Back in November, the Borderlands and Aliens: Colonial Marines studio Gearbox Software filed a suit against their former lawyer, Wade Callender, accusing him of "exploit[ing] Gearbox’s generosity and trust for his own personal gain." The suit was not particularly interesting, alleging that Callender did not fully pay back a loan he borrowed to secure his house, and that he used a business credit card for personal expenses.
Then, last month, Callender counter-sued, accusing Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford of "siphoning" a $12 million (£9.34m) "secretive 'Executive Bonus,'" as well as a number of significantly more salacious details that have rocketed the case into the public eye.
]]>In what feels like The Games Story Of The Year, during the Steam summer sale the much reviled Gearbox title Aliens: Colonial Marines was marked down to a stupidly low three dollars. A modder happened to notice that in the INI file for the game, there is a single typo that is -- get this -- responsible for many of the awful AI choices that the xenomorphs make in the game... like running directly at you on their hind legs instead of crawling on the walls and using ducts to surprise you. A once horribly broken game is now... functioning? Thanks to a single letter? Sure. That's about at 2018 as a games industry story can get.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
You probably haven’t and you probably shouldn’t. A year before the world finally got the Alien game it deserved with Alien: Isolation, the burning wheely bin known as Aliens: Colonial Marines was dragged into public view and stank out the industry with countless bugs, terrible writing, awful levels and magically teleporting NPCs. There were so many problems, they were coming out of the god damn walls.
]]>After years of waiting, No Man's Sky finally took off last week. For some, it soared above the clouds. For others, it crashed into a ditch and exploded. Our John had a rocky flight himself, saying that, while he was enjoying the journey, it was often infuriating. My own experience was one of disappointment. I didn't enjoy the focus on crafting, the endless menus, the lack of purpose to it all. But it was strange that I felt this let down. Then I went back and watched the early trailers and quickly realised that I was not playing the same game I had been shown.
]]>I mentioned Gearbox's woebegotten Aliens: Colonial Marines in snarky passing earlier, and so was surprised to see the disappointing Xeno-shooter crop up in the news for Actual Reals. Turns out there's a mod intended the make the lousy not quite so lousy. My main question at this point is why?
]]>Rumour has it that the decrepit Arkham Knight port beat a retreat on account of Steam refunds. After all, what better way to get a dastardly developer to blush and shuffle its hooves than to reverse its cash flow? Until June, when no-questions-asked refunds came into force, such a feat was impossible. Perhaps, after years of pro-consumer jabs at Microsoft and other corporates, Valve sought to make a material gesture that player interests are truly the heart of the Steam empire. Or perhaps they dislike being sued. Hint: they are currently being sued.
By now, you’ve likely encountered a shop and have a reasonable feeling about how refunds should work: if it doesn’t do what it’s meant to, you take it back. Nothing could be simpler. Refunds for digital products – or, as is often the case, licenses for digital products – are a legal hellscape of false assertions and misinformation, in large part a product of outdated legislation that no one is keen to test in court. To sift through the muck, I got in touch with Ryan Morrison, founder of the New York law firm by the same name (and no relation of mine this side of the 17th century). Whether you’re European, Stateside or in the wrong hemisphere altogether, here’s the plain English version of where and through which service your purchases are best protected and why some retailers still risk refusing refunds.
]]>Gearbox Software, the studio that developed dreadful nonsense in the misshapen form of Aliens: Colonial Marines [official site], have been dropped from a lawsuit that claimed the developers - with publishers Sega - falsely advertised the Aliens game with unrepresentative demos.
]]>As Sega and Gearbox scrap over liability in the class action lawsuit from folks who bought Aliens: Colonial Marines and felt more than a mite deceived, it's getting a bit messy. Sega have dug out a big bag of internal e-mails to establish who exactly is responsible for some of the misleading marketing, including the E3 2011 demo that looked better than the finished game. Naturally they're saying Gearbox were complicit, and that at times Gearbox president Randy Pitchford was "doing whatever the fuck he likes". Oof.
]]>We sent Brendan to Creative Assembly to meet the star xenomorph of their new first-person survival horror, Alien: Isolation. While he was able to file yesterday's extensive hands-on report from the field, he has not been seen since. But a crack team of RPS androids infiltrated the facility and recovered a sticky voice recorder with his name on it, containing an interview with Al Hope, Creative Lead on the project and Jon McKellan, Lead UI Art & Design. Here is a transcript of that interview, in which they discuss why this is true to Alien, who else players may encounter, how they think they can keep a single foe scary throughout, hiding in lockers for ten minutes and how and why Ripley's daughter is the protagonist.
]]>We have all been burned by past Alien games and I would like us to maintain a healthy scepticism about Creative Assembly’s recently unveiled Alien: Isolation, which I went to see and play just before the turn of the year. With this in mind, I believe it an obligation, before we begin discussing this new threat, to observe a moment of silence in which we can all remember the brave souls we lost to the Colonial Marines disaster.
*an eerie hush envelopes the world as billions of people solemnly mute Spotify*
Thank you.
The good news is that, despite keeping that scepticism intact, my recent hands-on with Isolation has given me cause for hope. With luck (and no small amount of effort from the development team) we are a little closer to having an Alien game that actually captures the feel of the original movie.
]]>Welp, seems that time's up for TimeGate. After the Section 8 and Aliens: Colonial Marines campaign dev filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, reports recently surfaced that the entire operation's now kaput. I did a little digging of my own, and sources very close to the company confirmed the reports to RPS without hesitation. Details are still fairly scant at the moment, but you'll find a few after the break.
]]>Despite what its name might imply, bankruptcy doesn't necessarily mean death. Not for businesses, anyway. But yeesh, Aliens: Colonial Marines co-developer and Section 8 mastermind TimeGate has some far more frightening numbers to deal with than the looming specter of Chapter 11. The short version? The developer's total liabilities (i.e. the amount they owe various creditors) fall in the $10 to $50 million bracket, presumably including $7.35 million stemming from a fraud suit by Section 8 publisher Southpeak. Things are not looking pretty, to put it lightly.
]]>Did Sega and Gearbox create a false impression of the final quality of Aliens: Colonial Marines? That's now a legal matter, for lawyers to battlerap about and judges to scorecard (lawsuits are much more entertaining in my head). Multi-faceted games site Polygon has obtained a lawsuit that was filed yesterday, claiming that both companies falsely advertised their troubled Alien troubler, showing off demos to the public that were unrepresentative of the released game.
]]>Oh, TimeGate. Still-unconfirmed (or denied) rumblings have linked you to a rather sizable portion of Aliens: Colonial Marines' acid-puking awfulness, so there's your legacy for now. I'd be remiss, however, if I didn't point out that the recently reviled studio's proven reliably inoffensive in the past, producing middle-of-the-road manshoots like Section 8 and a few FEAR expansions. So it's with a slightly less mountainous mound of trepidation than expected that I bring you word of Minimum, TimeGate's new free-to-play shooter/slasher/watch two Greek-mythology-inspired titans go all Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em Robots on each other-er. Promisingly, its inspirations seem to run the gamut from Quake's speed to Unreal's arcadiness to Minecraft's adaptability, but obviously, snapping all those puzzle pieces into a coherent whole is another matter entirely. I must say, though, the achy, breaky, blocky trailer after the break has me sort of intrigued.
]]>Seeing that Gearbox have put out a 3.8GB patch for their rather woeful Aliens: Colonial Marines makes me feel like a nurse in a hospital drama, the one who sadly, calmly puts an hand on the shoulder of a crying, screaming doctor who's desperately trying to resucitate an expired patient he thought he could save. "It's no good," I would say. "It's over." Then we'd have a hug and a cry, and maybe a slice of cake. Only I don't think it's possible to hug an entire game development studio, and I don't know whether Randy Pitchford likes cake or not.
]]>OK, everyone's probably bored of this by now, but if you're still wondering just how the makers of Borderlands 2 could get Aliens: Colonial Marines so very wrong, more has emerged.
]]>Aliens: Colonial Marines got 99 problems, and looking like it's from 2005 is one of them. Which is mystifying, given that recent in-game footage clearly showed that a more attractive version of the game did/does exist somewhere. God only knows why they'd put so much effort into a game whose lone memorable achievement is taking as long to develop as Half-Life 2 did, but modders have been busily trying to make Gearbox/Timegate's mess look a little more as though it was released this decade.
]]>If Aliens could cry, entire planets, ships, and conveniently placed ventilation systems would be dissolving under a torrential downpour of acid-laced tears right now. See, in spite of their lovable looks and multi-mouthed charm, no one wants to take credit for, well, pretty much anything about Aliens: Colonial Marines. First, Gearbox kinda did, but then TimeGate was accused of incubating Colonial Marines' loathsome single-player campaign - which prompted Sega to descend from its mountain of unreleased Shenmue sequels and tilt the needle back in Gearbox's direction. Seems like a lot of fuss to make if it was really all Gearbox at the helm, though, huh? And that's where a winding Reddit post by an alleged Gearbox employee enters the picture. Further, RPS reached out to a former TimeGate employee (who wished to remain anonymous) to clarify the situation.
]]>Of course you remember Aliens, right? Who could forget Danny Glover kicking ass on the Discovery One, Sarah Hamilton shouting, "That's how they git you. They're under the goddamned ground!" Ah, the memories. John's spent the day ploughing through Aliens: Colonial Marines, so he can tell you wot he thinks:
]]>Edit - Sega Senior Producer Matthew J. Powers has said of this allegation that "Absolutely not, the game has been developed by Gearbox Software. Other studios [like Timegate] helped Gearbox on the production of single and multiplayer." Which doesn't really clear anything up, but there you go.
By almost all accounts, Aliens: Colonial Marines, released this week, is a trainwreck. And not one of those cool trainwrecks with explosions, collapsing bridges and men in awesome hats leaping to safety at the last second. Instead it sounds like a sad, slow, drift off the edge of the track, toppling gracelessly onto its side and making a limp 'pffffffffffffffffff' noise. Mister John Walker will be along either later today or tomorrow to confirm or deny this, but in the meantime let's have a confusing look at the Gearbox shooter's odd gestation. I say 'Gearbox shooter', but it rather sounds as though other studios did the heavy lifting.
]]>“It’s like Left 4 Dead,” said the journo playing beside me to the Sega man.
“Yes,” said Sega.
]]>Yesterday's Aliens: Colonial Marines trailer was so bad, even the game's main writer publicly disowned it. That's some impressive marketing right there. Yet it seems it just needed one small tweak to become so much better. By swapping the audio, reader UberWaz has created a trailer that shows us an Aliens game we want to play.
]]>The latest trailer for Aliens: Colonial Marines has the worst - and I mean the worst - voiceover script I have ever heard. So bad, and so badly delivered, I cannot help myself but transcribe it in its entirety, and present it to you in the form of poetry.
]]>Recently, I had the chance to play Aliens: Colonial Marines and I'm going to try and write more than one thousand five hundred words about the experience without quoting Aliens once. Will I manage to describe two varieties of multiplayer from the perspective of both alien and marine without once using the words of Hudson or Hicks? Will I convey my thoughts about the small portion of campaign I experienced without inserting a Vasquez line or two? Probably not.
]]>Gosh. A trailer just fell out of a vent in my study and upon inspection it appears to contain footage of yet another multiplayer mode for Gearbox's Aliens FPS, Colonial Marines. Along with aliens vs marines deathmatch and a co-operative campaign mode, objective-based team combat has also been promised, and Survivor, along with the already announced Escape mode offers just such a thing. One team controls aliens, which now come in different classes, and the other controls marines, who grunt and occasionally panic. And panic they should because they are doomed. Alien players respawn, marine players do not. Or if they do, they probably respawn as aliens.
]]>Here's a good idea for a game. There's this giant alien, like, the size of a suburb, and it's eaten all the locals. You are a member of an elite squad of marines, and you must enter its intestines to save them. It's called Alien's Colonial Marines. And that, ladies and gentleman, is the difference an apostrophe can make. Another joke I would like to tell at some time in the future is when Aliens: Colonial Marines becomes cheaper but not quite cheaper enough, and I can say, "I've got a bad feeling about this drop." Meanwhile, the best I can do is alert you to the knowledge that you can now pre-order the game, and that there's a trailer telling you to do so.
]]>I have fond memories of Aliens vs Predator 2 multiplayer, in which I most often played the part of a terrified marine, a coward really who should never have signed up, abandoning my team and shooting wildly at shadows whenever anything resembling an alien jittered across the screen. Shown at PAX Prime, Colonial Marines is bolstering its multiplayer offering with a mode which is inspired by Left 4 Dead. Four marines must escape, booking it through a level while player-controlled aliens, some with special abilities, attempt to eviscerate them. A trailer skitters in the darkness below.
]]>It's impressive how effective the ping of the motion tracker from Aliens is, even after all these years. It tensed me right up the moment it hit in this trailer, but then it showed that the tracker was actually pinging an Sega logo and it all drained away. I'm not scared of corporate logos. Then a man with a beard appeared and told me what tension was, which I believe is probably the definition of 'untense'. By the time another man in the hat turned up, I was positively blaise. No matter, it's more of a discussion about how they're hoping their game will be tense, rather than making me ten - what, what was that noise...? Er, there's a Sega logo crawling towards me.
]]>I have to admit, I do default to somewhat ignoring Aliens-based games these days. So many ploppy ones in a row hasn't done the license any favours. But of course Aliens: Colonial Marines is Gearbox, and if we just rather quietly forget about Duke, they make splendid action games. I should probably catch up a little. A good way to do that is via their first edition of a rather overblown developer diary, that along with high-def shots of developers adjusting their glasses as a computer readout from 1989 scans them, shows some in-game footage. Also, they were going to make a Bladerunner game?! I WANT THAT ONE!
]]>Excellent news, troops. Reinforcing the ranks of impending PC games show Rezzed - orchestrated of course by Eurogamer and this here website - is lord of the Borders Randy Pitchford. The Gearbox head and former magician whose surname isn't but should be Pitchfork, veteran of Borderlands, Brothers in Arms, Half-Life: Opposing Force and Ukeday Ukemnay Oreverfay, will take to the stage in Brighton on Friday 6th July at 2pm for a live demo of Borderlands 2, followed by a bout of answering your questions. Randy's company Gearbox will also be presenting Aliens: Colonial Marines at the show, incidentally, so I guess you could also shout "yeah man, but it's a dry heat!" at him and he won't be too confused.
]]>Back in February 2008 when Kieron first wrote that Gearbox were working on an Aliens game, you'd have had to be the sort of maniac who believes Prometheus is a sensible name for a hubris-invoking scientific expedition to propose that the game wouldn't be released until February 2013. Today, any such maniacs can be released from the padded cells that hold them because it turns out they were right all along and it's the rest of us who are mad for not invoking The Walker Principle with enough gusto. Randy Pitchford has today taken to the airwaves and declared that Colonial Marines will be released on February 12, 2013. There's also a new trailer to get you all excited about something that is happening more than a half a year from now.
]]>Gametrailers, who insist on putting trailers before their trailers, have some footage from Aliens: Colonial Marines, as seen at PAX 2012. Dubbed 'First Contact', it shows a series of moments in the life of Winter, a marine: he slips on blood, sneaks through a mossy chamber, barely manages to mind the celestial gap and sees a shadowy alien or two. I've got some theories about him, which follow the video below.
]]>Good morning, Internet! I've been off having adventures, but I suppose I'd better try and put together an entertaining Saturday. Let's kick off with the latest Aliens stuff: after that CGI trailer it's good to get at least a few fragments of game footage, which is what you can see below. This latest emission from the developmental innards of the Gearbox creature show a bunch of scene-setting stuff, and then a little of the running about with a gun shooting Aliens stuff. I'm tentatively excited about this one, and it's been a while since I've thought that about a licence shooter.
]]>I sure hope that's the “RPS Release Radar” (patent pending) pinging, and not the “Approaching Alien Xenomorph Motion Tracker”. Why did we program them to sound the same? That was my mistake. I'll take the blame, but there was a two-for-one sale at “Stock Sounds For Imaginary Devices”. Hmm, I think it's RPSRR and not the AAXTM, as I'm also hearing that Sega's and Gearbox's shiny FPS Aliens: Colonial Marines is skitterring on all fours all the way to Autumn. To pacify baying hoardes, they've also released a trailer.
]]>This was shown in private at E3 earlier in the year, but the eleven-minute presentation has just turned up on SEGA blog. It shows off a bunch of game footage and is narrated by Randy Pitchford. He claims that the aim of the game is to creating the Aliens movie in videogame form. It's not looking like a bad attempt that, either.
Watch it below.
]]>EDIT: Ah, it's from Gamespot. There's nothing official from SEGA, but it looks like this might be the new trailer for Gearbox’s Aliens: Colonial Marines, below. It has come skittering out of the darkness on YouTube, but there's a good chance SEGA will set the flamethrowers on it if this is a leak.
Regarding the trailer itself, there’s plenty of frantic shooting and yelling but the edit builds up the tension and horror as well. It’s the first time I’ve seen enough of the game to shift from mild anticipation to fervent excitement. Some moments look scripted but they appear to be scares rather than action sequences. If the game can balance the gungho of Aliens with the dread of the first film, it should be a winner.
]]>Morning all! Sega are showing Aliens: Colonial Marines at Gamescom, and have released some images for us. So while we wait for more information on what the game will actually contain to emerge, we can ponder the images they've released, below. All the images in this post can be clicked for full sized shots.
]]>When I was over at Heatwave earlier in the year, checking out Gods & Heroes, a huge bug cropped up during Scrum. The team stopped gabbing. The silence of clever people racking their brains filled the room. From the back came a lone grunt, followed by "nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." That's how pervasive Aliens is, especially in games. The movie was fundamentally different from its subtle, stealthy predecessor Alien, owing more to Robert Heinlein's book "Starship Troopers" or Night of the Living Dead, than Giger's disturbingly sexual xenomorph. "It's the game I've been ripping off my whole career" says the effusive and ubiquitous Randy Pitchford of Gearbox, demoing Aliens: Colonial Marines, "we put facehuggers in Duke Nukem 3D and working on the Half-Life series with its head-crabs and when we helped Microsoft bring Halo to PC, there's the dropships and the sergeant is basically Apone. Yet we've never had a sincere, true sequel to it in videogame form".
]]>Could these be the worst screenshots ever? Well, no. PCG still talk about the time Kieron handed in a review that included a shot of some sand, with the caption "The game has a lot of sand", and I once sent a review with a shot of the game's loading screen. Also, Kotaku poster Stephen Totilo has an excuse other than laziness- he took these shots during a PAX presentation of Aliens: Colonial Marines where he was sat far to the right. The point of all this is (probably) that Aliens Colonial Marines is still coming out, despite Gearbox "halting" its development two years ago. At the time, Gearbox prez Randy Pitchford said that wasn't the same as cancelling a game. Did you believe him? I can't remember if I did.
]]>No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.
Alright, call it a blind, silly prejudice if you like. Unfortunately there are some elements of gaming my petty little mind is going to remain closed to until someone does 'em well enough to convince me otherwise, and QTEs are right there at the top of the pile o'despicability. They're just about palatable in the occasional console hack'n'slasher, but I really can't imagine they'd be appropriate in a first-person-perspective Aliens game. I'm already having nightmare visions of hitting left, right, right, left, space in exactly that order to remove a ravenous Facehugger from my head.
]]>And here's another one. We've known that Gearbox were working on an Aliens FPS - whose name has now been confirmed as Aliens: Colonial Marines - but Sega have released some more information. It's going to have a script from Battlestar Galactica (The Good one, obv) scribes Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, and while based on the mood and tone of the film, will take the Sulaco to new specially crafted destinations where hopefully our marines won't all get killed again and have to be saved by the civilian. New weapons are promised, perhaps finally revealing the much-hailed Colonial Marine favourite the pointy stick. Probably the most exciting feature is the 4-player co-op, where - let's quote the press-release rather than the film - we "will assume the persona of a Colonial Marine and have a distinct role to play in the completion of every mission". RPS have already had their characters assigned. Jim will be Hicks. I'm Hudson. Alec is Vasquez. Walker is Newt. Stone will be Bishop. Quinns is Wierzbowski . We haven't a visual yet but Eurogamer have found some cheery magazine scans you can see over here.
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