When I was over at Heatwave earlier in the year, checking out Gods & Heroes, a huge bug cropped up during Scrum. The team stopped gabbing. The silence of clever people racking their brains filled the room. From the back came a lone grunt, followed by “nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” That’s how pervasive Aliens is, especially in games. The movie was fundamentally different from its subtle, stealthy predecessor Alien, owing more to Robert Heinlein’s book “Starship Troopers” or Night of the Living Dead, than Giger’s disturbingly sexual xenomorph. “It’s the game I’ve been ripping off my whole career” says the effusive and ubiquitous Randy Pitchford of Gearbox, demoing Aliens: Colonial Marines, “we put facehuggers in Duke Nukem 3D and working on the Half-Life series with its head-crabs and when we helped Microsoft bring Halo to PC, there’s the dropships and the sergeant is basically Apone. Yet we’ve never had a sincere, true sequel to it in videogame form”.

Apart from Rebellion’s amazing first attempt at Aliens versus Predator, I have to add.(more…)