I was going to review Mass Effect 2, but that would involve thinking about it without actually playing it. Apparently I'm not quite ready for that.
So I'm going to talk about Aliens vs Predator instead.
For those not nerdy enough to know, AvP started out as a comic. In 1989, Dark Horse employees gathered to come up with some new ideas. They considered pairing up two different characters, then moved on to setting them against each other instead. Suggestions were getting increasingly silly (Roachmill vs Flaming Carrot) when a guy called Chris said, "Aliens vs Predator." Within minutes the publisher was on the phone to Fox to talk about licensing issues.
The comic was a great success. When Predator 2 came out, those who noticed it raved about the xenomorph skull among the trophies in the final confrontation scene. I think a new AvP comic came out every once in a while for several years thereafter.
Two AvP games came out for the PC in '99 and 2001; you could play as an alien, colonial marine or predator, and in the second game their stories were related, happening more or less at the same place and time. AvP2 also had multiplayer. I still remember when I was playing as an alien, I leapt halfway across the map and landed on a marine. He went splat. Body parts everywhere. For someone who typically sucks at first person shooter type combat, this was a golden moment.
I guess the poor expansion for AvP2 put an end to things until those godsawful movies... alright, yes, I own the first one on dvd because... well. As Scott Kurtz once wrote, the movie was half an hour of awesome wrapped in an hour of suck. To be honest I expected this going in, as the Hollywood of the 21st century has already become well known for taking a good idea and turning it into diarrhetic shit. I'm not talking about game-to-movie adaptations, Uwe Boll has the monopoly on that. I mean anything-to-movie adaptations. How many saw the English miniseries Ultraviolet? How many saw the Hollywood movie? How the hell did something so good get turned into another sucky Milla Jovovich movie? It's so bad, noone's even sharing it on Limewire!
So instead of setting the movie in the future where it belongs, it's in the present day, so we can "relate" to the humans. But to relate to anyone, we have to care about them. I'd be surprised if anyone did. Sure, the condom gun comparison was amusing, but we already know that whoever's carrying is gonna be target practice for the preds, and everyone else is gonna be eaten or facehugged by bugs. Any humans in an AvP story are there solely to provide a human perspective on the epic battle between the other two. How is anyone armed with anything less than a pulse rifle supposed to survive?
They even took the pussy out of the pred's face.
I guess there are too many of us AvP fans out there, because apparently the movie did well enough to provoke a sequel. This time bugs end up in Small Town, USA and a pred drops in to clean up the mess. The first movie had already been liberal with "artistic licence." This time they went all out and had the predalien vomit bug embryos into pregnant women just so there'd be enough of them to last the whole crappy movie.
So now a third AvP game is out. Not a movie spinoff, those never count. Something resembling the first two games. Unfortunately, the resemblance is disappointing, since those games were made ten years ago. The graphics don't seem to have improved much. Oh, there are very particular improvements in the gameplay, but sometimes even these ruin immersion.
I'll cite a specific example. This is the first AvP where the player can make use of a pred's ability at voice mimicry from the movies. Except in the game, the pred is throwing his voice, and he's doing it with a couple of stock phrases; and "Come on out, motherfucker," is not something you expect a marine to reply to with "Okay, I'm coming." Never mind the fact that the plasmacaster no longer sounds like it should, or the Wolverine ripoff with the wristblades. It also seems you can only use that collapsable spear as a javelin now.
The bug campaign was shortchanged, and you didn't used to have to press a button to climb into a ventilation shaft. Most of the love went into the colonial marine, with liberal amounts of Lance Henriksen's voice thrown in for the sake of continuity... and when I realised it was intended as continuity with the recent crappy movies... imagine someone throwing up as you kiss them. That's pretty much how it translates from Nerdish.
So I'm going to talk about Aliens vs Predator instead.
For those not nerdy enough to know, AvP started out as a comic. In 1989, Dark Horse employees gathered to come up with some new ideas. They considered pairing up two different characters, then moved on to setting them against each other instead. Suggestions were getting increasingly silly (Roachmill vs Flaming Carrot) when a guy called Chris said, "Aliens vs Predator." Within minutes the publisher was on the phone to Fox to talk about licensing issues.
The comic was a great success. When Predator 2 came out, those who noticed it raved about the xenomorph skull among the trophies in the final confrontation scene. I think a new AvP comic came out every once in a while for several years thereafter.
Two AvP games came out for the PC in '99 and 2001; you could play as an alien, colonial marine or predator, and in the second game their stories were related, happening more or less at the same place and time. AvP2 also had multiplayer. I still remember when I was playing as an alien, I leapt halfway across the map and landed on a marine. He went splat. Body parts everywhere. For someone who typically sucks at first person shooter type combat, this was a golden moment.
I guess the poor expansion for AvP2 put an end to things until those godsawful movies... alright, yes, I own the first one on dvd because... well. As Scott Kurtz once wrote, the movie was half an hour of awesome wrapped in an hour of suck. To be honest I expected this going in, as the Hollywood of the 21st century has already become well known for taking a good idea and turning it into diarrhetic shit. I'm not talking about game-to-movie adaptations, Uwe Boll has the monopoly on that. I mean anything-to-movie adaptations. How many saw the English miniseries Ultraviolet? How many saw the Hollywood movie? How the hell did something so good get turned into another sucky Milla Jovovich movie? It's so bad, noone's even sharing it on Limewire!
So instead of setting the movie in the future where it belongs, it's in the present day, so we can "relate" to the humans. But to relate to anyone, we have to care about them. I'd be surprised if anyone did. Sure, the condom gun comparison was amusing, but we already know that whoever's carrying is gonna be target practice for the preds, and everyone else is gonna be eaten or facehugged by bugs. Any humans in an AvP story are there solely to provide a human perspective on the epic battle between the other two. How is anyone armed with anything less than a pulse rifle supposed to survive?
They even took the pussy out of the pred's face.
I guess there are too many of us AvP fans out there, because apparently the movie did well enough to provoke a sequel. This time bugs end up in Small Town, USA and a pred drops in to clean up the mess. The first movie had already been liberal with "artistic licence." This time they went all out and had the predalien vomit bug embryos into pregnant women just so there'd be enough of them to last the whole crappy movie.
So now a third AvP game is out. Not a movie spinoff, those never count. Something resembling the first two games. Unfortunately, the resemblance is disappointing, since those games were made ten years ago. The graphics don't seem to have improved much. Oh, there are very particular improvements in the gameplay, but sometimes even these ruin immersion.
I'll cite a specific example. This is the first AvP where the player can make use of a pred's ability at voice mimicry from the movies. Except in the game, the pred is throwing his voice, and he's doing it with a couple of stock phrases; and "Come on out, motherfucker," is not something you expect a marine to reply to with "Okay, I'm coming." Never mind the fact that the plasmacaster no longer sounds like it should, or the Wolverine ripoff with the wristblades. It also seems you can only use that collapsable spear as a javelin now.
The bug campaign was shortchanged, and you didn't used to have to press a button to climb into a ventilation shaft. Most of the love went into the colonial marine, with liberal amounts of Lance Henriksen's voice thrown in for the sake of continuity... and when I realised it was intended as continuity with the recent crappy movies... imagine someone throwing up as you kiss them. That's pretty much how it translates from Nerdish.
It's supposed to be like Darth Vader's little square front panel:
Oh, and my jacket finds your lack of faith disturbing.