of creatures standing basically perfectly still or with limited animatronics. You can't really directly compare them as the requirements between the films were quite different.
 

DalekFlay

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Only thing those pictures made me think was "wow, Sigourney Weaver was trimming her bush in the 1970s?"
 

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