Aliens: Colonial Marines TC - FINISHED

[Terrorized666]

Either I'm just dumb, or GZDoom doesn't like me...

Flashlight isn't working xD

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GZDoom is current (1.7.00) and Dynamic lighting works, just not the flashlight.

[Big C]

It's not you, something in the more recent GZDooms broke something with whatever dynamic lighting trick the flashlight uses.

I think it said last page to use 1.6.0 or 1.5.0.

[kmxexii]

My Colonial Marines TC better than the Gearbox game? Sorry, but i can't belive this
But thanks, this means alot to me!

And now the good news about my ACM game:

I never got around to playing the 2012 release (reviewed the 2011) but most of these sound like fun additions. It was a pretty fun survival horror game. More levels would be super cool. With the gear loadout thing, I can see taking away the goodies to even out the ammo balance but I don't know about making it harder, I'd have to see. It would be a neat way to select for an alternate gameplay arrangement, like different alien positioning or item locations.

[NostalgicAlgorithms]

@ObsessedWithMODs

Can you be reached by email? I have some Aliens related goodies you might be interested in.

[scalliano]

Finally got the chance to play this and it's really impressive. However, after getting the three keycards in MAP01 I've come to a complete dead end. Absolutely every door I've tried has either led to somewhere I've been or ACCESS DENIED. I appreciate the nonlinearity, but the level progression is just infuriating, and I had to quit after over an hour of aimlessly running around. Even something as simple as using red, blue and yellow dynlights on the corresponding doors would help alleviate the confusion. At best, objective markers in the automap.

On the plus side, the xenos feel like more of a threat than they are in the official ACM game. There's a real sense of urgency when you hear them growling in the distance, and the chestbursters are slippery little buggers. The pulse rifle sounds as good as it could ever do in the Doom engine.

Can't fault the action or the atmosphere, but when the majority of the doors don't do anything, I'm inclined to quit and move on.

[Max Dickings]

I've only tried the first couple of levels, but I have to say I'm really impressed. Looking forward to playing through the whole thing. Great job!

[lodsemony]

I think that it will sound kind of dumb, but can you give the marine some sort of melee weapon for God's sake? I don't know, a knife or a shoe or even a fucking stick, anything to kill these damn left-overs of a slaughter.

Especially in the second map, after the aliens flooded in and I killed almost all of them, only like 6 of them were left and I couldn't finish because they're hungry for blood, and I could only try to make them blind by flashing the flashlight at them. I don't know why was I doing that, xenomorphs do not have eyes.

[ObsessedWithMODs]

@ObsessedWithMODs

Can you be reached by email? I have some Aliens related goodies you might be interested in.

Can you PM me the links so I can test them?

Are they completely fresh and new and personally made by you? New graphics and sounds? Or new maps?

Because I've already been aware of virtually every Alien Doom WAD that ever had been released and archived over at those various idgames public WAD directories, so no need to send me those, as I've already found them long time ago.

Many of those older wad zipped files (from 1993-1997-ish) are really messy and I even tried to re-adjust them by making consolidated single wad files per tc or mod package, and even updated many older dehacked patches to the later format. And many still lack proper compatibility with modern source ports such as Z-Doom and I feel they deserve to be updated like how Virtue gave Justin Fisher's Aliens TC a modernized doom source port "revised" edition.

At the moment I am mostly interested in seeing a new skin for the Sentry Guns turrets as the current ones are just slightly modified versions of the laser turret sprites seen in the old classic Duke Nukem 3D game.

Only other things I would hope to see is new sprites to replace some of the modified and/or recycled item pickup sprites.

Oh and the flares, if somehow they could be changed to glowing red like how we've seen them in the Aliens movie.

[scalliano]

Finally found the exit of MAP01 after consulting GZDoom Builder and discovering it was a large door completely indistinguishable from all of the other large ACCESS DENIED doors without so much as an EXIT marker which I had walked past at least eight times. Even oldskool AvP had EXIT signs.

Now on MAP02 and OH MY GOD THAT FUCKING BEEPING NOISE! JESUS! MY HEAD! MAKE IT GO AWAY!

[NostalgicAlgorithms]

Trying to melee with a Xenomorph is the silliest thing I have ever heard! Considering they have the strength of a grizzly bear but the speed of a cheetah. Even Vasquez in Aliens got lucky because she pinned it's head to the side as she unloaded rounds into it's head.

This brings me to one of my major cripes with recent Aliens games... The Aliens seem to ignore the laws of physics at times but were supposed to believe a human is fast enough to parry a angry aliens claws or teeth? If they get that close your dead. ACM was another good attempt executed poorly.

[scalliano]

I'd call that a gameplay concession, given that a shotgun blast at that range would do the player more harm than good. Funny, though, how in the official ACM the xenos' acid blood is weaker than a budgie's hardon. I've had energy drinks that were more corrosive.

[ObsessedWithMODs]

I'd call that a gameplay concession, given that a shotgun blast at that range would do the player more harm than good. Funny, though, how in the official ACM the xenos' acid blood is weaker than a budgie's hardon. I've had energy drinks that were more corrosive.

Have you read this article from Forbes?: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegr ... as-solved/

Or just read the part below specifically as to regarding why the developers had not gone for absolute realism for the Acidic Blood effects.

And it does kind of make sense for the limitations of engines we have now. Otherwise we'd potentially have fully corroded floors, walls, ceilings, armor, and even your guns would be melted and destroyed in the process if any Xenomorphs ended all up in your face and you blast them.

So think about that wouldn't it be very hard to implement "realistically", even though it is realistic?:

This part below gets to the point and I thought oh well, this guy's got an interesting point.

See the problem?

If you are trying to make a modern FPS set in the world of Aliens, this is going to cause immediate problems – and if it’s squad-based, to paraphrase Morrissey, that makes it even worse. Modern FPSes are, somewhat predictably, based around the gun – the focus of the player’s interaction with the world. You, the player, see the world through crosshairs. When you are deprived of a weapon, as in one section of Aliens: Colonial Marines, at the beginning of Half-Life 2 and during a harrowing in-game sequence in Quake 4, it is for a specific purpose – to create a temporary sense of helplessness.

This is not exactly rocket surgery. But it is a problem, because one thing we realise pretty early on in Aliens the movie is that the shiniest technology is not very much use against an enemy that emerges from the walls, or pulls you down through the floor.

So, to make that work the Aliens have to be nerfed a little. To make it worth the player’s while to shoot, they have to become easier targets, and less numerous. To make melee work they have to be less acidic, and also less deadly at close quarters, where no marine stood against them unscathed. At a certain point, the sense of dread – the sense that nothing you have been equipped or trained to do works – is going to be diluted.

This is not to criticise Gearbox – there has been enough criticism already, by people who have spent more time with the game than I have – but to recognize the scale of the challenge they faced. The history of sci-fi FPS games has been so heavily influenced by the aesthetic values of Aliens - from the Cogs of Gears of War to the identikit UNSC marines of Halo or Quake 4′s Rhino Squad – that it’s sometimes hard to remember that the Colonial Marines are basically useless – duped and dismantled from the start.

A smartgun doesn’t make you smart

Nowhere is this more evident than the M56A2 smartgun. In an FPS, this is, of course, a fetish object – between the murderous rate of fire, the explosive rounds and the auto-targeting, it’s a dream come true. The apex firearm. In Aliens the movie, it’s a total liability. Even in its servo-sling it is too heavy and cumbersome to make it easy to do the one thing you need to do – run. And, when your enemy bleeds acid, a device that fires small explosive shells is a terrible idea.

When Vasquez shoots the alien menacing her comrade Drake with her smartgun, it fairly predictably explodes into pieces, killing him as well. Compare that with Hicks’ old-timey Ithaca Model 37 shotgun – not much use in a stand-up fight, because of its low rate of fire, but when you use it against an alien trying to fight its way through a door, its old-timey kinetic force means you escape most of the acid splashback.

A genre-savvy player in the Aliens universe should not want to pick up a smartgun. Ever. It’s the universal sign for impending xenomorph benihana. But they are also the apex firearm, so an FPS player will expect some more-dakka set pieces. It’s a problem.


And so on just read the rest.

Otherwise if GearBox had gone with making it a really realistic and squad tactical based game (like I really was actually hoping for it to be), then those that are familiar and too comfortable with regular traditional modern FPS games would end up pissed and start whining about getting their asses handed to them with the new "ultra realistic" gameplay mechanics and physics.

Because then he players would be dying consistently on Normal and Harder difficulties on an average of every 10 minutes.

[ObsessedWithMODs]

Trying to melee with a Xenomorph is the silliest thing I have ever heard! Considering they have the strength of a grizzly bear but the speed of a cheetah. Even Vasquez in Aliens got lucky because she pinned it's head to the side as she unloaded rounds into it's head.

This brings me to one of my major cripes with recent Aliens games... The Aliens seem to ignore the laws of physics at times but were supposed to believe a human is fast enough to parry a angry aliens claws or teeth? If they get that close your dead. ACM was another good attempt executed poorly.

Melee combat realistically wouldn't work for ANY Human Marine fighting Xenomorphs. I meant the survival rate would be very very slim.

In Gearbox's Aliens Colonial Marines I'd have to say it's pretty ridiculous how they allowed the player to "kick" Aliens (I think it was always the Lurkers) off them when they had already been pounced on.

Even shaking off facehuggers was "unrealistic", but I guess everyone got tired of "instant deaths" from Face hugs back in the days of AvP and AvP2 on the PC?

Again check the article above to explain why GearBox did what they did, otherwise their game would be significantly harder to play.

So no melee attack in Deimos's mod is actually "realistic", but if someone has a problem with that then maybe they should edit his mod and implement a melee attack themselves mechanic either as an addon patch or something.

I personally can never really see anything Other than Ultra powerful combat cyborgs like Terminators ever being able to realistically and consistently beat Xenomorphs in melee combat, at least for any 1 on 1 match. But even then there will always be the acid for blood issue, unless somehow the Terminators are upgraded and modified to be fully or near-fully acid resistant.

[Enjay]

Meh, the meltyness of acid is over rated. You know we do actually manage to keep even very concentrated acid in all sorts of containers.

[scalliano]

By no means am I against the idea of nerfing the xenos for gameplay purposes, but from my experience with ACM, their blood is almost, if not completely harmless. No-one's asking for full-blown acid destructo-physics, but a little splash damage would have been sufficient. AvP 2010 nailed this aspect.

As for making it a tactical squad-based FPS, personally I couldn't think of anything worse. ACM needed to go in the opposite direction - it needed more sections where the player was alone and outnumbered, relying on their motion tracker and their wits rather than invulnerable, dim-witted NPC's who spent more time getting in the way than actually helping out. And fewer Wey-Yu merc sections. A good idea, but implemented way too soon in the game. It's Aliens, not CoD.

The recent 4GB update makes the game a lot tougher, but only in terms of the speed and strength of the xenos, rather than their AI (and their blood), which is a missed oppurtunity IMO.

I'm not going to lie, though. For all of the game's faults, I enjoyed ACM. I just wish that it had fewer SGWW trappings and more oldschool action and suspense.