Colonial Marines: It's An Aliens Thing

To my surprise, Amazon delivered my copy of the Aliens: Colonial Marines on Saturday. Only four days behind the February 12th release. The collector's edition looked good. Damn good. The game? Well, that's another story.

After playing the game for just one hour, I had seen and killed more xenomorphs than were featured in the entire Aliens movie. That's a lot of dead aliens in just one hour. Too many, in my opinion. Then I had to start killing Weyland-Yutani goons and that just pissed me off. I really don't like the FPS that features completely incompetent human enemies and allies. To just shine the spotlight on my first two computer-controlled squad members: Shaquille O'Neal and Bella were idiotic, invincible, and made of ammunition. At first I thought it was funny to watch them shoot the walls and boxes that enemy soldiers were using as cover. It was hilarious, and then it just became sad. They were just tracking enemies and firing blindly (and they hardly ever killed anything).

I just want to put Shaq and Bella in an empty hallway with two enemy goons, weld the doors shut at both ends of the hallway, and watch all four of them pretend to be stormtroopers. Again, at first it would be hilarious, and then it would be embarrassing. But the really sad part would unfold when I dropped two aliens in the hallway from ceiling vents. Deadly xenomorphs my ass. There were points when Shaq, Bella, and I were waiting behind a closed door listening to the mad-scientist mercenaries fighting with the aliens. And I was thinking: alright, we'll just let them duke it out and we'll clean up whatever's left. That's a terrible strategy because apparently computer-controlled mercenaries and computer-controlled aliens just play patty-cake with claws and bullets.

Just kill them all yourself. It's the only way to be sure.

A couple things did impress me. I was worried when I used all of my pulse rifle's secondary fire grenades. A sliver of survival-horror right there. I did find Hudson's chestbuster-ruined body and his special pulse rifle; however, the legendary weapon did not make my character scream obscenities whenever he fired at aliens (I was mildly disappointed).

The best part was being chased by a larger alien (one that I believe birthed from Hudson) that the Internet is calling the Raven. Maybe there's a connection between the loud-mouthed bird from Edgar Allen Poe's famous poem and Hudson being the voice of ominous despair. I like it, let’s go with that.

Hudson's raven xenomorph chased me into my absolute favorite part of the game: the sewers aka home of the boiler aliens. The sewer was creepy by itself; to add to the tension, I was completely unarmed. Up to my knees in sewage, I found myself surrounded by alien carcasses. The character calls them husks; but they reminded me of the white, dying E.T. White and crusty as a sign of decay works. It was unnerving to see the first supposedly-dead alien body get up and walk around. Over the radio, Shaq tells me their "vision is based on movement" and that I have to stand still for them to leave me alone. Thanks Alan Grant, I haven't heard that one before.

Further through the level, I had to activate little machines that the boilers would sprint to and immediately explode all over. I was kinda disappointed by the whole kamikaze act. The boiler creepiness dropped severely after I realized they were so easy to trick.

I haven't gotten much further in the game; that's about three hours of gameplay (and I'm going slow).

My last little bone to pick: alien acid blood doesn't work at all like it should. I thought, as soon as I encountered my first alien, that I should keep the critters at a distance and avoid the bodies at all costs. Now, obviously, the game can't render every single dead alien melting through the floor where they die. But the wrong way to go is to give me a melee attack that stuns the alien so I can blow them apart while they stand there surprised, shocked, or frustrated from getting bonked on the head.

At least have the alien body do damage to the player who walks right over it. I don't want to see a space marine tea-bagging a dead xenomorph body in multiplayer. That's just wrong.

It's melt-your-dick-off wrong.

Cartridges: Our Link to the Past

While currently trying to ignore whatever pops up about Aliens: Colonial Marines, I need something to write about. Luckily, something interesting happened this week that hasn't happened for a long time: a friend and I swapped game cartridges.

Yeah, like totally old-school. I brought my copy of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for the the GBA to the office and he brought his copy of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for the GBA (the one with the Four Swords multiplayer thing). We traded, identified save files that we didn't want overwritten, and agreed to return them as soon as we had finished. School yard ethics dictate that I name my save file PENIS or something, but still, how long has it been that you and a friend exchanged games? And cartridge games at that?

This single act has made me look over my collection of emulators and roms and think: "Wow. This is the future."

I remember when that cartridge was a key, unlocking a little portable world. I used to guard them with my life, especially if it was a borrowed cartridge, because that meant it was a game that my parents didn't want me to play. I had Tetris and a chess game for the Game Boy (not high on the school yard trade list), so I relied on the good graces of my elementary classmates to take one of my crappy games hostage so I could play their infinitely better TMNT or Mario game.

Now, these games are just zip files on my hard drive. Games that I would have begged to borrow are purely dismissal. I'm having fun playing A Link to the Past on my GameCube GBA player, but I've had that rom on my computer for years, and I've never touched it.

I guess that's the magic of cartridges and nostalgia. Back then, the first thing I did when I borrowed a game was pop it into the old Game Boy and give it a spin.

Blogging: How To Proceed

There's plenty of new shit to do now that 2013 is here and kicking. The first on my list is evaluating Google and its blogger service. I'm going to do some experiments here and the first has to do with images.

It seems that the images in each of my posts are actually getting hits and not the post itself. For a while, I was perfectly fine with this: the images get uploaded to a Picasa web folder and linked in the blog. This maintains the image name and that's what gets the hit in Google's image search. Crazy pictures seem like a cool way to attract readers to my blog.

But.

I don't think anything is actually getting read. So I'm uploading images to my imgur (account, gallery, thing) and linking to them in each blog post. This way, the images themselves will not pull hits to the blog; the images will pull hits to imgur. This will show if I'm getting hits based only on the post content and keywords or labels.

The Google AdSense service has denied my request for an account twice now. A sneaking suspicion tells me that I did something wrong when I tried to create my account. It's Google numbers all over again. Another likely explanation is that most of the images that I've used (up to this point) have been blatant copy-right violations. I own very few of the images found in my blog.

My crazy chronicle seems like the perfect spot to place some gaming-related ads. Maybe I'm just wrong about that.

October, November, and December of 2012 and January of 2013 have all drawn over 150 hits per month. By Internet standards, that's not that good. But by my standards, it'll do just fine. I'm curious to see how the hits dip.