Remembering The Aliens Versus Predator Games

foreign [Music] denominator and that's a love and appreciation for both the alien and Predator franchises throughout the years these two Titans have both done their own thing but they've also come together to create some of the most memorable experiences in both film and gaming speaking of which I thought it'd be worth going back and taking a look at some of those more notable entries as far back as 1993. run but you can't hide and although the series is most well known for its first person shooters it actually started off with a couple of forays into the beat em up genre with titles on both the Super Nintendo and in the arcades right so before we get started I've got to mention that this video is sponsored by Nvidia and MSI and before we get too far into things I've got to give a quick rundown over their new beastly MSI pulse 17 B13 vgk laptop God that's a mouthful now that sci-fi design on the outsides only a mere hint at the powerful in its within I'm talking Graphics power up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 with 8 gigabytes of G ddr6 RAM and processor power up to an Intel Core i7 13700h which means the MSI pulse 17 is built for a mix of everyday Computing but most importantly plenty of gaming on the GPU front you get all the benefits of the latest and Nvidia technology there's DLS S3 with AI upscaling and frame generation for a serious bump to frame rates even with Ray tracing on plus maxq technology optimizes overall system performance including battery life power and acoustics speaking of battery life the MSI pulse 17 laptops got a built-in Mark switch so you can choose between better battery life for you know everyday stuff or tap into more Graphics power when you're gaming was that not enough for you well pop the lid and you'll notice the RGB backlit support for gamers who love a bit of an impromptu light show so to learn more about the MSI pulse 17 hit that link in the video description for more info now the Super Nintendo game was released in early 1993 and developed by Japanese team jaradan whose only other notable title was a Game Boy port for Bubble Bobble anyway the story in this is that in the far future on a distant planet named vega 4 humans have accidentally dug up a bunch of xenomorph eggs which then eventually gestate into fully formed xenos and take over the city of New Shanghai as a lone Predator who happens to be in the neighborhood getting up to no good you pick up the distress signal and land on the planet with the sole purpose of beating up as many of these things as is humanly possible [Music] now in terms of the gameplay it's pretty simple and should feel pretty familiar that people used to similar titles like Streets of Rage or Double Dragon for every level you move from the left to the right along with jumping punching and sliding weapons include the Predator's wrist blade the throwing discs Spears plus you can also cloak and use the Predator's plasma caster which has Infinite Energy [Music] and it's far too easy to just hang back on one side of the map with this thing and spam it repeatedly which will have that annoying high-pitched sound it makes burn into your brain [Music] um shut up charge this up long enough and it even releases a really powerful blast that looks like a rejected spell from Golden ax which damages everything on the screen [Applause] it's kind of funny seeing the aliens completely ignore the Predator when he's cloaked even though most iterations show that aliens can see right through that thing but you will enjoy those brief moments of respite you get where you're not having to mash the attack button because otherwise this is one horrendous and tedious game the reason being that you're really just speeding on the same couple alien types over and over and I mean there's nothing wrong with repetition I mean it's the foundation for most beat em ups but if that repetition is just the same couple of button inputs well then it starts to border into tedium the boss fights are just horrendous too like this one that jumps in and out of water because apparently xenos can gestate in Dolphins this thing pops out for me in nanoseconds taking a few swipes at you along with turning into a [ __ ] Wagon Wheel and slamming into the player at high speeds followed by this boss which is apparently what happens when a Xeno has a gorilla as a host or how about taking out endless chest bursters that fall from the sky because yeah that's fun and apparently also constitutes as a boss encounter it's actually a bit of a master class in how to not design end of level boss fights and all of these are about as fun as trying to pull out your toenails with Rusty pliers I will admit though that that slide move is hilarious and if I had the patience to just push two buttons over and over well yeah I'd probably sit there for the 45 minutes it takes to beat this thing one of the main reasons that this thing sucks is because it lacks the most important mechanic for a beat em up and that's the co-op play and yeah for some reason this is a one-player game which I guess on some level does kind of make sense considering you're playing as one of the Galaxy's most solitary Hunters but just from a basic enjoyment perspective it makes the whole thing just so boring playing while you're lonesome and you can't help but wonder what it really would have been like if you had a second play to help well Wonder no further because that question got answered with capcom's arcade classic foreign titled Alien vs Predator this one was an arcade exclusive released in 1994 which even supported up to three plays at once Alberta player is either a hunter or Warrior Predator Lieutenant Lin kuasawa or even major Dutch himself yeah making this the only game I think in the entire franchise that references the first Predator film it even looks a little bit like Arnie well you know as much as they could make it look like him without getting sued each character also has different move sets stats and abilities so they don't just all feel like clones are Bimi and Jimmy from Double Dragon the story in this one is similar to the SNES version with the city being overrun by aliens only this time the Predators are working with the humans and how we still haven't had an AVP movie that's brought back in aging Arnold Schwarzenegger to utilize this very plot point is anyone's guess anyway it doesn't take too long to play this before you realize just how awesome the whole thing is and goddamn son this one has the same level of quality in Polish that's really prevalent with most Capcom beta marks from the 19 90s showing off the kind of masterful sprite work that really helped to Define an entire decade not to mention just some of the best promo art of all time I mean get a load of this stuff The Punisher arcade game is another title that also comes to mind here showing how Capcom are really able to take an IP that wasn't even Theirs to begin with but inject it with their own Flair and DNA and really make it stand out and feel unique not to mention just make the whole thing a lot of fun to play through similarly with AVP not only does this game just look and sound amazing but it's also a blast to play with a justifiably challenging difficulty mode that can somewhat be balanced out against the player's own skill level controls are really simple you've got a basic melee attack either kicking or punching or using a melee weapon along with a ranged attack that differs for each character Predators get access to those awesome plasma casters Lynn gets a semi-automatic pistol and Dutch gets a machine gun built into his arm and to balance out all of this having a limited ammo they'll overheat if they're used too often aside from that you can also pick up the many many weapons scattered around each stage with series favorites like the pulse rifle the smart gun and the flamethrower and look man if the side of a predator wielding a smart gun in a goddamn pulse rifle doesn't get you worn between the thighs well then nothing will simple controls are the Cornerstone of any good beat em up but Capcom has still found a few ways here to expand upon it just being three inputs so yeah while simply mashing the attack button will end up with a basic but effective combo even something as basic as jumping and attacking will have different effects if you're grappling an enemy jumping and then pressing attack will even let you pile drive an enemy into the ground like you're saying geek from Street Fighter foreign attack and ranged attack at the same time and you'll let off a really powerful special move which again differs for each character it's almost so fun pulling off all these moves that you start to forget how much the game is otherwise kicking your ass because yeah flashy visuals and Sprite work aside this is still an arcade game at heart and that means it won't waste time and sapping your life away faster than a gold digging ex-girlfriend either way though what Capcom managed to create here is hands down one of the best examples of the co-op coin arcade craze of the 90s if you ever want to see an example of when this genre was at its absolute Peak well damn some look no further I I wrote a blog post a while ago about why I [ __ ] hate video games because this is what it does it appeals like the male fantasy the only Quant here is that it still hasn't been ported to any other platform something which the next game in the video also suffers from introducing Alien vs Predator for the 64-bit Atari Jaguar you might not want to play it alone please now if you're one of the 12 people in the world who actually owned a Jaguar well then you might also be one of the three or four people who owned and played AVP a first person shooter released for the console in 1994. the first game of three to be developed by Rebellion it was a pretty ambitious title trying to replicate that first person formula that had started to become so popular on PC and attempt to get it working on a console and it is kind of impressive in that regard considering the limitations of the jaguar and what they were forced to work with all said on a uscm training base with the player able to choose from playing as either the Marine the predator or an alien and while the map itself is the same across each character the weapons and the gameplay is entirely different the Marine starts off near the stasis pods the Predator starts off at his ship and the aliens start off in the hive now the Marine campaign is all about Firepower you've got weapons like the shotgun the smart gun and if you last longer than I did the smart gun and the flamethiller Berg Sue every second door you come across is locked so you're constantly on the hunt for higher level security cards which may as well be invisible because they're often tucked inside the corpses have long since killed Personnel predator on the other hand is all about honor putting those iconic weapons to use like the wristblade and the plasma Caster combining these cloak and different Vision modes to hunt down Marines and Aliens alike to unlock the better weapons though you've got to earn enough honor in the first place which has to be done by killing something when you're not cloaked and that becomes this very tedious process of cloaking uncloaking killing something and then cloaking again [Music] and this is necessary because only the plasma Caster can actually damage the alien queen so you pretty much just need to grind out kills here unlocking the spear and then the disc before eventually getting that plasma caster probably the most bizarre one of all because without the means to heal itself you're instead forced into constantly cocooning Marines to essentially create what's more or less respawn points and this might kind of sound like a neat idea but there's so many marines around and you take damage so quickly that you'll spend more time cocooning people and waiting around for those stupid things to gestate then you will actually you know exploring the level still though you can see the creativity and Ingenuity here for the gameplay and for a console FPS it does look pretty good mostly mostly even if those Predator Vision modes look like what would happen if someone vomited up LSD you also can't deny that the game has got a great atmosphere foregoing that overbearing soundtrack and instead using ambient noise to really heighten the mood when you're playing as a marine and a predator is nearby you can even hear it making those iconic clicking noises which yeah as a small kid I'm sure is the stuff for nightmares thank you however it's also come a bit of a relic by today's standards and it doesn't even really stuck up all that well against other games from the same era the problem is that the level design is literally maze-like that is to say you are exploring literal mazes I mean take one look at the maps for each floor and you'll see what I mean it's a mess it's just like a bunch of random shapes compiled together without any kind of proper structure or flow you got to keep in mind that Doom came out a year prior on the PC and by that point the entire genre had really started to evolve past this approach to level design and it is easier to compare this thing to Doom which a lot of people did back then but it really does share much more in common with Wolfenstein 3D mostly with its singular flat levels flat lighting and simplistic Sprite work which was already becoming a thing of the past even at that point replaced with games like obviously Doom dark Forces and System Shock those kind of games were able to replicate more realistic looking locations I mean in Doom's case for instance it was nuclear plants toxin refineries labs and computers stations that's why if someone goes off and plays Doom now even for the first time they're still likely to get far less lost and confused compared to if they went off and played something like Wolfenstein 3D because the levels in Doom and those ladder games had distinct layouts and notable rooms that made it much more easy to get your bearings these environments in AVP though are just the same looking wall textures copied over and over I mean you might get the occasional sign on the wall which tells you which part of the floor you're on or that you're near an airlock or an elevator but that's about it [Music] once you go into that ventilation system it becomes even more confusing and the layout for these areas just makes no sense whatsoever this is the main way to get around the base is the alien and also kind of essential for the Marine to get past some locked doors and this is just a complete jumble of random twists and turns ending in Dead ends and often unintentionally having you ending up right back where you started and I mean what sort of lunatic designed event system that's going to curve around in an elk shape and come to a dead end I mean who is the architect Ivo shandor maybe supposed to be a reference to the second film when Newt is trying to lead Ripley and the other characters to the events and they kind of get lost because it's also confusing nah they just [ __ ] up which way [Music] what I find even more annoying is how often corridors are only wide enough for one person which makes it really easy to get trapped in and stuck because you literally can't get around enemies [Music] and off the back of that what's even more annoying is when you kill aliens as the predator or the brain because when you kill one of these things they leave behind an acid puddle which just never goes away and becomes this eternal Hazard that burns your feet every time you're forced to walk over it oh I mean I haven't seen this many burned fate since a Tony Robbins Retreat it's kind of sad that this game was the so-called killer app for the jaguar and playing through it now in 2023 what it really does is kill any chance you'll ever have of enjoying yourself a big part of why this thing got so well received was that there just really wasn't anything else to compare it to especially at the time and especially not on a Home console but in the grand scheme of things time has really not being kind to it either and there's a reason why people don't talk about it as much they do other titles like Doom Quaker you know Duke Nukem 3D foreign still though it built the foundation for what Rebellion would work on a mere five years later with Alien vs Predator on the PC in 1999. and when this thing launched in 1999 you can see that in a lot of ways it's really just a massively improved version of that same game they released on the Jaguar half a decade ago [Music] developed exclusively from Microsoft Windows again you're getting three campaigns for the price of one here the alien predator and Marine and each of these again offer up a vastly different experience as the alien you'll be moving around a blisteringly fast speeds climbing up walls and attacking your prey with startling ferocity your claws and tally are only weapons but that's hardly a disadvantage because most NPCs can be ripped apart in a matter of hits if you aim at someone's head with the mouse you can dish out that devastating headshot using the aliens in a mouth which is something that's still severely unnerves me ever since I saw yaphet kodo catch one of those things in the first alien film and yeah you'll get used to that crunchy sound effect as you frequently turn someone's brains into a snack because this is also the main way to refill your health which also means saying bye bye to that awful cocooning mechanic and hello to frequent distressing head trauma the only downside is that you're not the most resilient creature and it doesn't take all that much damage before you become one seriously dead bug [Music] when you're playing as the alien there's two things you're gonna get real familiar with and that's automated gun turrets and fire seems every second enemy has a molotop cocktail or a flamethrower and all it takes is like a whiff of petrol to set you a light during which about all you can do is just run around screeching until it goes out thank you and those gun turrets at the absolute bane of the xenomorph's existence with these things guarding seemingly every second Corridor though I can't deny that it's definitely on brand there's some critical references in this campaign too like one of the environments looks a lot like the Nostromo from Alien and one of the last missions is set on Gateway station which is where Ripley wakes up at the start of aliens the final boss for this campaign is against a couple of predators which is pretty easy you just strafe around this guys like a total sweat Lord while spamming melee attacks and overall it's easily the shortest campaign out of all three taking maybe an hour or so to finish but it's the predator and the Marine campaigns though where you'll find the most meat no pun intended wake up privately you're in some serious [ __ ] now the Predator campaign is just an outright power fantasy letting you play as this technological Savvy Hunter bullying Marines and punching down on xenos like it's going out of fashion the main goal for this campaign is initially just to rescue one of your buddies who's been kidnapped and experimented on by Weyland yutani but then after that you're just trying to wipe out the remaining humans and destroy their secret weapon which just happens to be cybernetic Xenomorphs and look that is just so [ __ ] dumb that it's actually awesome this campaign is also packed with fan service and nods to both franchises one point you return to the smelting plan on Fury 161 which is the same planet from Alien free and it all ends with a fight against the alien queen where you show this prehistoric [ __ ] how we do things downtown for weapons the Predator's got his wrist blades along with the speed gun which first got introduced in Predator 2 then of course that iconic shoulder Cannon the Plasma Pistol and then the throwing disc as well as being able to heal himself at any time and unlike the healing in the first game which was a complete non-event now when you hear the predator full on Jabs himself up along with screaming out loud like he's passing the Galaxy's biggest kidney stone foreign it is horrible plus there's probably his most important ability the cloaking device and the vision modes and yeah again just like in the movies The Predator can turn invisible at any time and become a heart of the spot though this does seem to be dependent on what weapon you've got equipped along with the plasma Caster the pistol and the disc cloaking uses up your energy and to stock back up you need to grab these energy pickups which I guess the Marines were just nice enough to keep lying around and considering there were lines you're going to be having on the cloak and the vision modes you're going to be mostly seeing the world here in two kinds of shade either in blue or red blue for when your heat mode is activated and you're going up against the Marines as that heat mode makes them stick out more than nipples that are wet t-shirt contest and then red when you're going up against the aliens is using this mode makes those aliens easier to spot than piss stains on denim jeans I had an accident you had an accident what does that mean to be honest though you'll probably want to have either of those modes on at all times anyway only to circumvent the amount of flickering lights in the levels which is so bad at times that it pretty much induces epilepsy [Applause] all right this is definitely the most fun campaign to play through though and even now over two decades later there's still something undeniably enjoyable about running right up to someone and stabbing him in the face with a wrist blade [Applause] you can even collect the heads of Fallen enemies as a trophy which has no real purpose outside of just making you feel like a bit of a badass is the Predator lets off that triumphant war cry I really don't ever get sick of blowing Marines apart with that shoulder Cannon either that classic lock-on sound combined with that targeting reticle is truly one of the most memorable combinations in all of Science Fiction aside from maybe Jedis and lightsabers finally we've got the Marine Campaign which again takes a massive shift in tone feeling more or less like an action horror game primarily having a player fight back against waves and waves of xenos which come rushing at you from all directions to bug hunt a xenomorph it's a burger giving your orders by another soldier of iron to come who is very clearly a member of the dev team in fact it seems most of the video calls feature some really bad acting by people who clearly work for Rebellion but you know what if anything that just kind of adds to the charm are you guys hearing this are you hearing this again you'll explore some very familiar looking environments I mean during the very first level you come across a space jockey inside a bone ship and then later on there's a very hardly's hope-looking environment you navigate through as well plus it seamlessly combines two franchises but putting you into combat with both aliens and other Predators like this one here who kind of looked like it was in the middle of taking a [ __ ] as you'd expect the Marine comes with all the tools of the trade most importantly the pulse rifle the smart gun and the flamethrower [Music] and in the last 30 seconds of the last level the minigun the way they tried to integrate the smart guns lock on mode he is also masterfully executed and it works without feeling like it's putting the game into easy mode still requiring some basic game sense and awareness from the player and even those bigger weapons like the rocket launcher make a worthwhile addition to any self-respecting Marines Arsenal you liked the way we Den night vision mode and flares and incoming threats are picked up on your motion detector giving off that trademark beat which increases in Pitch as something closes in on your position 12 meters 11. ten and it all just feels like a massive love letter to the films the first level gives you a bit of time to get acclimatized to how movement feels along with the basics of interacting with the environment but then after that it becomes absolutely Relentless and rarely do you get a moment to even catch your breath because almost every Mission as the Marine has you going around flipping switches and turning valves but throughout all of this you're being constantly attacked by the xenos and it's kind of like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube or someone's throwing a bunch of rocks at your face the music reflects this as well and Miss seconds after loading in you get these really loud and thumping soundtracks that just keep going until you finally make it to the end the third mission in this campaign is the reason why I could never beat this game as a kid until that Gold Edition came out yeah you see some people might remember that there were originally two versions of the game the first one back in 1999 and then the Gold Edition in 2000 and it wasn't until that Gold Edition that they added in manual save points I mean just try to consider that in the original you had to beat entire missions in one go and that's a pretty tall order man considering the length of some of these and the placement of things like facehuggers in dark corners so overall it's definitely the hardest campaign out of all three but really what you'd expect and hope for when you're playing as the character that's really the lowest down on the food chain the final boss for this campaign is against the alien queen which is a direct homage to the final scene from Aliens but you need to blow the goddamn thing out of the airlock you can even hide in a nearby vents to avoid it like newt deer so yeah it's a fun and terrifying campaign and although you could probably pick all three of these campaigns to pieces if you really want to I think overall they're a great example of something being a sum of its parts because I just can't think of any other game we got from back then FPS especially that gave you three vastly different experiences to play through and the relatively short length for all of them is actually to their benefit encouraging replays and trying to get through each Mission as clearly as possible I still remember how scared I got playing through that Marine campaign as a 13 year old which directly contrasted with how I felt when I was playing as the predator and then the sick Glee that I got from decapitating defenseless Wayland yutani employees as the alien its Legacy lives on in the insanely fun multiplayer mode with both Co-op and death match Maps which are still really accessible and hilarious to play through with friends oh that's a one hit kill baby the fact that online servers for countless AAA games have somehow been taken down throughout the years but then the fact you can easily get a match going with an even older game like this really shows how much the industry has declined since 1999. if Half-Life hadn't have come out around the same time period and stolen all of the Limelight Well we'd probably hear people talking about this one way more than we currently do still though that cult status is well deserved and people with the patience to install it and check it out you won't be disappointed so at this point the series left the hands of rebellion and found its way to the crazy uncle of FPS developers with monolith Productions with what a lot of people believe to be the best game in the franchise and in some ways they wouldn't be wrong avp-2 was released in 2001 again exclusively from Microsoft Windows running on The Lift Tech Engine previously used in such titles as no one lives forever blood 2 and show Go Mobile armored vision and yeah you guessed it again having three campaigns playing as the alien marine and Predator instead of it just being three separate storylines though now all three characters are more or less connected moving to the same locations and at key points even crossing paths directly with emotionally being set around in Weyland yutani research station on the planet of LV 1201 man my luck never changes it's got that whole Half-Life opposing Force Vibe going on and it definitely helps in making it feel like you're taking part in this larger over storyline each campaign has its own main antagonist as well for the alien it's a guy named Eisenberg not to be confused with Heisenberg and this guy is responsible for all the research getting carried out on the xenos for the Predator it's General rykov a soldier who had a run-in with The Predator decades earlier and then for the Marine it's kind of like a combination of both as they deal with the corruption inherent at Weyland yutani and in a lot of ways outside of the story avp-2 is really just an objective Improvement across the board Memphis starters it looks a hell of a lot better and has proper cinematics with dialogue and key characters given their own motivations and agendas some of which are actually kind of interesting to sit through even if they are a bit wooden and everyone looks like mannequins with work and eyelids we should move inside this time during the alien campaign you get to experience an entire life cycle starting off as a Facehugger brought to the planet for research purposes and then in a gross display of work or incompetence it gets released from the egg yeah put that one on FailArmy [Music] as a face I get out to make it in the big bad world you're then sneaking through vents and hiding in the shadows avoiding nearby humans until you find some poor solitary [ __ ] just trying to get in a bit of shut eye who ends up becoming the perfect host the second chapter begins with you literally chomping your way out of this guy's chest in real time which is still one of the most metal sequences of all time then after that you evolve into the Drone form we all know and hate and have to make your way back to the hive to Save the Queen God Save the Queen well I can't say that anymore thankfully because xenos haven't learned how to handle pulse rifles just yet your main method of attack is still the claws and the tail combo movement speed's also been significantly reduced since the first game which is one of the many ways here it feels like it's been balanced around the multiplayer mode but in lieu of this you've now got like a jump attack which has the added benefit of instantly jibbing anything you come into contact with it's again the shortest campaign out of all three coming in at maybe like 90 minutes or so but it's a campaign that pretty much just never lets up and it's a sickeningly fun power fantasy running around ambushing soldiers and bullying innocent scientists giving it to kill a few Predators along the way awesome [Applause] now the Marine campaign ain't just the best Marine campaign in the series it's probably one of the best horror based FPS campaigns of all time and the pacing throughout the first couple of missions alone is just masterful not even introducing any enemies for about 20 or so minutes playing as Corporal Frosty Harrison serving aboard the USS verlock and you sent to the planet to investigate the research colony and find out why it's had his Communications not doubt yeah sounds familiar all we know is that there's still no contact with the colony and that xenomorph may be involved I don't like this one bit this is definitely the most narrative and story driven campaign out of all three with quite a bit of time here spent getting us familiar with Harrison's buddies Jones Duke Sergeant Hall major Kane and pilot Johnson voiced by Jen Taylor not much to work with sir who is doing the absolute worst Cockney accent I think I've ever heard in my life to the point that I've got to assume she's doing this as some kind of practical joke what a day to get airborne a landing vegan and windshield data for a start plus a ship's a little beat up stabilizers jammed I can fix it but take me an hour so the antennas she also voices tomiko a scientist who AIDS Harrison along the way and helps him escape the planet need better but you're still very much on your own for most of the time here and after crashing in that drop ship you're separated from the rest of the squad when a roof caves in at which point the Marines almost instantly assume that Harrison is dead like at an alarming rate becomes obvious that you're getting hunted by a predator seeing the remains of its gruesome work and observing far too many random explosions and odd occurrences for it to just be coincidence I mean that is to say I don't think trucks usually roll down Hills and explode like that after this you're then tasked with getting a Beacon online so the rest of the Marines can land safely which involves navigating through some very dark and claustrophobic environments with a really cheeky jump scare with a level designer knew exactly what he was doing then you reunite with your squad but only for like a brief moment because now you sent off to an entirely new area to reactivate the security grid which involves moving through more pitch black environments and coming across the signs that you've missed one hell of a fight then it's at this point finally when you're attacked by the xenos and yeah man talk about going from the frying pan and right into the fire because you go from moving through these completely innocuous environments to having to move to a vent system and getting ambushed from all signs what comes next is the best mission in the game where you have to head into an Alien Hive all alone to rescue Sergeant Hall and this whole area is still incredibly unsettling to play through you might notice too that as soon as you enter the background music cuts out completely leaving you with just the soft buzzing and beeping of your motion tracker [Music] when you finally find Hall she is in the kind of condition you'd expect her to be in and about all you can do at that point is mercy killer and then Hall ass running backwards like you're playing Cirrus Sam and hightail into the APC with every Xeno in the near vicinity trying to stop you and this is just the first half hour of the campaign later on it switches up gears again slowing down a bit as it deals with the corruption at Weyland yutani before you've got a finale inside the Alien Hive [Music] so yeah overall it's a lot different to the last game which really just had you running around frantically pretty much the entire time with barely any moments to even catch your breath what I really like too is how they've added in those tools of the trade that we first saw in Aliens a lot of which were missing from the 1999 game like the welding torch and the bypass tool the shoulder lamps also been introduced and flares are no longer infinite you do however get absolutely inundated with weapons in this one obviously you've got those returning Champions like the pulse rifle the smart gun flamethrower and the minigun both of which are just amazing by the way but they even find a way to throw in more weapons like one of the best shotguns of all time a grenade launcher a rocket launcher and even a sniper rifle it is almost like too many weapons though and some of these are definitely designed with the multiplayer mode in mind the other thing is that some of the weapons kind of cancel each other out I mean the flamethrower looks and sounds great and is really effective but you know then again so is the pulse rifle smart gun and the shotgun the grenade launcher might have like five different ammo types but it don't ever really need to use them anyway and I would have used the minigun more if I actually could but once again you only get it within the last 10 minutes of the campaign I know it's kind of a weird complaint to make here that there's too many guns and that they're so good to use but something that monolith Productions are really Masters at and go and look at the amount of weapons they crammed into blood to shogo and no one list forever and you'll see what I'm talking about combat is still fast and terrifying though when xenos come at you with even more startling speed than the first game one of the coolest things is how you can see their acid blood spray off in different directions when you shoot them and what I thought was even more awesome was how if you shoot an alien's legs off you'll see them crawl along the ground using their arms it's just a really enjoyable and hardcore shooter and the campaign is again ridiculously in tensor times it's kind of amazing man how something this old can still serve its purpose in scaring the absolute piss out of you you know as in Piss is gonna leave your body not to mention it's also got some hilarious physics back from the good old days when you could be killed in an FPS game by simply standing near a closing door foreign and then finally we've got the Predator Campaign which to be honest kind of sits somewhere at the bottom for me and the simple explanation for why I don't like this one as much anymore is that it just isn't as much of a power fantasy now this campaign really tries to tell a story here about how the Predator you're playing as formerly known as Prince no that's actually his title he's pursuing an old adversary who just happens to be General rykov Prince is on the planet also responding to the distress signal and he soon learns that rykov is alive but that's not the issue the issue is in the way that the game dolls out your weapons and the pacing of each chapter now in the first game more or less have the entire Arsenal from the get-go but in avp-2 though they give them out to you much more slowly the first level is more or less like a tutorial moving across the planet killing enemy Soldiers with your wrist blades spear spear gun and discs because that's all you've got available by that point along with introducing a new high jump move that lets you navigate those polygonal Tree Tops just that little bit faster [Applause] you'll notice earlier know how to hitboxes have kind of wonky when using the melee weapons as it seems attacks often pass through enemies entirely so as a result I just spent most of these opening levels just running past everything altogether even when you do engage in combat though it's primarily going to be with the speed or the speed gun the ladder of which you don't even get extra ammo for and look don't get me wrong I like nailing someone's limbs to the wall with a spear gun as much as the next man does but I'm really only getting into this for that plasma caster and the fact that they don't give you this thing until the fifth chapter of the campaign of which there's only seven by the way means that for more than half of the story you're missing out on what's arguably the Predator's most iconic weapon and then even once you get it you'll realize it disables your cloak every time you fire it which again I have to imagine has been done to balance out the multiplayer because it sure as hell didn't break the Predator's cloak in any of the movies that's for damn sure it just didn't break its cloak at any time any time it's most useful at dealing with the waves and waves of xenos you've got to contend with for the last few chapters of the campaign is it kills these guys in a single hit and you'll again spend so much time in infrared mode that it's like you're seeing the world group Satan's butthole just kind of a shame you can't stalk clueless Commandos from the Treetops with this thing like a silent unseen assassin which you know is how it really should have been [Music] new weapons include the net gun and the remote explosives which are cool but again like the speargun there's not ever any ammo refuels for either of these so once you get them that's all the ammo you're gonna get for the remainder of the campaign [ __ ] [Applause] they also somehow found a way to ruin that pistol because now this thing does Splash damage which makes it pretty much useless against the cenos Mostly because those things run right up to you with no regard for self-preservation healing ain't that much of an issue though because again you can jab yourself up like rent boy from Trainspotting at any time here and you've got an energy sifting device now that instantly refills your energy bar but I mean even that has its own dilemma because if you have to heal chances are you don't have enough energy to do so right so this becomes a really tiresome combination of recharging your energy healing then recharging your energy again select that try to make a more tactical campaign here and have you moving slower and thinking smarter which you know does fall in line with The Predator being this super Advanced space Hunter but in the process they've kind of lost that power play element that the character had in the last game I will keep this as a trophy the [ __ ] you are the final two bosses are the alien queen and then rykov who's running around in an exo suit in the fight against the queen Ain't Much More Than Just circles strafing and spamming attacks and then the fight against rykov is just about exploiting this guy around corners and shooting the hitbox of his giant exo suit when it comes into view so yeah I mean this one still has Merit but overall it's really the weakest campaign out of all three when it really shouldn't have been still though although this is a masterpiece when compared to that abysmal expansion pack they're released later on with Primal hunt and what can I say here about Primal hunt that won't make it sound like I'm describing an explosion at a sewage plant as a prequel to avp-2 you're playing as either a PMC Soldier working for Weyland yutani another Predator who admittedly does look pretty badass and then finally a predalien and it might have served as a good side dish to the main game but this thing is just ripe with really crappy level design unbalanced difficulty spikes not to mention boring cinematics and it just makes for a very unpolished and unenjoyable experience let's just say that when people look back at avp2 it's not to fondly remember this expansion pack what they're going to remember is that campaign man not to mention it's multiplayer mode which was arguably as popular if not more so than the campaign and even to this day they're still active service going though most of them seem to be about as empty as a Ray William Johnson fan made up avp-2's licensing and copyright is one of the most notorious ones in the history of gaming especially when it comes to first person shooters and the fact we haven't had some kind of remaster or Revival for this thing over the years is just downright Criminal where problems aside it's still got some of the best horror based FPS campaigns of all time and its charms are still there over two decades later they're off and search by twos I want this guy found fast where they went from here though is where it starts to get a bit interesting with the next game in the list aliens versus predator Extinction making it the only game in this video outside of that one and SNES and the Jaguar to get a console only release [Music] Alien vs Predator Extinction now Extinction is interesting for two reasons firstly because it's an RTS the only one of its kind in the entire AVP library and secondly because it's an RTS on a console and the fact they've been able to condense all the inputs and commands you'd expect from that genre onto the limitations of a controller it's pretty damn impressive out of all the game genres there's always been something about RTS though that I've struggled with even as far back as older titles like age vampires I think the part of your brain that's supposed to make understanding these games possible just got left out when my parents conceived me and I've always sucked at getting good with these but yet this is something I didn't suffer so much from with Extinction and in fact I was kind of amazed at how easily I picked the whole thing up here you can easily select multiple units at once by just holding down a single Button as a circle grows in size you can bind squads to the directional pad you can change the behavior of individual units and navigate the screen with the left thumbstick or quickly Dart across the minimap with the right one and it's really kind of clever how someone has managed to get all of this stuff working on what's more or less a handicap of a platform especially for this kind of genre this one is set on the Weyland yutani colonized planet of LV 742 oh yeah and by the by the LV stands for Life viable so it's safe to assume off the back of that that there's at least 741 other planets aside from this one anyway LV 742 has come into contact with the Xenomorphs big surprise and instead of taking off a nuke in the sight from orbit the companies instead decided to stay and make lemonade out of those acid-spitting lemons this of course draws the attention of the Predators who really at this point are just going from planet to planet collecting skull trophies like their pogs remember pogs yeah this story went exactly grab you by the balls and hold them in a vice-like grip but it does have something else which is probably its best attribute and that's its sixth generation charm yeah that's right man this is a PS2 and Xbox error title and there's just something about this period of video games that is still absolutely Timeless create the eggs and find the hosts to build up The Horde then search far and wide for predator hosts The Hive must grow stronger and all the ray tracing motion capture and cinematic voice acting of modern games just can't compare to the good old-fashioned chunky charm of early to mid 2000s graphics God damn right no h Mission more or less starts off the same with the player being dropped into a relatively safe pocket of the map then tasked with going off and completing your objectives whatever they might be along with finding resources and crafting more units along the way the Marine campaign is again all about heavy Firepower with pulse rifle smart gun flamethrower and sniper units resources are required by repairing atmospheric processes yeah the very same thing that took up a sizeable chunk of land on lv426 oh great wonderful and those reinforcements are new units according to the battlefield on museum dropships these can only be called in by a comtech soldier and I don't know if that's supposed to be a reference to the techcom soldiers from the Terminator movies but either way if you've got none of these guys left it's a game over man game over [ __ ] you can have a turtle of 25 units all up and it pays to have a good variety of these guys as well because even those less combat focused troops like the synthetics are often needed to complete mission objectives as these guys are the only ones who can haul around these crucial items Predators on the other hand are again all about honor and these guys hunt in smaller packs only up to 12 units at a time and spawn in on the battlefield in drop pods a big component of this campaign is collecting trophies be it either human or alien so after every little Skirmish you send all your boys out like head hunting ants to collect all those shiny skulls off nearby Corpses and those new units are called in via the Predator Shrine which is not only mobile but can also fire back at attacking enemies which is kind of funny to watch because it looks like they're slowly moving armchair that fires out lasers there's a whole bunch of different units here as well like Hunters with the shoulder cannons Brawlers with the wrist blades through to the bigger and Battery units like the vanguards who are predators covered in body armor wielding plasma size which is just so [ __ ] awesome I can't find fault in that if I tried and of course all these guys can either heal or cloak themselves at any time this is definitely the most enjoyable campaign here and some of those missions where you're fighting back against rival Predator Clans are dorky as hell but in all the right way finally the aliens are what you'd expect with the whole egg face hugger and chest burst life cycle and creating units for this campaign is easily the slowest process of all so for starters you'll need a queen to lay eggs and the only way to get a queen is to hatch a praetorian from a praetorian egg and then evolve it into a queen after that when the egg hatches you send off your little face hugger to do its business then sit around waiting while that chest burster gestates and eventually bursts out of Something's chest before then waiting again while that thing cocoons and evolves into one of the veracino units and this has to be done for every single unit 45 of them all up if you want to max out the squad as an alternative you can get drones to drag back the bodies of unconscious hosts which is pretty funny to watch seeing some Xeno clumsily drag something back to the hive like they're moving a bag of dirty laundry three eventually you get upgrades so the queen lays eggs which contain two or even three facehuggers and then facehuggers can also be upgraded so you can get two units from a single host but it's just such a much slower process than simply calling in more units from the sky and this campaign is definitely not designed for people with ADHD by the way though depending on who you're playing as creating and controlling all these units is mostly pretty simple and fun but then after like a couple of missions you start to notice just how insanely hard this game starts to get now like I said before I'm not the best at RTS in fact it's a genre I avoid like genital warts but I'd still like to think that I've got a basic understanding of what I need to do here even still though there'd be missions where I just get absolutely wiped in a matter of seconds from this previously unseen platoon of enemies it just happened to be concealed outside of my field of vision some of the missions are really also just bad in concept alone like there's one for the alien campaign where you're held captive inside a test lab and have to build your own Army up before these hostile clones xenos are able to do the same you pretty much just have to race across the map and get all your face huggers turned into drones before they do and it's just not very fun to play through there's also one for the Predator where you've got to sneak into a Marine base to assassinate an officer and this is really just navigating this literal Maze and killing Marines until your cloak runs out before then hiding until your energy recharges and yet for some reason too none of these enemies seem to react to getting shot at and I can't tell if that's supposed to be a blessing or a curse ah come on you snores do something but by far the worst thing are the missions where you've got to kill a set amount of enemy units because these guys can often be anywhere on the map and because the map is so vast you'll spend 15 minutes wandering around a ghost town trying to find those last couple of enemies that you have to kill what also meant helping either is the often atrocious pathfinding I've lost count the amount of times I've sent a bunch of units to a set point and then for some reason half of them have just run off in the opposite direction like they know something the rest of us don't you'll get a notification that you're in battle again which is because four or five stragglers have decided to take the scenic route and go off on their own to God knows where so you can definitely see The Kinks in the armor here and it all does start to make sense why this thing got such average review scores a lot of these older games especially from the sixth generation often felt like they were made so challenging on purpose to try to maybe extend the lifespan and the time it's been with them but there is a fine line between a game being suitably challenging and then just being a bit of an [ __ ] probably just need a bit more time in that development oven before it bursts out of someone's chest cavity but as living proof that the RTS genre can indeed work on a console it's definitely got Merit [Music] Alien vs Predator Extinction now outside of a crappy PSP game Rebellion would come back for one last swipe of the franchise with Aliens versus Predator in 2010. more or less again rebooting the series from scratch and being the only game to ever get released for the Seventh Generation the consoles [ __ ] you yes you've got three campaigns to play through with the Marine predator and the alien only this time these campaigns flat out recycle the exact same environments and locations in avp2 it felt like you were seeing a lot of similar looking areas and while there was a bit of overlap here and there mostly just to tie things together this one's really taken like a different route and more or less just copy pasted entire levels [Music] they're the same picture the story said on the planet bj386 where Weyland yutani has planted a flag investigating an ancient pyramid with ties to both the Xenomorphs and the Predator's history compared again to avp-2 though where each character really had their own antagonist and separate thing going on the story now just feels more or less like a predator an alien story with the Marine just being along for the ride with it all mostly being centered around Weyland voiced by Lance Henriksen this time trying to open this pyramid like his entire future depends on it safe to say though that opening this thing does not end well in about the only way that things could have gone more tits up is if pin had any band of Center bites also showed up at the same time too [Music] the Box you opened it we came now look I'll admit this is something I've always found really boring and that's when a franchise tries to over explain the backstory and the reasons behind why everything is the way that it is which ultimately just makes the whole thing less interesting yeah lion part of the reason why the future wars in the Terminator movies were so awesome because you've only got these brief glimpses into that nightmarish future that Humanity might potentially end up suffering from I mean you're sure as [ __ ] don't need three [ __ ] movies explaining every little detail of how everything comes to pass and it's for that same reason why I don't really give two shits about the history behind the aliens and the Predators and both of them having this Millennia old Feud wasn't something that ever needed to be explained I mean look man Predators like to hunt [ __ ] and aliens and humans make good hunting that's all it ever needed to be [Applause] I mean all I really play these games for anyways to have the bejesus scared out of me during the Marine campaign and at least on that front this one again does deliver because this might not be the best Marine campaign in the series but it sure as hell is one of the best looking ones and even over a decade later this is a really good looking game at times with DirectX 11 effects like tessellation and other lighting tricks that still look amazing it's a great example of a bike on error especially for FPS games where level designers really seem to put a lot of effort and thought into how lighting can affect the mood of a scene just kind of sand that after Doom 3 every game engine that had some kind of dynamic lighting system went on to have environments like this which was a good thing and you'll see this first hand here with a lot of these really impressive and truly handcrafted feeling environments where the lighting does a fantastic job of heightening the tension and that Eerie nature of the backdrop the modeling for the Predators and the aliens looks great and the usage of bump mapping in some of those alien environments just looks incredible too it's just really just an amazing looking game in the Artistry prevalent to add some of those last few levels inside the pyramid and those ruined structures is beaming with creativity plus it's also an incred violent game yes that's awesome now I remember back when this thing came out there was a lot of hubbub over it getting released in Australia due to the whole r18 rating and all that crap thankfully though the decision to release it was made by people who actually know what the [ __ ] they're talking about and not a bunch of crusty old Boomers so the game eventually saw the light of day that's a bloody outrage it is which means we've got to appreciate truly some of the most gratuitous executions in all of gaming with the predator and the alien campaign it's almost like both these species are playing with their food the way they seem to save the moments before and after killing someone and there's definitely something undeniably fun here about controlling such vicious creatures now the Marine campaign has you playing as the so-called rookie crashing on the planet and being separated from the rest of your squad to then meet up with a fellow Marine named Corporal tequila to uncover what Wayland yutani are up to inside this mysterious pyramid come on in grab yourself a pulse rifle kid this involves running around in darkened environments getting ambushed by zenos who pop out of the goddamn walls along with fighting back against combat synthetics who look like edgy Call of Duty skins this campaign also has a whole lot of memorable sequences I mean the opening level alone has a really neat sequence where you've got to stand your ground inside an infested nightclub with a techno backing track height in the mood [Music] then being pushed back by an ambush and captured by xenos and hauled away you'll fight a predator one-on-one and even have to stand off against weyland's synthetic doppelganger and overall it's a pretty decent campaign though I do think that the pulse rival a bit dirty here and I can't help but think that it feels a little bit underpowered as a result you'll probably mostly use the shotgun and that scoped rifle both of which on the flip side are laughably overpowered [Music] there's just no reason to not have both of these equipped the entire time you're playing this I mean the rifle alone kills most xenos in a single headshot along with absolutely shredding through those combat synthetics the shotgun reminds me a whole lot of the shotgun from Alien Resurrection even down to the reload time and its double barrel design and this thing makes some of the boss fights a total Breeze that's actually the worst comparison to make here to Alien Resurrection considering that this can almost kind of feel like survival horror times we do only ever having three healing stems and the difficulty being really crushing on those higher modes oh killing aliens at close range really reminds you how volatile a face full of acid blood can be and the splash damage in this campaign is [ __ ] ludicrous to the point that it almost leads me to believe that it might be broken I mean even simply shooting a corpse and standing in this near vicinity can outright kill you in nanoseconds my real main complaint about this campaign though is the way they handle the pulse rifle and the smart gun both of which just feel and sound like [ __ ] I mean there's just something so underwhelming about both of these and for the smart gun it's only really useful when shooting at something at close to medium range which definitely contrasts with how effective it was in the previous games so I think overall I'd probably rank this one somewhere in between the first and the second ABP game fantastic for the Predator campaign you're playing as a predator called Dark coming to the planet for the thrill of the hunt like a millennial messaging cougars on Tinder but also to protect its Heritage and lineage from these invading humans and this campaign does a really good job of combining all those iconic abilities and weapons to make sure it doesn't feel clunky or confusing at all times you've got the Predator's wrist blades equipped but you can also easily swap through the four Primary Weapons the plasma Caster the throwing disc the explosive mines and the spear with those first two sharing the same energy bar and when you've got all of these abilities unlocked is when this campaign is at its absolute best we are more or less like an Interstellar murderous version of Batman stalking these unfortunate Marines from the higher ground and taken them out one by one collecting their skulls like their trading cards you can swap through vision modes to make it easier to track enemies lure Marines away from the pack leap tall buildings in a single bound and religious be as creative as you want here and taking these guys out round about here sounded like the plasma Costa Burns to energy like nobody's business but it does pretty much vaporize whatever it hits and once you get the disc and the spear the whole campaign is utterly broken as both of these weapons can One-Shot most enemies if the whole campaign had just been taken on Marines like this it probably would have been awesome but this thing is so close to being great that it hurts because it's ruined by one of the crappiest melee combat mechanics ever which robot forced into when taken on the xenos right so for the wrist blades you've got a light and a heavy attack along with blocking and you can kind of look at this as if it's like rock paper scissors in the sense that a light attack interrupts a heavy attack a heavy attack interrupts a block and the block can prevent taking damage from a light attack makes sense and while that may sound good on paper it's seldom Works in practice and it all kind of goes to [ __ ] when you're fighting anything more than a single enemy because it becomes really tricky to visually read what inputs you're even supposed to be countering there's these really awesome executions where you can finish off the xenos in these really elaborate ways like giving them the backbreaker snapping them over your knee like you're the Iron Sheik but these are often pointless not to mention dangerous because if another Xeno is still left alive well then they're gonna start taking chunks Yeti from the side while you're stuck in this unskippable animation because the whole thing's played from a first person perspective you know a perspective not known for giving the play a total situational awareness it is likely that this will happen quite a lot thankfully though once you get the disc and the spear you you won't have to bother with the melee combat quite as much which is a good thing because it really just this kind of awful just kind of feels like they gave up on it from a development point of view as well because for the final fight against the pretty alien by the way they just give you recharging energy for all your weapons Which is far easier than trying to take this thing head on [Applause] so like the Marine campaign I'd say this one sits somewhere in between the first and the second game and then the final campaign is for the alien which is yet again the shortest of the bunch and this one in particular might be the shortest campaign in the entire series The Marine and the Predator campaign will take maybe two or so hours to get through but this one will take you the better part of an hour and the reason for that is because outside of some very specific moments you never have to kill anyone to proceed and can just run right past most enemies entirely oh great wonderful you're playing as a Xena referred to as number six not to be confused with the Sinners the six from Marvel Comics or Nikki Six from Motley Crew and their gloss over the life cycle completely this time kicking off with six inside a lab getting tested on by Wellington after the pyramid is opened it causes a power surge which releases six from its confines and like all good zenos it doesn't waste time in making as many head and chest cavities as possible running a mark and violently murdering anything in a path like the other games in the series taking a more subtle approach is better than trying to run in the front door and what I actually really like here is the way this campaign is updated though still mechanics giving the alien this heightened Vision which pretty much lets it seem the light and shadows at all times not only being able to distract NPCs use the darkness to actually hide yourself and even Knock Out nearby light sources it really helps to make it feel like an actual stealth game this is interesting interesting a new strategy sneaking up behind and killing NPCs again shows off those really impressive and gruesome takedowns and the look of absolute fear in the eyes of your victims moments before they catch your Spike towel with their face is pretty awesome I mean even those combat synthetics which more or less look like nightmare machines show fear in their face moments before they get put out of commission the thing is though like I said there's not really ever any good reason to spend all that extra time killing every single NPC you know unless you're just really like killing things and most of the areas can be placed through in a few minutes to put it into perspective the speed run record for the Marine campaign is around 50 minutes the Speed Run for the alien campaign is around 11. [ __ ] this campaign also has the absolute worst final boss fight in the whole game where you need to take on three Predators back to back and this just proves again how the melee combat is one of the worst things ever made by another human being [Music] even just the idea of a lone Xeno being able to defeat an Elder Predator in hand-to-hand combat or I guess clawedical combat is just [ __ ] insulting and almost as offensive to witness as it was in that first AVP movie where one Xeno took down two separate predators [ __ ] like the endings for the other characters this one has the alien being transported to the Xeno Homeworld and it's kind of sad that Rebellion never made a sequel to this or got to Showcase what they would have envisioned that planet looking like AVP 2010 did ultimately sell quite well for the time but it didn't get the best response from Gamers or critics and although it had quite an active multiplayer scene that's all but dead now a big part of that I think was the insane expectations that Gamers had back in 2010 when the industry was really at one of its all-time highs you've got to remember that this was around the time that we had games like Mass Effect 2 Red Dead Redemption Fallout New Vegas and Arkham Asylum among a whole heap of others we were unknowingly enjoying some of the best titles the industry would ever produce so for something to be anything other than an 8 9 or 10 out of 10 experience was instantly frowned upon a game like this which really was just a better looking and playing version of the same game they made back in 1999 yeah didn't get the best reviews or response from critics or fans it's a hard Evan you know just like your mum I like this one by the way though AVP 2010 is often regarded as one of the weaker games in the series and it's really the last entry in the franchise that we've ever had which is probably the most depressing thing to think about there was a mobile game that came out in 2013 which I've actually read good things about but that's still over a decade since anyone took another shot at the title both of these franchises live on though with the release of things like predator hunting grounds along with aliens fire team and the upcoming aliens descent yeah another RTS I doubt people have also forgotten about aliens colonial Marines either and I still hold out hope that someday we'll get a proper remaster for alien Trilogy in Alien Resurrection so there's still life left in this franchise without a doubt and as we're living in the age of remakes and sequels it's really only going to be a matter of time until someone else has a goal at it come on but as it is the AVP series offers up a really cool little collection of games which serve as like a mini catalog of how gaming has progressed over the years it's still funny to think that despite how many generations these games have crossed through they're still United by one thing scaring you shitless they say that in space no one can hear you scream but play through some of these games and your neighbors are definitely likely to [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: GmanLives

Views: 1,129,409

Keywords: alien vs predator, first person shooters, avp review, horror games, rebellion software, scary games, microsoft windows, alien vs predator game, monolith productions, steam games, xbox 360, video games, fps games, xbox one, marine campaign, avp extinction, alien vs predator extinction, aliens vs predator, colonial marine, avp 1999, avp classic, scary games to play, avp 2010 review, fps games on steam, horror games 2023, gmanlives, gggmanlives, pc gaming

Id: IFf49i37xhk

Length: 66min 4sec (3964 seconds)

Published: Sat May 13 2023