It's baffling to me that people are complaining about the graphics while they play an alien franchise game. It's like shoveling shit into your mouth and complaining about the texture being off.

"The turret scene was a really iconic scene." Wait, what? You didn't get enough of the turret scene with Half-Life 2 and it's demi-sequels to tide you over for the next two decades?

For an Aliens game, graphics and atmospherics are key. It's supposed to be a survival-horror game, and if it looks like junk, it's not scary. It wouldn't even have to be high-def next-gen graphics. Half-Life 2's Ravenholm is still nice and scary after all these years.

The real disappointment is that the franchise looks like it was MADE for a first-person shooter, and just about every attempt has royally fucked it up.

As for the turret scene being iconic, I think what you're missing is that they don't mean "we want a turret section to our game." I think they mean "in the movie, the turret scene showed you that you were facing an alien horde that was so massive and hard to deter, they'd take 2000 rounds of ammo and what must've been high casualties before deciding to find another way to get to their prey." It was chilling to watch (in the film) the turrets constantly firing into the dark, locking onto motion, yet the creatures wouldn't stop coming until well after even wild animals probably would've taken the hint. This adaptation wasn't anywhere close to being as compelling.

That was solid rebuttal. You win this time, aliens-game-liking-person.

Actually, I don't like any of the Aliens games precisely because they, well, suck at trying to make a decent survival horror shooter.

It's just so baffling. It should be pretty easy, compared to making a new friggin' game. I don't know, maybe the IP is cursed.

How did there get to be that many Aliens from only "60-70 families"?

The reason no one can make a good Aliens game is the source material has already been mined dry by other franchises. The movie was so influential, its art and characters and key scenes have wound up in a million games already. They have been reimagined and improved upon by multiple iterations of shooter sequels to the point that anything that stays true to the source material is going to feel dated. Working on Aliens is asking developers to incrementally improve on such franchises as Halo and Half-Life. That's really hard, even Valve has given up. To do it and stay true to a 30 year old movie? They're fucked.

Yeah, what I really want to see is a supercut of every time a character asks something like "Wait... But the Sulaco was on that prison planet in Alien 3, why is it back here now?" or "Wait... You're dead, and this makes no sense, how are you here right now?" only to be answered with "WHO CARES AH'M A MARINE DAMNIT SHOOT THIS THING"

Seriously, the game not only seems to not care about all of the massive plot holes it creates, it practically gets off on them.

Heading off to read the plot!

What the shit though was with the Sulaco being infested with hundreds of aliens?

The first part of the marines section was very atmospheric. What made it difficult for me wasn't so much the game being "hard", just that it made me very jumpy and nervous.

Yeah, it was really really intense! I'm not particularly into that either but as a piece of art evoking powerful emotions it was a great success imo..

Also the 3 different characters missions had totally different vibes.
I liked the predator ones.. antithesis of marines ones; Slow paced, stealthy and feeling totally chilled and in control of your prey :)

I dunno, seeing as how I can't see either of those games ever turning out as anything short as a complete fiasco with as much time they spent in development, I think Gearbox deserves some praise for at least getting us all to shut the fuck up about them already.

i think everyone's right in a way though: Gearbox should just go all out on the "This game is was only playable by yesterday's standards and you know it" and release them with running commentary from former developers and comedians alternately riffing and speaking to what could have been.

actually trying to release it as something anyone in their right mind should be excited for is just kinda exploitative and sad, and undermines customer confidence for no good reason.

tldr: STOP TRYING TO SALVAGE, COMPANY THAT WILL NEVER SEE THIS MESSAGE. CURATE.

I actually think IGN is the best for reviews...I know they are massive corporate whores, but they have discipline!!!
The reviews are less about the reviewers quirky little anecdotes and more about technical things that you can measure to some extant.. are the graphics/sound good quality? is it buggy? are the mechanics solid? how much content? etc.
Thats what I want to know about a game from a review. After that stuff only I can decide if I'll actually *like* it

Colonial Marines is special in that just about all of games journalism is trashing it. Aside from EGM (which has nothing to do with the magazine of old aside from the name) which gave it a 9/10

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/aliens-colonial-marines/crit ic-reviews

In an industry where a rating of 70 really means "average", an average score of 42 is like a hacksaw castration

LJ: I use to work in the game press and can give you at least my inner perspective on why awful review articles can come from any outlet. For every good, critical thinking, knowledgeable, hard working critic in the game press -- there are 10-20 staff and freelance writers that would be lucky to intern for a press gig covering any other entertainment medium (I'm not innocent of this: I definitely was not developed when I got my first gig, but I was extremely lucky to be working with some of the best writers/editors at the time that, excuse the horrible cliche, "took me under their wing").

There's just no incentive in keeping facts straight, knowing what you're writing about, writing a great article and having integrity -- outside of having pride in your work (for me, the pride of not allowing someone on a forum claim my articles were inaccurate was everything). The pay is awful, the onslaught of crappy games can be relentless and in the end no one will remember or care about anything you wrote 6 months down the line (if that). Even if you are the next huge critical intellect of the medium, your revolutionary interpretations may wind up edited down so that you aren't over the heads of the average reader of these sites. If you're really unlucky and the lead editors are bending to the will of their marketing and sales department, you could be forced to alter your criticism anyways (a much more serious offense amongst those working in the press than readers believe).

This all helps create a game press that suffers from a revolving door of mediocrity, fueled by an entire Internet full of people who think they can do better for cheaper and a business model whose main source of revenue is Internet ads. The truly great writers/editors eventually 1)break off and run their own site 2) utilize the game press as a jumping point to do something...anything...else in the industry 3) just burn out.

For every Giant Bomb, Insert Credit, Gamasutra and the original 1up: there is late 90's IGN, Kotaku and the original Gamesradar. Just like for every Seanbaby and Old Man Murray, there's a The Mushroom (really dating myself now).

As for myself and what I read? I mostly don't. Several years ago I got fed up with the sloppy coverage, bad review articles and overall horrible work ethic of the people writing this stuff. I still read the occasional Giant Bomb feature (Great guys), Insert Credit (ditto) article and definitely read Gamasutra (obviously) -- but otherwise I'll put up with being ignorant of what is hot and new over being aggravated at the coverage from other sites. This has at least made the medium exciting again, in that I can discover new shit I never heard/read of for myself. It's unfortunate that everything I run into now days, however, is cliche and boring.

Oh yeah, so to answer the other part of your question. Do people still read from a place that gives an obvious turd a high score review? Yes. Why? If the reader stopped reading gaming sites that were guilty of doing that, they'd run out of gaming sites to read.

Sorry for the horrible rant.