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The Alien films have always held enormous power over me, occupying the same sphere of significance that Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings do for many others. So it’s been with great interest and no small amount of hope that I’ve watched the development saga of Aliens: Colonial Marines. This Gearbox Software-developed first-person shooter promises to pick up where James Cameron’s 1986 classic Aliens left off — an irresistible premise for any diehard fan of the series. A recent trailer (watch it below) presented a convincing succession of sound and images, yet carried the sadface news of a new fall 2012 release date. What’s an impatient Alien fan to do?

Well, I went to Randy Pitchford to get some answers. The gregarious CEO of Gearbox Software was all too happy to share new insights into the studio’s plans for Aliens: Colonial Marines, including multiplayer concepts, the control scheme, play style…and, perhaps most tantalizing, what he knows about the upcoming Ridley Scott-directed origin tale Prometheus.

Alien fans: Something tells me that 2012 is going to be a mighty fine year.

PlayStation.Blog: Aliens: Colonial Marines was recently confirmed to be a fall 2012 title. How will the game’s new fall 2012 release date benefit the final product?

Randy Pitchford, CEO, Gearbox Software: Aliens: Colonial Marines has been a dream project – a labor of love. We’re fully committed to our vision for the game. Creating deadlines is helpful to the process, but we do regret where it creates expectations that cause us to choose between changing expectations or compromising the vision.

PSB: Are you excited to see Prometheus? Will any of the Space Jockey lore hinted at in the film make it into Aliens: Colonial Marines?

RP: I’m very excited about Prometheus. 20th Century Fox invited us to read the script and check out production and ACM’s director, Brian Martel, had a discussion with Ridley Scott about the matter years and years ago, so it’s been a really interesting seat for us on this one. A bunch of our guys went out to read the script a while back. I chose to decline because I didn’t want the spoilers — I can’t wait to see the final film! Ridley is such a master storyteller and filmmaker and I’m thrilled that he’s spending some more time in science fiction. Oh, and I haven’t dodged your real question. Yes, ACM will bring you inside The Derelict on LV-426. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll leave it at that!

PSB: Would you describe the FPS feel as grittier and more realistic, or focused on arcadier accessibility?

RP: I would say that the player’s experience for Aliens: Colonial Marines will tend closer to the gritty realism side. I say that because sometimes the gameplay footage we use for marketing will tend to focus more on the action — which is definitely in there — but you can’t really feel difficulty and challenge as well when you’re trying to promote and market the game using promotional footage.

PSB: How are you approaching the control scheme? Does the game feature aim down the sight and a two-weapon limit? Are there any equipment slots or ways to customize your character?

RP: Looking down the sights properly is a big deal. Gearbox is really proud of its heritage in the evolution of down-the-sights views having really pushed that feature forward in the first Brothers in Arms game. Since then, every shooter we’ve created has featured direct down the sights views with ballistic weapons — including Borderlands. There are still some things we’re bouncing around between with respect to how we’re managing weapon slots and equipment with ACM, so I’ll reserve making a commitment on that right now.

Peer review and testing with customers is really important to us in the tuning process. If any of your readers are in Dallas, TX and want to be part of our user testing program, they should check out our website for more information.

PSB: Displaying the aliens themselves is a tricky balance between showing too much and showing too little. What’s your philosophy when it comes to showing them in the game?

RP: It’s been fun for us to dream up the presentations, but we’re not approaching it like no one knows what a xenomorph looks like. We do have some awesome new variants to reveal for the first time, so we try to get value out of those moments for the experience when you’re playing the game.

PSB: Finally, how important is the multiplayer experience to Aliens: Colonial Marines? Can you give us any hint as to the way it will play?

RP: Multiplayer is a big deal for us. It’s getting a huge amount of attention. I think we’ll be looking for some opportunities very soon to get some people outside of our studios, including some journalists, to have a chance to preview the multiplayer game and play a bit of it. We’re really looking forward to testing it against other eyes and getting some feedback from that, so it shouldn’t be too long before we make that happen.

Like headshots in slo-mo with artistic blood spurts? Boy, do we have the video for you! This trailer for Ghost Recon: Future Soldier offers gadget porn, stylish state-sanctioned murder and lines that could only come from the future -- "one bullet, two dead."

Depth Hunter‘s a Fisht Piercing Shooter, if you’ll allow me to be so dreadfully mean to the English language: you’re a diver in the not-so-competitive world of spear fishing. That means you take deeeeeeep breath (why not interactively take part in the blog post by holding your breath?) and plunge into the azure waters looking (still holding your breath?) for fish to spike with your harpoon (now find a nearby body of water to dive into, like a lake or a spill in the nearest public lavatory). No air tanks: just you, your mask, your spear and what’s in your lungs.(more…)

#gamingappoftheday Having reviewed the likes of Matt Hazzard: Blood, Bath and Beyond, I was prepared to dislike One Epic Game, a platformer set in, let's see here, yes, "an alien invasion right in the middle of a zombie outbreak in a fantasy kingdom somewhere in a post-apocalyptic wasteland." That's from a cutscene. "With World War II also involved somehow." More »

If you're a Silver subscriber on Xbox Live, downloading the Mass Effect 3 demo will allow you to cease being that one weirdo in your group who can't ever play with his friends online because he's a cheapskate. Upon downloading the demo, all Silver members will be automatically bumped up to Gold level until Mass Effect 3 launches on March 6.

The demo will be available on February 14 not only for Xbox 360 users, but also PC and PS3. Players will get a taste of the multiplayer component and sample the Reaper attack on Earth that opens the game.

#death Chen Rong-yu of Taiwan checked into an internet cafe in the city of New Taipei on Tuesday evening to play popular multiplayer PC game League of Legends. Wednesday evening a waitress found the 23-year-old sitting rigidly in his chair, hands outstretched towards the computer. More »

Head over to the new Sony Entertainment Network Blog today for the latest updates on new movies, music and more!

This week, the Video Unlimited library adds Dream House, In Time, and The Thing. Plus, watch Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie before it hits theatres. See this week’s update here.

The Music Unlimited service features new releases from Lana Del Rey, Leonard Cohen, and The Jealous Sound, as well as titles from Jack White, M.I.A, Gotye, Scorpions, and more!

Patrick teams up with Ryan to turn Samur-I into Samur-US.

This is what happens when you get busy. I did not know that Gotham City Imposters, Monolith’s inventive multiplayer FPS where players are copycats of Batman and his various villains, has a defensive gnome that tazers people. Where I was and what I was doing at the time to not know I don’t know, but I now begrudge whatever it was I don’t remember doing. I hopefully won’t begrudge playing the game on February the 8th, and peeping into the beta tactics video below, I don’t think I will.(more…)

#theelderscrolls There's a lot of talking here at the beginning. A lot of boring crafting stuff. Stick with it. Eventually, you'll see that you really can get lightsabers in Skyrim. And canon be damned, they are awesome. More »

#china A man in a blue jacket crouched, lighting a firecracker on a manhole. The children stuck their fingers in their ears. More »

THQ CEO Brian Farrell started yesterday's third quarter earnings call with investors by saying, "On our last call we told you we anticipated that our third quarter would be the largest in our company's history. Unfortunately, we were wrong."

The company announced a $56 million loss for the quarter ending December 31, 2011, nearly triple the loss of the same period last year. Sales also slumped slightly from $314.6 million to $305.4 million

Despite the success of Saints Row: The Third and WWE '12, the discontinued uDraw tablet took a majority of blame for the company's ill condition.

"Revenues were lower by about $100 million," Farrell explained. "We've got 1.4 million [uDraw units] still in inventory we haven't sold that we planned on selling." He estimated about $80 million of the lost revenue was from units the company didn't sell, and the other $20 million was from lowering the price of what they did sell. He concluded on the topic, "We would have doubled the profitability in the quarter were it not for uDraw."

THQ is currently attempting to make itself a leaner, more efficient entity. Part of its announced realignment includes pay cuts for the top brass, layoffs of 240 people and seeking help for big-ticket items like the Warhammer 40K MMO. The company didn't provide estimates for its expected financial condition for the final quarter of the year.

Last night I dreamt the sim industry was in the grip of canal mania. You couldn’t move on Steam without tripping over a new barge or waterway for CanalWorks. The forums at SimHQ were thronged with folk debating lock physics and butty boat damage models. Thrustmaster was on the verge of bringing out a heavy-duty HOTAT (Hands-On-Throttle-And-Tiller) controller… Things had gone so far, I was contemplating changing the name of this column to The Tow Path.

How sad it was to wake, and realise that Simulatia had no interest in plodding narrowboats. How galling to have to replace planned pieces on Kanaal Koningen (A work-in-progress Amsterdam- based sim incorporating Seventeenth Century history and tycoon elements) and ‘Idle Women, Vital Work’ (A new add-on from Just Barges) with articles on ZDSim and Over Flanders Fields. (more…)

Ever since Kinect was announced, we've wondered why EA has taken its sweet time to implement the tech in its Tiger Woods PGA Tour series. Why fake-golf with a controller when you could fake-golf as the controller, right? Finally, Kinect comes to the series in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13.

A series of vignettes shows off some of the Kinect features, from the obvious such as miming a golf swing, to the more impressive like using voice and hand gestures to set up shot approach. Another video after the break shows Tiger fiddling with Kinect in an earlier build of the game -- turns out being amazing at golf in real life doesn't necessarily guarantee success in-game, as you can see when Tiger slices a shot into a bunker right off the green.

#soulcalibur If you allow people the freedom to create things, you can count on one thing: sex. Just look at all the dick faces people made with Nintendo Miis. Nintendo Miis! They're the most innocuous things imaginable, and bam, cocks. More »

Deep in the year 1977, an upstart fanzine called Sideburns printed a drawing of three guitar chords. They were A, E and G, if you really want to know. They were scribbled down the page like one of those desperate reminders in Memento. “This is a chord. This is another. This is a third,” the reminder said. “Now form a band.”(more…)

#deathsmiles DeathSmiles is a horizontal shmup from bullet hell developer Cave. It's not my favorite Cave title by any stretch, but it does have a sizeable following due to its Christmas-in-Hell asethetic. Plus, the game stars Gothic Lolitas, like batgirl Casper. People seem to like those. More »

Zen Studios, the developer of Pinball FX2 and Zen Pinball, did say it was going bigger this year with different ideas, which leads us to pinball-meets-RPG hybrid: Epic Quest. The new table will be available through your Zen pinball platform of choice on XBLA, PSN, Apple iOS and Android this month.

"It is our quest to deliver the most entertaining and original pinball tables, and Epic Quest delivers on both fronts," said Mel Kirk, Zen's VP of Marketing and Public Relations. "With a wink and a nudge towards classic RPG tropes, Epic Quest blends frantic pinball action, obsessive character building, and liberally applied tongue-in-cheek humor."

What also makes this table different is experience and loot carry over from one game to the next. Players will be able to dress up the knight Max and defeat monsters to collect epic gear. It's an interesting hook to the classic fail state of any other pinball table.

#cosplay Way before cosplay was mainstream, Italy's Giorgia was doing her thing, dressing up as game and anime characters. She's been cosplaying since 1997, which, in internet time, must be a century. More »

Some days you click on a trailer and realise the developers have mapped out your life for the two months following their game’s release. Assuming Team Fortress 3 isn’t squeezed out in Summer of this year, I’ll be jetpacking around on Natural Selection 2, Unknown Worlds’ Aliens-inspired FPS/RTS multiplayer game. Here’s why.(more…)

Times are hard at THQ and that’s relative to the general hardness of the hour for the majority of people who rely on one of the world’s known currencies to secure food and shelter. The publisher is under threat of NASDAQ delisting, with its stock currently below $1 a share, and over the next year 240 staff will be losing their jobs. The company has shared its release schedule, which shows that Metro: Last Light is now scheduled for an early 2013 release. Other releases of note are the new game from Left 4 Dead’s Turtle Rock. That’s due between April 2013 and March 2014, as are Dark Millennium Online and Del Toro’s inSANE. Before April 2013, it’s Metro and “unannounced core titles”.

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Retro-game host DotEmu has released, in classic horror-puzzle form, The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, further supporting our theory that both titles were an extensive viral ad campaign for red Slurpees at 7/11. Both titles are $10 each and available for download here and -- look out there's something over there!

#gravityrush Sony invited a group of Japanese press to its offices to check out upcoming PS Vita game Gravity Rush. These types of tours can start to blur into each other, with game developers giving the press the hard sell. But this tour had something I'd never seen before: whiteboard drawings! More »

BWAARRRR, LOCK AND LOAD, BWARRRRR, LAUNCH DETECTED, BWEEEEEEEE, RATATATATAATA…ARRGHLE…KABOOM…shhhhhhhh.

That seems to be the script for Ghost Recon: Future Soldier judging by the gameplay footage in this new trailer. Sure, there are missiles launching and helicopters strafing entire continents with vicious intent, but there’s also sneaky silenced sniping, creeping up and stabbing, and a great deal of encouragement to fight dirty. “Only the dead fight fair” is the tagline and it’s not a curveball announcing the arrival of hordes of rulebook-wielding zombies but rather a way of saying, ‘do whatever is necessary’. Position yourself within a shrub upon a hilltop and observe the trailer through a thermal imaging binocuscope.

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#loveplus You might think this statue of Nene Anegasaki from Konami's love sim Love Plus looks pretty nice. You might think it's well sculpted and well put together. But wait until you see it in pieces. More »

Well here’s a thing. You may remember that last January there was a flurry of excitement at the prospect of a new Cannon Fodder game. The 1993 Amiga classic still generates a lot of love, and people especially like arguing about whether Cannon Fodder 2 was an acceptable sequel, and whether Stuart Campbell ruined it with his sticky-up hair. Let’s fight about that now! But a third never happened, until the peculiarity of Codemasters licensing the title for a Russian-only third part developed by GFI. Codies quickly distanced themselves from it, and things fell silent. But now every other site on the internet has reported the spotting of a YouTube video of some footage by Twitterite superannuation. And, well, it looks like Cannon Fodder with improved graphics.

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#culturesmash Hello Kitty is an icon. You don't only find the cat in video games, on toilet paper, and even an infamous vibrator. And now, Hello Kitty has a dentist office. More »

Max Payne 3: Bullet Gargles finally has a PC release date. I thought I’d be cool and mark the June 1st release on my calendar by shooting at the date, marking the special occasion with a bullet hole, but then I realised it’s out on the 29th of May in North America. I tried to flip the calendar over with another bullet, but things got out of hand. If they want to follow my gunspree release schedule, Rockstar will just have to release it on June 12th, The Corner of My Monitor, My Foot, and Next Door’s Housekeeper. While I bandage up and shop online for a new identity, distract yourselves with the new trailer they released.(more…)

According to some typically cryptic words on the Team Fortress 2 blog, 2012 holds a “secret project” for the game, and they promise it is neither a hat, nor a map. But they don’t say what it actually is. And there comes the promise that this year will finally see the final Meet The Team video, giving the Pyro the coverage she so deserves. And apparently it’s going to contain an awful lot of blood. But no mention of fire. Finally, there will apparently be a more imminently revealed secret related to the Saxxy Awards. But who knows.

So I challenge RPS readers to speculate – what is the next new inclusion for the game? An entirely new game mode? A new character to muddle all the balancing? An RPG set in the TF2 universe in which you play as a struggling Scout, trying to find his way in the brutal world? A new hat?