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I haven't played more than an hour and a half of this game due to my computer barely being able to get it going at a playable frame rate, but I have to say that I love it. Along with being amazingly gorgeous and atmospheric even on low detail levels, the little bits of immersion and Amanda's voice actor make everything feel much more authentic. I also really love how they stuck with the 70s-80s technology aesthetic when the series usually sees the tech magically updating with whatever the real world has invented at the time of the media's creation.
chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Mar 26, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 21:38
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I was active in the thread in the main Games forum for a few weeks after the release. A ton of time was spent attempting to figure out how the Xeno's AI is programmed and discover the best way to avoid it. One thing people think they figured out is the Alien is more likely to come out from a vent nearby if you're sneaking, possibly as a way of ratcheting up the tension for stealth segments, so you should walk or run everywhere and only duck when you have to.
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Mar 26, 2015 22:37
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Well, may as well lighten the mood of this game.
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Mar 27, 2015 16:46
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Night10194 posted:One thing I'm really appreciating is how they do the violence in this game. It's very sudden and quick, instead of lingering on gore. Like, when someone gets wasted by the Xeno, you don't get long, gruesome kills, it just drags them off. They're there one second, the next they're dead. It really follows the first film's style of horror. There's plenty of blood and gore, but they don't go for gorn like many bloody horror works and they minimize jump scares. The vast majority of fear comes from the tension (the best way to do it) rather than just making people anticipate that something will suddenly pop out in front of them and scream in their ear. I'm not at all a fan of jump scares.
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Mar 27, 2015 21:14
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Comrade Koba posted:Well, gently caress. Turns out my video card doesn't support DX11, so I can't play the game after all. Serves me right for not checking out the system requirements, I suppose. It's very graphically intensive and there's a limit to how low it can go. Even on the lowest setting it's prettier than the vast majority of my Steam library, in part because of the ridiculous amount of detail and dynamic lighting in the environment.
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Mar 28, 2015 03:47
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TomViolence posted:Yeah, the whole Amanda thing in the director's cut nicely sets the stage for Ripley's surrogate relationship with Newt and the other additional scenes add a lot without being overindulgent. I wonder how Alien: Isolation's plot is supposed to fit in with Amanda supposedly dying ignorant of her mother's fate at age 57, if it is at all? I'm hopeful Creative Assembly'll get pestered to do a sequel if enough people buy this game - even if it's on steam at 75% off. Although making lightning strike twice and getting two good games out of the concept might be pushing things... It's established in canon that Amanda Ripley died a senior citizen before her mother returned from super deep crygoenic sleep, but that occurs literally decades after this game takes place. I don't have total knowledge of how the game ends, but I don't believe it screws with the current canon.
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Mar 30, 2015 18:57
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Iceclaw posted:Well, Amanda can't really learn anything about her mum's whereabouts, now can she? Message is dead, and Ripley herself is still drifting in space. That assumes that a wiped/corrupted black box was the only thing related to the Nostromo that reached Sevastopol.
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Mar 30, 2015 21:07
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Dariusknight posted:I believe Ripley read about her daughter's fate in an iPad-like device, so more than likely it's true (or close enough that it doesn't really matter). Since Ripley didn't arrive almost a century later from cryosleep, the game has plenty of time to play with and still be canon. It's a deleted scene, but yeah. She's handed a datapad with a photo of her elderly daughter and is told that she died (I think of cancer) 2 years beforehand, with her body cremated and leaving no children.
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Mar 31, 2015 20:17
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TomViolence posted:Dallas, rather than Ripley, seems to be built up as the primary protagonist through the first half of the movie. Ripley being the last survivor must have come as some surprise to a 1979 cinema audience, what with female protagonists being pretty novel outside of exploitation or slasher films. The first impression we get of the character is that she's a by-the-book busybody and the script kind of leads us on as she clashes with Dallas, who's prioritising Kane's welfare over quarantine regulations. I imagine a lot of audiences on first seeing the film were like, "You tell her, captain! Crew comes first!" From my understanding, it was entirely intentional to present Dallas as the protagonist and Ripley as "That bitchy by-the-book woman who annoys the crew and isn't a true companion of theirs and gets offed within an hour" as was typical for horror films at the time. They greatly subverted expectations by having the aforementioned by-the-book bitch turn out to be entirely correct and the only survivor primarily thanks to her own competence (unlike many other horror protagonists, especially the Final Girl in slashers, where they survive to the end mostly due to luck of the draw killing everyone else before them). They played with it further by casting prominent actors in the roles of the other crew who would be given top billing, while Sigourney Weaver was virtually unknown outside of a little Broadway attention and would likely be ignored by the audience up until she ended up the last one alive.
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Apr 1, 2015 17:27
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Most Xenomorphs really do have intelligence on par with a typical apex predator. The drones obviously live for no purpose other than serving their queen, but they have enough independent intelligence to act as hunters and have a self-preservation instinct.
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Apr 5, 2015 05:05
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Arglebargle III posted:I don't get where this idea that the aliens are immune to bullets comes from. They must have killed dozens of them in Aliens. Sevastopol Station just has a really limited arsenal of small arms. Sidearms even. You'd have to have pretty good aim and reflexes to have a shot at taking down a tiger in close quarters. Apart from one shot of multiple 9mm rounds at nearly contact range breaking through a drone's skull, the Colonial Marines' weapons predominately fired rounds that would literally tear modern human soldiers to pieces through their armor. It's also quite possible that the firearms aboard Sevastopol are specifically designed for use aboard a ship or space station, and are unlikely to shatter windows or pierce the hull when fired. The best way to do this would be a lightweight, very high velocity bullet that shatters upon hitting something as hard as a wall or the reinforced windows you'd need on a space station that needs to absorb constant debris impacts. Against something like a Xeno, this would break apart against the exoskeleton.
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Apr 5, 2015 06:37
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Alien and Aliens are the two top of the lot, and watching 3 and 4 is really dependent on how big of a fan you are of the franchise. The first two are hugely influential in sci-fi and horror, to the point where you'll probably start immediately recognizing callbacks and imitations you've seen in other media as having come from them. The remastered Blu-Ray of Aliens also looks extremely good and emphasizes how awesome the practical effects are, to the point where pretty much everything but the bluescreen dropship flying stands up today.
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Apr 5, 2015 18:43
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ZeusCannon posted:I always had a soft spot for him as Mr. Big in Live and Let Die, but until you said his name I never made the connection that it was him in Alien. I don't know why, he is a very distinctive actor and a good one I just never thought about it. I believe his success with Live and Let Die is actually what inspired them to send him a script and ask if he wanted to audition.
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Apr 15, 2015 02:22
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JIZZ DENOUEMENT posted:This looks cool but I can't really tell when the alien is actually a threat, is a cutscene, or is just the LP'er hamming it up. Like as the gamer, what are the gameplay mechanics for running/avoiding/dealing with the alien, and how does that translate into gameplay strategy? I believe that any time the Xeno is around and you're not in a cutscene, it can kill you. Exactly when it appears and how close it wanders to you is seemingly based on the area, with certain areas being scripted to have it disappear to give you a breather or focus on other enemies. When it appears, it wanders randomly and actually travels through the vents (it's not rendered, but it's also not just teleporting). It does appear to be programmed to wander closer to Amanda when you're sneaking, presumably to increase tension and give more moments where you see it dramatically stomping right past your hidey-hole and seemingly coming within inches of spotting you. But I don't think it's ever scripted to catch you for no reason outside of cutscene moments. It does truly wander randomly and is drawn by stimuli (like noisemakers or leaving doors open as it "learns" your behavior), but the most the out-of-cutscene scripting does is make it take paths a little closer to you when the game wants to add challenge or freak you out. It's playing fair.
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May 14, 2015 21:07
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I think one of my favorite things about the game occurred in video 5, where Tom brought the Xeno into the hub area to take out some scavengers. Because he hid while it happened, all you got was just the noises in the background: sudden screaming and gunfire, an alien roar, and then a disgusting crunch and silence. Through playing the game as expected, he created a perfect cinematic moment completely dynamically.
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May 15, 2015 18:07
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CJacobs posted:Agreeing with everyone else, great LP! As someone who was barely able to make it past the medical deck before wimping out, it was good to see the full game without my baby self being the one behind the controller I kinda love the idea of a CJacobs LP of this game now just for your reactions during it.
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Jun 7, 2015 03:52
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Sel Nar posted:Actually, the Cryosleep is used to mitigate or prevent the side effects of the FTL drives used by human ships in the Aliens universe; as an example, it takes 17 days to go from Earth to LV-426, which is part of the Zeta Reticuli system. It's 39 Light years away, so being able to tear rear end there in just over 2 weeks suggests a FTL speed of 2 LY/day. Which is still nothing compared to Star Wars, where it's considered completely normal to literally cross a galaxy in days, to the point where travel across the entire galaxy is comparable to how we would view a trip around the world. One Canadian engineer used evidence in the films and novelizations to estimate a speed for the Rebel fleet in Return of the Jedi to be at least 9600 light years per day, or 3.5 million times the speed of light.
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Jun 9, 2015 02:38
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CJacobs posted:That's terrifying to think about! The reason it came up was the classic Star Wars vs. Star Trek argument. He analyzed the speed of Federation and the Imperial Fleet and discovered that even the slowest crap Star Wars could put up was still several times faster than Starfleet's fastest ship, so it was a complete non-contest because the Empire would literally be able to send one Star Destroyer to bomb every undefended Federation world and leave before they could ever scramble ships to intercept. That's actually kinda how it is for the entire thing. Star Wars scales its poo poo so much higher than Star Trek that it's not even funny.
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Jun 9, 2015 02:50
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PurpleXVI posted:While I hate to be That Nerd, I don't know if the Colonial Marines Technical Manual counts as canon, but it has some hard numbers and mechanics on Alien universe FTL. It interestingly enough has the FTL work the other way around from traditional high-speed space travel: due to the odd mechanics of it, you more "real time" passes for the travellers than the rest of the world, which is why they need cryosleep to avoid arriving as 90-year-olds. The maximum FTL practical FTL speed is quoted as "0.74 light years per day," with it being stated that higher speeds are possible, but would increase the travellers' aging so much that the ship would probably be a decrepit hulk by the time it arrives(page 118 if anyone has the book on hand and wants to have a read). I believe the Technical Manual is canon.
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Jun 12, 2015 19:46
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