Aliens: Colonial Marines Message Board older than one year ago

Gamekyo has discovered an image of what appears to be a collector's edition of Aliens: Colonial Marines. Based on the unconfirmed evidence, the collector's edition will include a nifty display box, several in-game weapons, a new "USMC Academy Firing Range" game mode and the USCM Dossier, which offers "essential briefing notes on the Xenomorph infestation." We're assuming the more salient points will cover acid blood and secret mouths.

What's that? Oh yeah, it also includes a badass power loader statue. Despite all that, Sega tells Joystiq that it is "not commenting on this rumor."

Gearbox Software has spawned a few new Aliens: Colonial Marines screenshots on its official Facebook page, featuring plenty of high res slime and grime. Most of them show said aliens fighting said marines, though the shot above looks like it might be the exception. Get a room, you two!

#alienscolonialmarines Gearbox Software pumped out another six screenshots of its upcoming Aliens: Colonial Marines over the game's official Facebook page this afternoon. The game is still on course for a 2012 release, as these grabs are meant to show. They also show wrecked infrastructure, rampaging xenomorphs and humans in charge of the galaxy's least desirable Orkin franchise. More »

#aliens We've seen this Aliens: Colonial Marines demonstration twice now: Crecente caught it at E3 and I saw it at Gamescom. We both walked away rather impressed. Now you can see how you walk away. More »

This was shown in private at E3 earlier in the year, but the eleven-minute presentation has just turned up on SEGA blog. It shows off a bunch of game footage and is narrated by Randy Pitchford. He claims that the aim of the game is to creating the Aliens movie in videogame form. It’s not looking like a bad attempt that, either.

Watch it below.(more…)

For months, you've relied on our words -- insightful though they may be -- to illustrate the extraterrestrial horror of the E3 Aliens: Colonial Marines demo. Today, you can use actual moving pictures to relive the experience. Just check out the developer walkthrough posted above!

#aliens In this lengthy video of Sega's Aliens: Colonial Marines, Gearbox head Randy Pitchford walks us through some new gameplay for the upcoming game. More »

This information comes from a Google translation, so I don't want to pull data and end up having it be incorrect. I've posted the Google translation below, and you can make of it what you will until we have an official translation.

Thus, there is little doubt that, apart from the version PC , which will run on U Wii will be another level of PS3 / Xbox 360 , console, Nintendo could offer " a unique visual record of current console and offering a gaming experience beyond the current generation e "while confirming that" the return made ​​by Nintendo to a more traditional gameplay is a source of satisfaction that should attract new players . " In addition, the gameplay will mablette quite unique as you point the camera at the screen for additional data, an optional camera will be displayed when you play in a conventional manner, without seeking the screen, thus allowing to keep a close eye on what's happening behind you. Other ideas are still developing and Gearbox draws even among those in the community.

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"Hey, where is The PAX 10?" An enforcer pointed up, another didn't even know. The Mega 64 guys, whose merchandise booth was around the corner from The PAX 10, couldn't even tell any of us where it was.

That's a problem.

I don't have much interest in checking out games from the major publishers at PAX. Sure, I'm looking forward to Aliens: Colonial Marines, Mass Effect 3 and Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, but all of 'em are coming down the pike soon enough. I'll probably encounter each of them multiple times in the next few months--it's just how the media cycle works.

The PAX 10 features games from every platform, including iOS. Something for just about everyone.

Spending an afternoon milling around The PAX 10 is one of my favorite activities at PAX Prime and PAX East. Some games will go underground for years, some will never live up to their potential, some will be picked up by a massive publisher and maybe, just maybe, become industry sensations. I've said it before, but if you want a snapshot glance at the future of games, tour the PAX 10. Everything's right in front of you.

Except it wasn't this year. The PAX 10 was on the sixth floor of the Washington State Convention Center, two escalators above the main hall, without great signage to point traffic in the right direction.

The lack of appropriate signage is besides the point, though.

What made The PAX 10's previous location so special was the inability to miss it. The PAX 10's booth--if you can call it that--has never been as flashy or expansive as something like this year's monstrous Firefall area, but if you were walking towards the "big" games, The PAX 10 was in your peripheral vision. You were almost assured to find it, and perhaps something great might grab your eye!

Super Meat Boy? Bastion? Retro City Rampage? Among others, these are all games that generated unmistakable buzz, thanks to appearing in The PAX 10. It helped make them what they are today.

Developers and attendees I spoke weren't exactly happy, either, expressing marked confusion over the location change. Sure, there were a solid block of people coming through The PAX 10 booth, but the shift upstairs was awfully confusing.

Fez, in development nearly five years now, was lucky to have a PAX 10 spot and its own booth.

You could argue The PAX 10 has become enough of a thing that people will seek it out anyway, but given the massive numbers of people who attend PAX as a whole---there were 70,000 this year!--that's probably untrue. Forcing people to walk within The PAX 10's vicinity helped nudge the kinds of people who don't spend their spare time seeking out neat independently developed video games for their own edification.

I tracked down the spectacular-looking Fez because I've known Phil Fish for years, but how many PAX attendees can say that?

Each year, PAX becomes bigger. More locations, more booths, more games, more people. Change is inevitable, understandable--as are missteps. That said, here's hoping this year was an oversight, part of PAX's growing pains as more corporate money comes in.

PAX has power to change the lives of the developers we cheer for. Hopefully, that's not forgotten.

Onto PAX East, then.

Get More: GameTrailers.com, Aliens: Colonial Marines - GC 11: Acidic Blood Overview, PC Games, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

I checked out Aliens: Colonial Marines when I popped over to the SEGA gamescom booth to say hi to a friend and, within minutes, it became one my highlights of the show. I’m not as familiar with the Aliens films as many – I remember seeing one of them on TV as a child and not sleeping well for a few days – but judging it purely as a shooter, it is looking very impressive.

The level shown was a beautifully lit labyrinth of corridors on-board a craft sent to investigate LV-426, 11 months after Ripley escaped in Aliens. The most memorable aspect for me was the animation of the Xenomorphs and my skin is crawling as I type just thinking about them. This added to the level design, which always leaves you feeling exposed as creatures pour from every angle and air vent, produces an unnerving shooter that piles on the tension.

After the demo, I spoke with Gearbox Chief Creative Officer Brian Martel about working with such an iconic IP and why his team is best suited to bringing the essence of the Aliens films to the interactive space.

Earlier in the week, Rocksteady Studios told us that they had been given the creative freedom to build their own ‘Batman canon’ with the Arkham games. Is that what you’re trying to do with Aliens: Colonial Marines?

That’s exactly what we’re looking to do. Fox has been great to work with and SEGA has been a good partner in building the bridges between developer and IP holder. Fox is a little more flexible with the canon than other companies out there, but they do have to be careful not to annoy directors – if you put together a proposition that assumes a particular film never happened, the director isn’t going to like that very much and Fox may have plans to work with them again in the future.

We’re able to introduce our own elements that we feel are right for the interactive space, whether that’s weapons or new types of aliens, and we’re aware that in doing so we’re adding to the existing canon.

What is the essence of the Aliens films?

The aliens aren’t just looking to kill you, they’re trying to propagate the species and take you elsewhere so they can get you face-hugged. That’s the threat and it forms the scary aspect of the world, and then you also need to have the high action aspect. If you watch the film Aliens, there aren’t too many scare moments; it’s scary because you know what’s going to happen if you get caught but it’s action-packed, and to make a great game like this you have to have lots of aliens, lots of stuff to shoot at. You need the diversity between extremely quiet all the way up to high-octane.

What are the differences between creating fear cinematically, in a film, and doing so in the interactive space?

A lot of it is the same, so you’re going to have audio cues that catch the player unaware and you always want to use some misdirection, drawing the eye to one spot and then making something happen elsewhere. But at the end of the day, with a co-op shooter it’s pretty hard to truly scare the player so that’s why Colonial Marines is more action driven. It’s not like Dead Space, which has a fright around every corner, or something like Condemned, which was pure tension throughout.

We could talk about the Aliens IP all day; what gameplay innovations are you bringing to the table?

You’re going to see a lot of growth in terms of what you expect from a Gearbox game that is co-op focused. Obviously, things like the look and atmosphere belong to the Aliens universe, but underneath you’re going to get a sense of something that is totally Gearbox.

Why is Gearbox the right developer to take on the Aliens IP?

If you take a look at our track record on working with IPs, whether it’s Half Life or James Bond, we’ve been true and honest with what it needs to be. We’re one of the best at that, looking at what gamers want and expect from the license and giving it to them.

What’s more important to Aliens fans: familiarity or surprise?

It’s important to have these little signposts or fan service moments, such as finding out what happened to Burke or seeing what happened to Hudson when he got pulled down. But then you also have people coming in who might never have seen the movies so we’re bringing something for everybody.

If we had a nickel for each of the titular soldiers that gets massacred in this (apparently leaked) trailer for Aliens: Colonial Marines, we'd probably have enough money to afford the therapy we'll need to get over how many titular soldiers we just saw get massacred. Come, join our distress!

#aliens When a handful of Colonial marines face-off against a never-ending swarm of acid-blooded xenomoprhs, the ending is never pretty, and rarely happy. Here's the debut trailer for Aliens: Colonial Marines. More »

There’s nothing official from SEGA, but it looks like this might be the new trailer for Gearbox’s Aliens: Colonial Marines, below. It has come skittering out of the darkness on YouTube, but there’s a good chance SEGA will set the flamethrowers on it if this is a leak.

Regarding the trailer itself, there’s plenty of frantic shooting and yelling but the edit builds up the tension and horror as well. It’s the first time I’ve seen enough of the game to shift from mild anticipation to fervent excitement. Some moments look scripted but they appear to be scares rather than action sequences. If the game can balance the gungho of Aliens with the dread of the first film, it should be a winner.(more…)

Morning all! Sega are showing Aliens: Colonial Marines at Gamescom, and have released some images for us. So while we wait for more information on what the game will actually contain to emerge, we can ponder the images they’ve released, below. All the images in this post can be clicked for full sized shots.(more…)

#firstlook Popular comic artist Chris Bachalo breathes life into the 19 space marines doomed to die this September in Sega and WayForward's Aliens: Infestation for the Nintendo DS. More »

By its own admission, Nintendo's reveal of the Wii U at this year's E3 was less than ideal. There was the initial confusion over whether the Wii U was a new console or merely a new controller for the existing Wii, there was the lack of any real technical specifications revealed, and then there was the fact that the gameplay demonstrations appeared to exhibit a level of graphical quality that merely matched the standards of current generation Xbox 360 and PS3 games rather than exceed them...

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…)

During E3 2011, I entered a gloomy room and found myself before Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford. He was there to show off Aliens: Colonial Marines, the upcoming first-person shooter that’s scheduled to hit the PS3 in 2012. When you hear a developer talk about his game with the passion Pitchford demonstrated, you know the studio is on the right track. Gearbox Software is packed with fans of the Aliens films; seeing the game in action, it shows.

The demo starts with the crash of the U.S.S. Sulaco, the high-tech marine vessel from the second film. You wake up to find yourself in a nightmare, surrounded by xenomorphs with no idea about what is happening. But you’re not alone — you’ll have a group of highly trained marines at your side wielding state-of-the-art military technology, from the iconic pulse rifle and flamethrower to the pulverizing smart gun.

During his presentation, Pitchford assured us that this is the real sequel to Aliens and everything indicates that this is so, from the Marines’ tools (including motion trackers) to the automatic turrets that we saw on the special edition of Aliens; they are all here. The game also featured a cooperative mode for four players and your friends will be able to drop in and drop out of gameplay as they please.

Without a doubt, the most striking element I saw in Aliens: Colonial Marines was the setting and atmosphere. Gearbox is busy perfecting the combination of loneliness, abandonment, and claustrophobia that have become hallmarks of the series. The xenomorphs are more horrific that ever — they’re quick, merciless, and attack in groups that will not give you a moment’s rest. We also saw a new alien who looks like a Queen but is faster, uses its head like a shield, and can charge its enemies. Of course, you have to run away to face it afterwards in a battle that involves a exosuit cargo-loader. You can imagine the rest.

We are a long way off from 2012, but from what we have seen, Gearbox is on the right track. Aliens purist can rest easy, while those passionate about first-person shooters can look forward to a promising co-op experience.

The Aliens: Colonial Marines teaser trailer contains clues that lead to another clip, containing approximately 12 seconds of extra footage...

A game can't just be aimed at a single audience. For the crowded shooter market in particular, you've got to be good, and you've got to appeal to a broad swath of players. Aliens: Colonial Marines might be able to pull that off. It's got four-player, drop-in co-op for the entire campaign. It's got a...

Randy Pitchford, President and CEO of Gearbox software, confirmed Aliens: Colonial Marines is currently in development for Nintendo's Wii successor, Wii U. Speaking at a demo of Colonial Marines on the floor of E3, Pitchford said the title would be coming to PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii U, a...

LOS ANGELES - SEGA of America, Inc., SEGA Europe Ltd. and Gearbox Software today revealed that Aliens: Colonial Marines, is being prototyped and considered for the Nintendo Wii U. In partnership with Twentieth Century Fox Consumer Products and developed by critically acclaimed studio Gearbox Software, Aliens: Colonial Marines for this new gaming console is currently under construction by a dedicated research and development branch within the studio...

Aliens: Colonial Marines from Gearbox Software is getting its long-awaited reveal at E3 2011 next week in Los Angeles. SEGA today confirmed the game will launch in spring 2012 for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3...