Grave Gamer News & Views — xenomorphs

motherfuckinscifi:

Unreleased concept art from Neill Blomkamp’s Alien project.

Blomkamp’s Alien > Prometheus II (a prequel to the Alien films that Ridley Scott giddily confirmed would feature no xenomorphs).

Hollywood needs to hand Neill two things. A blank check and permission to do whatever the fuck he wants.

Why am I just finding out there was a cancelled Saturday morning cartoon based on Aliens? I’m a bad fan. A terrible fan.

Dubbed Operation: Aliens, the series followed Ellen Ripley and an assortment of colonial marines that retired from G.I. Joe’s unit in every way save for their uber-machismo appearances and inspired one-liners.

Ripley and co. defend different colonies from attacking xenomorphs (including new, animal-based hybrids) and, presumably, high five afterward.

Set to coincide with the 1992 release of Alien 3, production came to a crashing halt for no explicable reason. Except maybe for the fact that the bad guy in the show was a penis-shaped monster that incubated in people’s chests before bursting out of their rib cage. Still, that didn’t stop the Quaalude-fueled producers of the world from adapting several other R-rated features like Robocop, Rambo, and Starship Troopers for the kiddies.

Kenner’s supplementing toyline of mantis aliens, snake aliens, and other strange hybrids (which I owned as a wee lad) had to change their name once the show’s plug was pulled, but some merchandise already hit the shelves with the branding intact.

Yes, Operation: Aliens probably would’ve been toxically cheesy and cripplingly dumb. But that was part of the fun of these cartoons. Goddamn, I would kill to hear this show’s theme song. But, alas, no recording of the pilot seems to exist (for all we know, watching it could be like opening up the Ark of the Covenant; leaving no survivors).

Isolated

Fun fact about Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation – the game is playable from start to finish. With the core experience laid out, the developer is using the time between now and the game’s Q4 release date to polish, tweak, and refine the game.

I’m feeling pretty good about this one. It helps that it looks phenomenal. But I feel especially good that CA is approaching the material at a different angle and that, all around, even on Sega’s part, Isolation is being handled with the same meticulous care you’d show a newborn baby. Or a bomb capable of leaving a crater the size of Nebraska.

Check out more screens hereabouts.

First Bits of Alien: Isolation Footage

Okay, so we’ve been here before. The months and weeks leading up to the turdening that was Aliens: Colonial Marines, I just about posted and gabbed over every shred of media trickled by that game’s superb marketing team (superb because they tricked me into thinking I wouldn’t regret buying that game).

So let us walk with trepidation. That being out of the...

Alien: Isolation Officially Revealed

I’ve been following every space scrap of news on this project for a while now – Alien and its film progeny, Jimmy Cameron’s opus in particular, being my favorite series in the history of the silver screen – but it’s refreshing to have the loading bay doors officially blown off of Alien: Isolation.

Though the game is set in the first-person, don’t expect Isolation to be yet another Hoo-rah-tastic corridor shooter as hollow as the sound of pulse rifle fire. Creative Assembly is seeking to create the Alien game no other developer has tried before: a methodically paced, suffocatingly atmospheric love letter to the bump-in-the-dark horror Ridley Scott famously put to film back in 1979.

Fifteen years after the Nostromo vanished from the star map, Amanda Ripley finds herself aboard the Sevastopol Station, the floating husk of a former trading port. The Company says she may find an answer to her mother’s disappearance there. What she does find is one ruthless, near unstoppable killing machine of an extraterrestrial that will stalk her, find her, and end her unpleasantly unless she uses her wits and what little supplies she can scrounge up to survive. Like mother, like daughter.

As much as I’d love for a team of perfect fans to crack Aliens’ formula and deliver a riveting action game instead of a derivative train wreck, I’m glad we’re not gagging on another space marine shooter. The films are, and always have been, firmly rooted in horror. It’s time video games stopped treating xenomorphs as canon fodder, having you blast apart hordes of them. It’s time to be afraid of them again.

Alien: Isolation, expected for late this year, is releasing for PC, PS3, 360, PS4, and Xbox One.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream Watching This Trailer!