Aliens Colonial
Marines
Well yes if I paid £70 for it I’d be unhappy too, but
frankly if you were stupid enough to pay the absurd pre order price for this
game then you should just look upon this as a valuable life experience on the
value of money. As a 10 year old I spent
the £10 I’d been saving for what felt like my entire life on The Wrong Trousers
VHS and I imagine the crushing sense of disappointment I felt when I finished a
barely 30 minute long video is something those of you who pre-ordered this game
can relate to.
However as you might now be able to tell I didn’t buy this
for £70, I bought it for £10, which is more or less now the maximum price I’m
prepared to pay for anything since 'The Wallace and Gromit Incident’.
And I liked Aliens Colonial Marines. I
liked the fact it wasn’t trying to be anything more than a pick up and play
alien annihilation fest.
Don’t get me wrong I like Half Life 2 as much as the next sociophobic
recluse but frankly I could do without every shooter since trying to mimic
it. As far as I’m concerned there is
still a market for mindless ‘shoot anything that moves’ games like Doom – even
if that market does just consist of myself and other like-minded desensitized chimpanzees prone to bouts of aggression.
So where is this review (ha!) going? Are all the poor reviews this game received simply
down to its style being out of fashion and therefore not considered cool by
today’s media who can’t stop banging on about how much they love anything that
Valve has dripped long lines of hot spunk over?
Well not quite. Even
I can’t honestly say the graphics at times aren’t far off early PS2 level. We’re talking flamethrowers that fire 4
increasingly large orange oblongs and explosions in space that wouldn’t look
out of place on an early Wing Commander game.
And then there was that bit where I had to punch a large
alien to death with a powerloader, only this proved impossible because the
large alien had the ability to hide from my punches by clipping in and out of a
wall. And the times my squad mates would stare directly at me
without so much as batting an eyelid as I mowed down the horde of aliens that
swarmed in from behind them.
Apparently the story was also shit, but then again I wasn’t
paying it any more notice than I might pay an attention seeking 3 year old
child. And since 99% of video games contain shit
stories I honestly can’t mark down Aliens Colonial Marines on that
account. Frankly it’s a GAME and if I wanted
a good story I’d read a BOOK. If I was expecting
to get any insight about the human condition from an Aliens video game then I’d
probably be the same kind of idiot who’d expect to get meaningful insight from
watching an animated cartoon about a plasticine man and a sarcastic dog.
