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Alchenar posted:Dark Descent is also on sale. I have deep Steam Sales brain though so I am holding off to see if there is a deeper discount come christmas. Oh poo poo, do you know if it’s on sale on Xbox too? Edit — looks like it https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/store/aliens-dark-descent/9MX7DMHK13SC Best Buy seems to have a physical copy for $20, too. Edit again— bought it from Best Buy Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Nov 22, 2023 |
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Nov 22, 2023 19:22
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Fun game, I recommend it. I felt a lot of tension in the early stages when my marines were low level and I had limited resources
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Nov 22, 2023 19:32
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FastestGunAlive posted:Fun game, I recommend it. I felt a lot of tension in the early stages when my marines were low level and I had limited resources Yeah, it has the XCOM "problem" where the higher level marines become nigh-invincible murder machines, but the early game is genuinely tough and requires some pretty careful planning.
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Nov 22, 2023 22:01
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I don't feel like it gets as bad as XCOM, because even though your marines get better at murdering stuff, managing their stress during combat to prevent it getting out of control is still... stressful. Getting into combat at all is kind of a soft-failure in play already, and your tools for preventing that don't improve through the campaign nearly as significantly as your tools for dealing with combat itself, on top of the sequences where the games don't let you avoid it. So there's never really a point like in XCOM where you feel like you are completely in control of the situation.
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Nov 23, 2023 00:42
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The engineer’s Drone, sniper’s called shot, and mines go a long way towards maintaining your stealth in the late game. There a few levels where it’s still pretty tough though
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Nov 23, 2023 01:12
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Is the NG+ replaying all the missions from the beginning, but this time with your leveled-up squad?
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Nov 23, 2023 22:13
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banned from Starbucks posted:What a terrible Ferrinus alt account They don't post at all alike? New guy is clearly MY forum enemy, uh, *checks old weird PMs* Biznort?
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Nov 24, 2023 23:00
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Overheard my boss today talking about how great Alien: Isolation was and I it reminded me of how much I'd love to see a sequel and an entire "Isolation" franchise. You could do Terminator, Jurassic Park, Halloween, Friday the 13th Isolation style games for a good minute. Everyone I've ever talked to played A:I loved it and I'm not sure how that formula didn't really ever catch on.
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Nov 25, 2023 04:26
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BiggerBoat posted:Overheard my boss today talking about how great Alien: Isolation was and I it reminded me of how much I'd love to see a sequel and an entire "Isolation" franchise. You could do Terminator, Jurassic Park, Halloween, Friday the 13th Isolation style games for a good minute. Everyone I've ever talked to played A:I loved it and I'm not sure how that formula didn't really ever catch on. There is a Jurassic Park Isolation, it’s called Jurassic World: Aftermath and it’s quite cool.
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Nov 25, 2023 04:30
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Xenomrph posted:There is a Jurassic Park Isolation, it’s called Ftfy
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Nov 25, 2023 04:35
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Well I mean, that too.
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Nov 25, 2023 05:15
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Wasn't there a Terminator game set during the Resistance that was kiiiiinda like that? IIRC it was third-person and of course you could get weapons that could destroy Terminators, but if they got within arm's reach there was no QTE or quick shove or anything, you were just dead.
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Nov 25, 2023 09:39
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McSpanky posted:Wasn't there a Terminator game set during the Resistance that was kiiiiinda like that? IIRC it was third-person and of course you could get weapons that could destroy Terminators, but if they got within arm's reach there was no QTE or quick shove or anything, you were just dead.
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Nov 25, 2023 09:55
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That's Terminator:Resistance. https://store.steampowered.com/app/954740/Terminator_Resistance/ It's an FPS with stealth elements, plus some crafting. Some of the spoilers I've seen ahead of the 6.2 hours I have played it get weird and also some creepy. There's a lot of love for the Future War sequences from T1 and T2. If you want the opportunity to sneak around past HKs and make pipe bombs, it's $16 on sale.
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Nov 25, 2023 10:23
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Pro loving click right here: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8PY2LKW/ YouTube version: https://youtu.be/rVrRjt69lhU?si=JB6lD8WN6lbxffgK Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Nov 30, 2023 |
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Nov 30, 2023 05:21
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Understanding the monsters in Aliens as Vietcong in specific/foreign insurgents in general interlocks neatly with understanding them as a labor revolt. Insofar as people resist and interrupt the
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Dec 1, 2023 18:29
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I think you lose more than you gain when you nove from treating the story as a broad allergory for military hubris to like an actual workers revolt or something. Like oh no, the rebelling workers have laid eggs in the lungs of the workers and we have now enraged the worker queen by destroying her eggs??? You're really forcing a reading at the expense of things shown to you on the screen
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Dec 1, 2023 18:37
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Ferrinus posted:the newly pro-corporate Ripley She’s pretty strongly anti-corporate at every turn “This installation has a substantial dollar value” “They can bill me!” “You don’t see them loving each other over for a goddamn percentage” Calling the whole government/company inquest “bullshit” Burke having to clarify that despite working for the Company that he’s “an okay guy” in order to win her trust, and Ripley pressing him that they’re going out to wipe out the Aliens, not to bring them back She had also just lived through an experience in the first movie where the Company went “crew expendable” on her and her friends Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Dec 1, 2023 |
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Dec 1, 2023 18:44
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If you want to apply class framing I think it's more robust if you acknowledge that the workers in the story are literally the workers of the colony. They are exploited unto death on a hunch by a glib executive, who sees them being massacred as just a minor hitch in his plan to make the corporate line go up, and his fortunes with it (with just a few more deaths on the other side of the ledger). The monsters are thus literally 1:1 born from each worker sacrificed to drive up the quarterly numbers of the Bioweapons Division of WY, Inc. In this framing they take on the mien of avenging ghosts, or the "monstrousness" of the working class achieving consciousness and manifesting direct action, as seen through the lens of terrified capital and their foot soldiers. What the hell the queen is supposed to represent when we try to smoosh it into this exegetic slot, I don't know. Maybe Marx.
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Dec 1, 2023 18:51
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Owlbear Camus posted:If you want to apply class framing I think it's more robust if you acknowledge that the workers in the story are literally the workers of the colony. I agree that this is a more interesting reading of it, and if I remember right it’s the one SMG proposed. I bounced it off a friend from the AvP forum I frequent and he basically said “yeah dude, that’s part of the Vietnam allegory - the North Vietnamese were communist and were trying to replace the existing system with communism, with the whole reason for the US intervention being to stop that from happening (just like the Aliens are “replacing” the Hadley’s Hope colonists with hive-minded communal creatures, which the Marines are trying to stop)”. Although if we want to lean on the word “colonial” as being a lightning rod, it’s worth noting that the US army wasn’t trying to colonize Vietnam (or maybe my understanding is wrong, feel free to correct me) but to dislodge a communist establishment, and insect hives (textually analogous to the Xenomorphs) are commonly called “colonies”. So at best the human colony citizens are being replaced by another (communist) colony - the Aliens aren’t from Lv426; Ripley points this out in dialogue.
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Dec 1, 2023 19:05
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Xenomrph posted:She’s pretty strongly anti-corporate at every turn Also she's explicitly, textually busted down from middle management to blue collar in the beginning of the movie. Burke even gets in a dig about her going from flight crew to dock worker with something like "I know it's the best you could get under the circumstances."
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Dec 1, 2023 19:12
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Xenomrph posted:She’s pretty strongly anti-corporate at every turn SMG's gone into this in much more detail earlier in the thread, but in Aliens Ripley is really saving Weyland-Yutani from itself, or more specifically from the hubris and overreach of Burke. It turns out that all the bad stuff that happened in the colony is his fault, down to even sending the colonists out to inspect the derelict in the first place, and the protagonists are stuck cleaning up Burke's mess. Burke did all that stuff because he thought it would make him rich and propel him upward through W-Y's ranks, and he had to do it in a sneaky and haphazard way that blew up in everyone's faces because he wanted to make sure to be the one who got the credit. Imagine if it was actually Weyland-Yutani as a corporation that was trying to exploit the LV-421 derelict. They could just send a full team of guys out to the spaceship itself to strip it down from top to bottom and harvest all the alien samples with maximum precautions. They'd have made way more money and lost far fewer lives -- and, as a benefit, they wouldn't have lost their expensive atmospheric processor, either! "You don't see them loving each other over for a goddamn percentage" is a huge shift from the comparisons made between the xenomorph and the corporation in Alien. No Dignity posted:I think you lose more than you gain when you nove from treating the story as a broad allergory for military hubris to like an actual workers revolt or something. Like oh no, the rebelling workers have laid eggs in the lungs of the workers and we have now enraged the worker queen by destroying her eggs??? You're really forcing a reading at the expense of things shown to you on the screen As Owlbear says, the xenomorphs are workers transformed. When they stop doing their jobs but begin to leverage all their advantages (superior numbers, lay of the land, militancy) against you (where "you" are either in the ruling class or ideologically aligned with it), they appear inhuman and monstrous. I don't get it, what happened to the nice man who used to serve me coffee every day? He must have been killed and replaced by this ghoulish figure that's waving a sign and yelling at me! Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Dec 1, 2023 |
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Dec 1, 2023 20:34
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Ferrinus posted:SMG's gone into this in much more detail earlier in the thread, but in Aliens Ripley is really saving Weyland-Yutani from itself, or more specifically from the hubris and overreach of Burke. It turns out that all the bad stuff that happened in the colony is his fault, down to even sending the colonists out to inspect the derelict in the first place, and the protagonists are stuck cleaning up Burke's mess. Burke did all that stuff because he thought it would make him rich and propel him upward through W-Y's ranks, and he had to do it in a sneaky and haphazard way that blew up in everyone's faces because he wanted to make sure to be the one who got the credit. Ripley was considered an untrustworthy source of information regarding the Alien and the Derelict, and Burke was the only Company person at the inquest and he keeps Ripley’s story to himself on purpose - Burke does what he does because he’s working on a gamble that Ripley is right and he’s taking the effort he’s capable of to check it out without requisitioning a whole Company team and getting people higher up the chain involved (which would cut him out of the profits). He knows that other people in the Company would do what he’s doing, and he wants to be first and act alone so he can get exclusive credit and get paid. With Burke in the picture, there was no scenario where the Company sends a big team to the Derelict to clean house because Burke intentionally hasn’t told anyone else at the Company about what Ripley knows, and were he to do so it would involve people further up the ladder than him. If Burke had the authority to order a Company strike team (like we see in Alien3), I suspect he would have done so. Ripley is very explicitly, textually, against the Company and its interests. She actively encourages the destruction of Company property, acts against their goals, and understands that Burke is just one example of a pervasive problem in a company she opposes. She is absolutely not “pro-company”, and believing she is required a pretty wacky disregard for the actual text of the movie. Also I’ve had SMG on ignore for quite a while so I never saw him post about it, nor do I care to. It’s clearly contrarian nonsense, and I’m definitely not going to go round and round with you about your or SMG’s (willful?) misinterpretation of the movie’s events. That kind of poo poo is what got this thread gassed in the first place, so we’ll have to agree to disagree.   Edit— I just remembered that 2013 Game of the Year “Aliens: Colonial Marines” actually genuinely rolls with the hypothetical of “what if the Company sent a strike team to the Derelict” and it actually goes worse than Burke’s plan. 
Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Dec 1, 2023 |
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Dec 1, 2023 20:53
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No Dignity posted:I think you lose more than you gain when you nove from treating the story as a broad allergory for military hubris to like an actual workers revolt or something. Like oh no, the rebelling workers have laid eggs in the lungs of the workers and we have now enraged the worker queen by destroying her eggs??? You're really forcing a reading at the expense of things shown to you on the screen I don't see how Wouldn't you gain more by definition, reading the themes as well as the bare literal plot?
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Dec 1, 2023 21:19
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Xenomrph posted:Yeah I don’t agree with any of that. Burke is representative of the Company and its behavior; he’s just one actor within a corrupt system - this is why he has to claim to Ripley that he’s one of the good guys, because he knows the Company’s reputation. For the movie’s purposes, he is the Company, made manifest as a character. It's really weird how you're capitalizing "Company". It's not a deity! Weyland-Yutani is represented by much more than Burke in Aliens. It is also represented by Bishop (who excuses Ash's behavior by calling those old models "twitchy"), who is unfailingly helpful and trustworthy despite Ripley's initial misgivings. Bishop is a Weyland-Yutani android; why doesn't he whine about how much the installation costs when Ripley proposes destroying it? Well, because he knows better than the greedy, short-sighted Burke that the LV-421 terraforming site is already totaled (thanks to Burke's scheming) and basically needs to be flattened and reinstalled. Actually, the android angle is dispositive itself here, because in Aliens Ripley is characterized as having some sort of weird anti-android racism when back in Alien Ash proved to be a threat not because he was an android but because he was acting on secret orders because of his class position. Even if we ignore Bishop, and furthermore ignore the colonial marines tasked with protecting company interests, there's a huge gulf in how Weyland-Yutani management is incarnated in Mother+Ash in the first film as opposed to Burke in the second. Mother and Ash are following company policy by conspiring against the (rest of the) employees. Burke, meanwhile, is disobeying company policy: keeping things secret from his superiors and therefore committing provably inadequate resources to what would be, if properly handled, an incredibly lucrative find. In Alien, Ash admires the xenomorph for being a more pure, more refined incarnation of capital's mindless procreative urge, currently imperfectly embodied in Mother. In Aliens, Ripley lambasts Burke and his fellow management staff for being greedy and traitorous, unlike the xenomorph. So our villain's objectionable qualities, and the source of the characters' predicament, is not the company's inhuman hunger for endless expansion but the failure of the all-too-human servants of the company to satisfy that hunger successfully and sustainably. By eliminating Burke, Ripley is actually purging Weyland-Yutani of its weaknesses, forcing it back onto the path of responsible investment and due diligence. It's a move from a genuine anticapitalist critique in Alien to a liberal hand-wringing about greed, corruption, overreach, whatever. Adbusters level. It's like when the bad CEO in Robocop is replaced by a nicer and more ethical CEO, but less conducive to being read as satire. Owlbear Camus posted:Also she's explicitly, textually busted down from middle management to blue collar in the beginning of the movie. Burke even gets in a dig about her going from flight crew to dock worker with something like "I know it's the best you could get under the circumstances." This is actually a perfect example of what I'm talking about, because suddenly Ripley is being rewarded below her proper station. She's temporarily-embarrassed PMC! Why are they treating her like this when she's the one who knows best about what goes on? She should have Burke's job! Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Dec 2, 2023 |
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Dec 2, 2023 04:30
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The worker politics in the Alien universe are all contained in Outland
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Dec 2, 2023 06:21
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Anyone else heard about the Alien TV series coming to FX (or maybe Hulu, I’m not sure)? It, uh, I’m not sure it’s going to be good. https://deadline.com/2023/11/timothy-olyphant-cast-alien-noah-hawley-fx-series-1235638841/ quote:Wendy who is a hybrid, a meta-human who has the brain and consciousness of a child but the body of an adult. There’s a lot of ways they could gently caress that up! Fede Alvarez’s Alien movie sounds a hell of a lot more promising. Edit— I know I’ve promoted this before, but for anyone who watched Alien Covenant and thought “drat, David sounds like a cool dude” I heartily recommend David’s Drawings: Alien Covenant: David’s Drawings https://a.co/d/4g140EP It’s a cool descent into madness as you see David starting out with drawings of native fauna and he progresses into experiments on the Engineers living on the planet that get progressively more hosed up. It’s funny because the artist of the book was instructed by Ridley Scott to get as twisted and hosed up as possible and then he reached a point where Ridley Scott told him “okay whoa, this is too hosed up, dial it back”. brocked posted:The worker politics in the Alien universe are all contained in Outland Fun fact: the Alien RPG includes some subtle references to Outland, just for giggles. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Dec 2, 2023 |
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Dec 2, 2023 06:45
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I heard Timothy Olyphant was joining the Alien TV show so its got that going for it at least.
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Dec 2, 2023 19:44
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I don’t know how you make an Alien TV series without, you know, Aliens, and given that it’s only set 70 years in the future there will be most likely be a bunch of contrivances to make sure nothing in the show matters. I don’t think that universe is all that interesting or unique without the titular Aliens, and if they’re not going to show up then you might as well make it a Blade Runner show, or Outland, or *gasp* an original concept. Edit: from reading more about it, it sure sounds like there will be aliens involved. Set on earth, 70 years in the future, and involving aliens - this sounds like some AvP nonsense. david_a fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Dec 2, 2023 |
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Dec 2, 2023 21:15
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As long as it manages to distance itself from “David created the Aliens” I’m okay with it. I haven’t read it yet but apparently the latest module for the Alien RPG walks that back pretty heavily, which I approve of.
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Dec 2, 2023 22:17
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I'm more intrigued by it than the Alvarez movie tbh
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Dec 2, 2023 23:04
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BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:I'm more intrigued by it than the Alvarez movie tbh Speaking as someone who just watched Alvarez’s Evil Dead remake for the first time recently, and Alvarez saying he’s a fan of Alien Isolation, I’m excited for his movie. The TV show has some, uh, questionable plot points that I’m not sure they can pull off, but I’m also not familiar with Noah Hawley’s work so I can’t comment on that. I mean I’m contractually obligated to enjoy all Alien content otherwise the bomb implanted at the base of my skull will go off, but I still have my reservations. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Dec 3, 2023 |
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Dec 2, 2023 23:42
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What I read about the TV show is that the setting is Earth being overrun by aliens with the wealthy elite living in safety and the lower class being exploited and having to deal with the alien threat (I think an example given was couriers who transport between safe zones?), with heavy class-based themes to carry the story. It should be set much further into the future, imo, but maybe they don't have the budget to create the sets needed, so it might end up being dissonant because of that. Setting it 70 years in the future when Aliens was set in 2179 and Earth is fine with Ripley treated as crazy is an odd call. Would make more sense to set it after Resurrection since thematically it's ideal, with the planet ruined and abandoned by the companies and elites. Setting it in the 2400s would have been best, I think. Then again maybe the story has changed since I last read about it. Also re: Bishop, I still think he's sus as gently caress and the source of the egg on the Sulaco  . Aliens & 3 provide plenty of suggestion but still keep it vague which I like.Xenomrph posted:I heartily recommend David’s Drawings: The poster for Alien: Specimen reminds me of this a little, it's a clever design. 
SUNKOS fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Dec 3, 2023 |
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Dec 3, 2023 21:21
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You'd think a droid would be able to come up with a better place to store an egg than cramming it under a table.
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Dec 3, 2023 22:22
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SUNKOS posted:What I read about the TV show is that the setting is Earth being overrun by aliens with the wealthy elite living in safety and the lower class being exploited and having to deal with the alien threat (I think an example given was couriers who transport between safe zones?), with heavy class-based themes to carry the story. It should be set much further into the future, imo, but maybe they don't have the budget to create the sets needed, so it might end up being dissonant because of that. Setting it 70 years in the future when Aliens was set in 2179 and Earth is fine with Ripley treated as crazy is an odd call. Would make more sense to set it after Resurrection since thematically it's ideal, with the planet ruined and abandoned by the companies and elites. Setting it in the 2400s would have been best, I think. Then again maybe the story has changed since I last read about it. Honestly I like the idea of just ignoring the loving timeline and doing something cool with aliens. Alien infestation of Earth is at least an idea. Would be cool to see imagery of city-sized nests and go deeper into the hosed up body horror of it. What would they do if given time, space, and bodies? Every other alien infestation we see is a hours/days/weeks old maximum. If they take anything from Prometheus/Covenant I'd want them to take the idea that these things can mutate in alarming ways. There is no good time to set it that really jives with what happens in the movies. I think if they can tell a cool story that has aliens in it then I'm not going to worry about continuity because the mainline films have already hosed that in the rear end pretty well anyway.
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Dec 4, 2023 12:24
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Can you elaoborate on the theory that Bishop is responsible for egging the Sulaco? I do find it interesting that despite him proving to be a compassionate droid he's got some latent protocol that causes him to unconsciously bring one aboard, but when would he have had the opportunity? Also, is it true that there's the sound of an egg opening right at the very end of the credits crawl in Aliens? I seem to remember this being a big foreshadowing easter egg, if you will, to entice a sequel, but I may have imagined it.
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Dec 4, 2023 15:00
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Honestly I like the idea of just ignoring the loving timeline and doing something cool with aliens. Alien infestation of Earth is at least an idea. Would be cool to see imagery of city-sized nests and go deeper into the hosed up body horror of it. What would they do if given time, space, and bodies? Every other alien infestation we see is a hours/days/weeks old maximum. If they take anything from Prometheus/Covenant I'd want them to take the idea that these things can mutate in alarming ways. idk, maybe one of the later films contradicts this, but based on the lifecycle we see in Alien I've always had the sense that xenos have extremely short lifespans, like insects. The thing was sundowning in the shuttle, or at least going into hibernation. In Aliens maybe they've been around for a few weeks, though? Time is kinda a non-factor, in my mind—they find hosts, make more xenos, burn through all of the viable hosts in the area, make eggs, then wait for more hosts. If there's nothing around to eat, the eggs remain dormant. It's the difference between a bioweapon and an animal.
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Dec 4, 2023 15:01
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Always wanted to see either ongoing or post full on apocalypse / infestation of earth or a major population center
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Dec 4, 2023 15:08
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feedmyleg posted:idk, maybe one of the later films contradicts this, but based on the lifecycle we see in Alien I've always had the sense that xenos have extremely short lifespans, like insects. The thing was sundowning in the shuttle, or at least going into hibernation. In Aliens maybe they've been around for a few weeks, though? So yes, the one in the first film was meant to be dying of old age by the end of the movie. As you pointed out, that idea went out the window for the sequels (and extended universe media). Off the top of my head I can only think of one Alien dying of natural causes in the EU, in ‘Aliens: Labyrinth, and I think that is attributed to it being in captivity. Mister Speaker posted:Can you elaoborate on the theory that Bishop is responsible for egging the Sulaco? I do find it interesting that despite him proving to be a compassionate droid he's got some latent protocol that causes him to unconsciously bring one aboard, but when would he have had the opportunity? As for where the egg came from, the filmmakers for ‘Alien3’ literally honest to god said “the audience isn’t supposed to ask that” regarding the topic. The closest “official” answer is from the animated menus on the Alien Anthology Blu-ray, which indicates that the Queen did it herself. As for how it got affixed to the underside of a mess hall table, that is not addressed. And yes, at the end of the credits for ‘Aliens’ there is the sound of an egg opening.
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Dec 4, 2023 17:41
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I don't think it's correct to call Aliens' allegory for Americans' experience in the Vietnam War "Orientalism". Like sure you can suggest it's vaguely racist agains Vietnamese fighters by having their metaphorical vehicle be inhuman space monsters, but "Orientalism" doesn't mean "(vaguely) racist against [Asians]". Said's concept is more about how "The Orient", which is a nebulous geographical and cultural idea that encompasses more than Asia, is used by Westerners to create a distant, exotic, and mysterious "dark mirror" upon which they can reflect and displace their own flaws and sins. And I don't think Aliens is doing that.
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Dec 4, 2023 21:03
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