Alien (feat. Predator and David): as Chairman Mao teaches us

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Sci-Fi Wi-Fi > Alien (feat. Predator and David): as Chairman Mao teaches us

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Do you like Alien 3 "Assembly Cut"?
	Yes, Alien 3 "Assembly Cut" was tits.
	No, Alien and Aliens are the only valid Alien films.
	Nah gently caress you Alien 3 sucks in all its forms.

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Neo Rasa: Mar 8, 2007; Everyone should play DUKE games.

Darko posted:

New Fifield looks like a werewolf.

What is funny for how they became more Universal monster movie-y, but not my preferred look.

Always was, acts like a gruff loner early in the film, eats directly out of a big bowl instead of using utensils when everyone is eating/getting themselves together, refers to the map drone as his pups, etc.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2023 21:47

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 12:57

Neo Rasa: Mar 8, 2007; Everyone should play DUKE games.

I still like the idea that the Predators are an enlightened Star Trek-ish utopian people and it's just that the only ones humans have encountered are the illegal poaching big game hunter/deranged rich people/were at the Capitol on january 6th ones.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2023 00:39

Neo Rasa: Mar 8, 2007; Everyone should play DUKE games.

NikkolasKing posted:

That's an interesting angle I hadn't considered.

I need to re-watch Alien. It's always been far and away the only truly great Alien film to me. Maybe I should also watch Prometheus and Covenant someday, too, just to see why they are so divisive.

Prometheus is great imo and worth seeing in general, I loved Covenant too but it's definitely an unexpected vibe, more so than Prometheus I totally get why people would hate it.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2023 23:44

Neo Rasa: Mar 8, 2007; Everyone should play DUKE games.

BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:

Something that I don't think gets talked about much with Prometheus (probably because no one has really watched it this way in a decade) - other than reviews at the time including Ebert's - is how much of a good 3D experience it was.

It was shot with 3D cameras and Ridley was clearly making the movie with those aspects in mind. I still have vivid memories of being wowed by those lasers scanning through the caves

I think Avatar, Life of Pi, and Prometheus are the best uses I've ever seen of 3D, but unlike those movies the fact that Prometheus's sets were so often practical really makes it stand out

It was absolutely the best 3D I ever saw in a theater that wasn't Avatar.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2023 00:15

Neo Rasa: Mar 8, 2007; Everyone should play DUKE games.

Samuels was a nice surprise I agree.

I wish the clearly Alien 3 homage character that teaches you how to do stuff at the beginning lasted a little longer, but I guess running around in the dark ranting about survival and then getting getting owned by the alien made it even more fitting lol

Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Oct 4, 2023

# ¿ Oct 4, 2023 17:29

Neo Rasa: Mar 8, 2007; Everyone should play DUKE games.

SUNKOS posted:

Since we're talking video games and discussion here sometimes extends to Predator and Terminator, I thought it worth mentioning that there's a Robocop game coming out shortly (Rogue City) and I just watched a Twitch stream of someone playing the demo that I think is up on Steam right now and it looks really good if you're a Robocop fan. It doesn't look like an awesome 10/10 AAA game but the developers clearly put a lot of effort into creating a faithful experience for fans and while it won't win any awards I think any Robocop fans here that are interested should give the demo a whirl at least since it looks really satisfying to blow limbs off with Murphy's gun.

I think Xeno mentioned a Terminator game a while back and the developers for this made a game called Terminator: Resistance in 2019 which might be that game?

That's the game, it's quite good!

There's some fun mods for it too if you're into that that try to make the lighting look very specific to T1 or 2 and stuff like that. Personally I think they did a great job with it.

If you want to waaaaaay back, despite the clunky controls I'm a massive fan of Terminator: Future Shock and its sorta sequel Skynet, both from Bethesda. Also interesting artifacts since they're not RPGs but you can see the visual story telling is very strong in them and the ambition for Future Shock is off the charts. Fully 3D FPS around the same time (maybe slightly before?) Quake 1 and right off the bat you have huge open levels with lots of buildings to explore, true free mouse look, there's a vehicle stage where you speed around blasting stuff and can use the mouse to look around independently of how you're steering, tons of weapons and like five different types of grenade/explosive, levels where you see the trenches filled with incinerated human remains in the machine labor camps, Terminator MIDIs, it really blew me away back then. Honestly still does even if the movement is a little too chunky/sluggish.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2023 07:23

Neo Rasa: Mar 8, 2007; Everyone should play DUKE games.

Mr. Grapes! posted:

Yeah I've played as some variant of a robot-cop in a zillion games by now, I think doing it in a retro-futuristic 80s with all the sarcastic overblown Verhoeven stuff is what I would find appealing.

Agreed I watched the demo and like, it's a bit frustrating because the stuff AROUND the game definitely seems like they cared it's got the news broadcasts, etc. but the in-game look could be any number of games, like it's technically nice but not much more interesting looking in-game than that cheapo RoboCop FPS from like 2003. :/

They're just never going to top RoboCop vs. Terminator as far as RoboCop video games go.

Anyway I hope the full game is good, be hilarious this is a DOOM 2016 situation where they just didn't understand what to show off of the game ahead of time lol

# ¿ Oct 5, 2023 23:24

Neo Rasa: Mar 8, 2007; Everyone should play DUKE games.

Baronjutter posted:

Typica Aliens RPG campaign:
"Ok guys, you're on the space station and need a job. There's a guy at the cargo office with a problem, he says there's some monsters infesting Cargo Bay 5 and he needs it cleared out for an incoming shipment. He'll give you 100 credits per xeno pelt"
"Nice work clearing out that cargo bay. He's impressed you were able to handle those bugs so well. He has a new mission, go down to the planet and explore a spooky cave because he heard there's treasure in it."
"Looks like there's a xeno hive in the cave! Roll initiative! Great work defeating those aliens guys, there's a digitally locked crate at the end of the cave. Roll for lockpick."
"Distress call nearby, check it out? Ok you dock with the ship. Look like its full of aliens again. The captain has locked himself in the forward hold and promises a reward if you clear his ship out!"

The Colonial Marines expansion book gives you enough gear to pretty much just do this uf your players want a more action kind of deal.

Baronjutter posted:

I kinda want to play the aliens RPG and just not have any of the titular aliens. Just explore the universe, do some space truckin, do some mercenary action, what ever, everything but xenomorphs.

The main book definitely feels built towards short campaigns where you're space truckin' or living on a colony, with plenty of organic ways to have alien-adjacent stuff/research/gossip present if you want.

It's easy to hold the xenomorph itself back for like a periodic season finale as it were. There's plenty of potential plot hooks and stuff the players can run into too that are inspired by the geopolitical situation of the setting, android stuff, people finding random engineer artifacts that are basically treasure just for how old they are, smaller stakes crime stuff like Outworld, etc.

Like it has tons of rules for doing repairs, there's ship to ship combat/boarding, social interaction/ordering people around and managing stress, sleep, supplies, most character classes that are actual jobs in the setting, you can dedinitely do an entire campaign of truckin' with no aliens at all.

Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Oct 8, 2023

# ¿ Oct 8, 2023 22:58

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 12:57

Neo Rasa: Mar 8, 2007; Everyone should play DUKE games.

End of Shoelace posted:

A thought about Alien and Aliens:

There is no proof in Alien that the Xenomorphs bleed acid. In fact, we are shown evidence blatantly to the contrary!

Remember when Ripley shot the Xenomorph in the chest with a grappling hook to punt it out of the airlock? Two things: The Xeno sprays a gratuitous amount of blood as the payload digs into its chest, but there's no remark of it digging through the hull of the escape pod (which should have considerably less layers to eat through than the Nostromo's floor):

We can tell that the payload dug in significantly deep, since the payload itself is rounded and blunt yet has a strong enough hold to drag the alien back towards the ship moving at escape velocity. Note also the relative thickness and angular nature of the hooks themselves, plus the outward-pointing ends. The hook dug in deep via brute force, despite having a build that would be extremely counterintuitive for digging into anything (maybe the Xenomorph is very soft).

Now, the problem: why doesn't the hook melt?

We've been shown the blood from the facehuggers to be strong enough to melt through several thick layers of metal, strong enough to support a fully kitted floor in what is presumably Earth gravity. It does this in a matter of some seconds, not minutes. The hook itself is MUCH less matter to eat through compared to the Nostromo's floor, yet it stays strong enough to haul the alien back to the escape pod, and even to hold for a moment against its ion jets.

Given this evidence, we can't readily conclude the Xenomorph bleeds acid in the movie Alien. If it does, it is SIGNIFICANTLY weaker acid than is shown in the sequels. As in, maybe hazardous on the level of normal acid.

Here's where we get to the more interesting part.

In Aliens, Ripley recalls that the Xenomorph bled "concentrated acid". It's clear that she is referring to the Xenomorph itself in her testimony, and not the facehugger. "'A creature that gestates inside a living human host'... These are your words. 'And has concentrated acid for blood'."
Ripley is, of course, getting her memories mixed up. There was a creature that infected Kane, bled acid, killed Kane and the rest of the crew... It's a blur of nightmares for her, which also leads her to the paranoia that one of these acid panthers would kill everyone on Earth. It's understandable, as it was a very traumatic experience.

However, the Xenomorphs DO blatantly bleed concentrated acid in Aliens. Ripley's distorted memories of her trauma retroactively become truthful!
This distortion is strong enough that it also made James Cameron himself misremember the nature of the monster in Alien.

It's never really going to make sense and that's fine, but the RPG tries to work with this by basically having the acid get a lot weaker overall as time goes on, and having some variations of them even within one hive kind of like different castes of ants have "acidic" blood from a chemistry standpoint but not to the point where it like melt through your skin or whatever, some have stronger stuff, etc.

Like compare how many decks of the Nostromo the facehugger acid blood melted through (and the very small amount of acid blood that came out that did that much damage) to how in Aliens you can get some one you and still live. Like if it was as strong as the Facehugger stuff I don't think Hicks would have made to out alive.

Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Oct 23, 2023

# ¿ Oct 23, 2023 16:17

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Sci-Fi Wi-Fi > Alien (feat. Predator and David): as Chairman Mao teaches us

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