Great video Johnny! That was a fantastic journey through the alien game ages! Your editing and pacing was excellent for covering it all. Thanks for your hard work!
@@Johnnygrafxit's, thematically, the best *Aliens* game in the series. It's not an RTS, it's more a tactical shooter kind of like XCOM. The theme and atmosphere are absolutely brilliant, and it's the only game that really allows the player the command view of directing the operation from the second movie.
@@Johnnygrafx You don't care for RTS, great! Go buy Dark Decent, play Dark Decent! Not someday in the future, do it now, really, I mean it, do it! It's from the same publisher which did the Aliens: Fireteam. As long as you don't hate RTS, try it! Please!
Isolation was incredible. For what it is, it's an extremely competent and polished game devs made to be remembered. It's a true shame that Aliens: CM wasn't made with the same level of care.
Now there's Dark Descent. Which nails Aliens about as much as Isolation did Alien. I was rather reluctant at first, but since I bought it last week, the game actually rekindled my entire fandom. It's a nail-biter, no small feat for a game viewed top-down. And it does this by doing something most Aliens games completely miss: Having consequences for engaging into direct confrontation (rising stress levels, even aquiring trauma, alarming the hive to be more aggressive...) Such as it was for the marines in the movie, and rather dire ones for them. Atop of that the game lets one use the more iconic gadgets of the movie in more elaborate ways. Welding doors (any door) shut to shut out aliens... using the motion trackers to plan your next moves... strategically setting up sentre guns to get a better control of the spaces you explore. The atmosphere is also really thick, thanks to decent lighting and lots of details in the environment. And the soundtrack does its best to emulate Horner without copying him (hints of Goldenthal's Alien³ score here as well). ua-cam.com/video/8v5jTvF86V0/v-deo.html&
@@snakeplissken111This is actually really encouraging to hear. Alien isolation changed my life and I thought no other video game adaption of alien could live up to it. I’ve been looking at dark decent for a little bit and haven’t fully decided whether I want it but I might give it a try after your description.
Interestingly, Isolation is the only game in that list that comes close to the movie it's trying to emulate. But then there had actually been beat-em-ups, at least for the AvP crossover. :-D Isolation does this by not merely taking from Amnesia, but heavily from Immersive Sims such as System Shock / Prey and their persistent space stations as well. Making for interesting moment to moment improvisation as well as exploration which sadly a follow-up project had never opportunity to go even deeper on. Say in a game that sees you in the shoes of Newt during the infestation of Hadley's Hope.... sigh. Whilst I also played quite a bit of even Alien Trilogy (a fairly outdated Doom clone even back in the day, when it came out for PC anyways) -- all the games based on Aliens get the movie completely wrong as well. They can be fun, but... Last time I checked this still wasn't a movie about Marines kicking Alien ass (or even a single marine kicking Alien ass) -- it was a movie about marines constantly getting their asses kicked. Always pushed. Always on the backfoot. Even when Ripley eventually goes fully on Rambolina in the final stage of the movie, it is suggested in the Director's Cut more explicitly that the hive had already been pretty diminished. The games mostly play out more like had Michael Bay done Aliens: Like a 12 years old's take on "marines vs aliens in space". I'm glad that Aliens Dark Descent actually replicates some of the movie, including the crisis management so prominent during all of the movie's plotline. Which I enjoy currently playing pretty much. My first two runs of the opening mission had my squad being overrun, and that was on medium difficulty. Mind you, once you get the hang of it, it's fine. But this experience of having your back pushed back against the wall is gonna last. :-) Electric Dreams' official game from 1987ish actually tries to do some of the same, but it's obviously heavily outdated. Its concept is still rife for a modern take on it: You're controlling a squad of six in a "persistent" one level colony, no loading screens or anything, first person perspective as seen from the movie's iconic helmet cameras. Just hundreds of rooms, which the Aliens take over in real-time as the game progresses. Doors can even be locked. The game shipped with a map. Your goal is to ideally get as many of those marines into the queen's chamber in the center of the colony, and kill the queen. Weapons are finite and can be reloaded in the colony's weapon chamber. All of your marines will at some point encounter aliens wherever they move. Meanwhile, if the aliens manage to infestate the colony's generator rooms, the power and lights cut out....
No AvP2?? Unforgivable! (Though forgivable because it is unpurchaseable on on ANY platform...) Really unfortunate because it's an amazing, and in my opinion, the best Alien entry there is. AvP: Extinction for og xbox is also really damn cool and an absolutely unique entry. Awesome vid
Yeah I attempted to include AVP 2 but I couldn't find a legit way to download it sadly! Isn't Extinction like an RTS game? I think that's what put me off about it back in the day.
@@Johnnygrafx yeah rts, but some really cool ways of adapting each race to the genre. It desperately needed a sandbox mode and multiplayer though, as it only had campaigns for each faction.
I played the PS3 version of Aliens: Colonial Marines in October and had fun with it. My two favorite weapon types in games with guns are Shotguns and full-auto Rifles, Submachine Guns, or Machine Pistols and this is among the very few first person shooters who start the Player character with both types of weapon. I played Fireteam Elite a few months after it came out mostly solo. I played primarily as a Technician with some combination of a Flamethrower, a Machine Pistol, a Shotgun, and a Submachine Gun.
I’m glad to see AVP 2010 receive some level of praise. I’ve always enjoyed the game but for some reason it was always panned. Looks great graphically even by today’s standards. Gameplay might have been slightly clunky but regardless it was fun. Hopefully a new AVP game comes soon because I’ve been waiting for the series return ever since!
There was an Alien Comic RPG came for PC in the 90's that was very difficult and atmospheric. Definitely an acquired taste. The fact you don't like Isolation is INSANE!!!
A superb video, JG! Absolutely fantastic. I agree with everything you especially about AVP for Jaguar. I owned that game twice complete. The first copy I bought new when it was on store shelves. It was coveted because of its low numbers in circulation and novelty. But after that, if was boring as $hit. I obtained a second copy somehow and flipped it quickly afterward. I look forward to more Fireteam, especially since I can play it on an ample console (my new PS5) rather than a console that will freeze multiple times then practically burst into flames (my former Xbox Series X). Of course, Fireteam wasn't the only game my X did that on, but I digress. Even though not a paper Alien game, the arcade game, Xenophobe, was modeled after the Alien IP, although in a fun & campy way. It's especially fun to play on the arcade machine or MAME. The Atari Lynx version was pretty decent. The 2600 version was abysmal and the 7800's was alright. I believe there's an NES version too, but I am hazy on whether it was good or not or if it even existed without looking it up! HA! A stellar video. I know it will get many, many views as it should. You labor paid off!
I don’t know why, but I was hoping you’d cover some of the non-Alien games that were clones of the IP: Silent Debuggers and Alien Syndrome, for instance.
Yeah I did consider that but when the video got 30 minutes long I had to draw the line lol. I will absolutely find an excuse to talk about silent debuggers one day though!
Shame that the two best Alien games (after Isolation) aren't in this Video, AVP2 and Dark Descent are phenomenal, yes you can't really get AVP2 legit anymore, but there are safe to places to get it which I won't mention by name, but they should be easily recognizable as big community hubs
Great video. You reviewed a bunch. Wished you had time to show 2 of the arcade games Aliens and Alien the Gun...even one side game that isnt alien but a knockoff version of it called SpaceGun. But otherwise it's a great game.
I was pumped for AVP 3 but it severely disappointed me. One of the few times I ignored reviews and was wrong to do so. I don't think you mentioned they just reused ALL the levels for all the campaigns. Unforgivable game design out-done by AVP 2
As Dark Descent rekindled my fandom, I'd picked up Fireteam Elite as well. Whilst purely technically, I can't fault the game, it's still both borderlining on movie parody and is a rather simplistic shooting gallery even for its subgenre. They didn't even put much effort in, simply ripped similar games and reskinned zombies et all for aliens. If you would exchange those aliens for armed Trump supporters, Nazis or Evil Chicken from the dark side of moon, all storming your display en mindless masse, it wouldn't change a thing. So many missed opportunities to at least adapt the format some to what made the movie/s tick. Such as things escalating through the course of a mission, rather than you being bombarded every fifteen feet from the get-go. More elaborate ways and less one-way ticket corridor levels to set up turrets, weld doors shut and plan for an incoming wave/invasion.. and some of that would be actually pretty low hanging fruit rather than anything elaborate, e.g. how CoOp stuff like GTFO rips the motion tracker from aliens and turns that into something CoOp with tension here and there. Even a couple iconic setpieces rather than the repetitive "push a button for another wave to appear" trick, hell ANYTHING. But then I came off Dark Descent, which is the most Aliens faithful since forever, the first in decades that's actually even tried. Man, this is a good one. ua-cam.com/video/8v5jTvF86V0/v-deo.html
You left out some old 80s era Alien games. Most of them were shitty to be honest :D but that Arcade Aliens game wasn't too bad. There was an Alien game for Spectrum and Commodore that was just horrible. You just had like a map of Nostromo and I have no idea what was going on there. Then you had 2 versions of Aliens that were both horrible. There were probably more, but I can't remember :D Btw - I liked the music from the NES Alien 3 that was made by Jeroen Tel. There's just something about that soundtrack.
I tried lol. Couldn't figure out how to get a copy up and running in time to include here. I'm gonna make a follow up video eventually though so I'll try to figure it out for that 😅
You know that the Super NES 1 what's the better looking one but you guys back then our Genesis fans just like you are a Sony fans the Super Nintendo one was the more false Superior one out of the Genesis 1 Alien 3 was better when the Super NES
Like you say you were young and dumb so you couldn't understand how to take advantage of a better looking game that was way better designed in the first two so that's why you put that one down for the Genesis version but the Super NES won't was a lot better and I played it and I was much older than you back then so I understood the difference between the three
Great video Johnny! That was a fantastic journey through the alien game ages! Your editing and pacing was excellent for covering it all. Thanks for your hard work!
Glad you enjoyed! I had fun making it 😌
If you haven't checked it out, Aliens: Dark Descent is a blast. It's a top-down real time strategy with stealth and rogue-like elements.
It's definitely on my radar. RTS games aren't normally my thing though so I'm a bit hesitant.
@@Johnnygrafxit's, thematically, the best *Aliens* game in the series. It's not an RTS, it's more a tactical shooter kind of like XCOM.
The theme and atmosphere are absolutely brilliant, and it's the only game that really allows the player the command view of directing the operation from the second movie.
Okay cool, I remember enjoying Xcom. I'll definitely give it a shot eventually 👍
@@Johnnygrafx You don't care for RTS, great! Go buy Dark Decent, play Dark Decent! Not someday in the future, do it now, really, I mean it, do it! It's from the same publisher which did the Aliens: Fireteam. As long as you don't hate RTS, try it! Please!
I didn't think this game was gonna be good but it surprised me
Isolation was incredible. For what it is, it's an extremely competent and polished game devs made to be remembered. It's a true shame that Aliens: CM wasn't made with the same level of care.
Now there's Dark Descent. Which nails Aliens about as much as Isolation did Alien. I was rather reluctant at first, but since I bought it last week, the game actually rekindled my entire fandom. It's a nail-biter, no small feat for a game viewed top-down.
And it does this by doing something most Aliens games completely miss: Having consequences for engaging into direct confrontation (rising stress levels, even aquiring trauma, alarming the hive to be more aggressive...) Such as it was for the marines in the movie, and rather dire ones for them. Atop of that the game lets one use the more iconic gadgets of the movie in more elaborate ways. Welding doors (any door) shut to shut out aliens... using the motion trackers to plan your next moves... strategically setting up sentre guns to get a better control of the spaces you explore.
The atmosphere is also really thick, thanks to decent lighting and lots of details in the environment. And the soundtrack does its best to emulate Horner without copying him (hints of Goldenthal's Alien³ score here as well). ua-cam.com/video/8v5jTvF86V0/v-deo.html&
@@snakeplissken111This is actually really encouraging to hear. Alien isolation changed my life and I thought no other video game adaption of alien could live up to it. I’ve been looking at dark decent for a little bit and haven’t fully decided whether I want it but I might give it a try after your description.
Interestingly, Isolation is the only game in that list that comes close to the movie it's trying to emulate. But then there had actually been beat-em-ups, at least for the AvP crossover. :-D Isolation does this by not merely taking from Amnesia, but heavily from Immersive Sims such as System Shock / Prey and their persistent space stations as well. Making for interesting moment to moment improvisation as well as exploration which sadly a follow-up project had never opportunity to go even deeper on. Say in a game that sees you in the shoes of Newt during the infestation of Hadley's Hope.... sigh.
Whilst I also played quite a bit of even Alien Trilogy (a fairly outdated Doom clone even back in the day, when it came out for PC anyways) -- all the games based on Aliens get the movie completely wrong as well. They can be fun, but... Last time I checked this still wasn't a movie about Marines kicking Alien ass (or even a single marine kicking Alien ass) -- it was a movie about marines constantly getting their asses kicked. Always pushed. Always on the backfoot. Even when Ripley eventually goes fully on Rambolina in the final stage of the movie, it is suggested in the Director's Cut more explicitly that the hive had already been pretty diminished. The games mostly play out more like had Michael Bay done Aliens: Like a 12 years old's take on "marines vs aliens in space".
I'm glad that Aliens Dark Descent actually replicates some of the movie, including the crisis management so prominent during all of the movie's plotline. Which I enjoy currently playing pretty much. My first two runs of the opening mission had my squad being overrun, and that was on medium difficulty. Mind you, once you get the hang of it, it's fine. But this experience of having your back pushed back against the wall is gonna last. :-) Electric Dreams' official game from 1987ish actually tries to do some of the same, but it's obviously heavily outdated. Its concept is still rife for a modern take on it:
You're controlling a squad of six in a "persistent" one level colony, no loading screens or anything, first person perspective as seen from the movie's iconic helmet cameras. Just hundreds of rooms, which the Aliens take over in real-time as the game progresses. Doors can even be locked. The game shipped with a map. Your goal is to ideally get as many of those marines into the queen's chamber in the center of the colony, and kill the queen. Weapons are finite and can be reloaded in the colony's weapon chamber. All of your marines will at some point encounter aliens wherever they move. Meanwhile, if the aliens manage to infestate the colony's generator rooms, the power and lights cut out....
No AvP2?? Unforgivable! (Though forgivable because it is unpurchaseable on on ANY platform...)
Really unfortunate because it's an amazing, and in my opinion, the best Alien entry there is.
AvP: Extinction for og xbox is also really damn cool and an absolutely unique entry.
Awesome vid
Yeah I attempted to include AVP 2 but I couldn't find a legit way to download it sadly! Isn't Extinction like an RTS game? I think that's what put me off about it back in the day.
@@Johnnygrafx yeah rts, but some really cool ways of adapting each race to the genre. It desperately needed a sandbox mode and multiplayer though, as it only had campaigns for each faction.
The alien 3 megadrive version has a no time limit hack, which makes this game SO MUCH fairer.
You forgot Aliens infestation on DS..why don't you put her in charge?
Dude, u r so awesome. How do you not already have 1 million subs!? Please keep up the good work and marketing ur stuff.
Appreciate it! The slow growth is at least partly my fault for uploading so irregularly. Working on that though!
I played the PS3 version of Aliens: Colonial Marines in October and had fun with it. My two favorite weapon types in games with guns are Shotguns and full-auto Rifles, Submachine Guns, or Machine Pistols and this is among the very few first person shooters who start the Player character with both types of weapon.
I played Fireteam Elite a few months after it came out mostly solo. I played primarily as a Technician with some combination of a Flamethrower, a Machine Pistol, a Shotgun, and a Submachine Gun.
You lost me with your IGN style review of Alien: Isolation.. And then the praise for Elite was the last straw. 😂😂
1987, Aliens side stroller, arcade machine, by Konami I think. So many quarters gone 😂
yeah Konami and Capcom really mastered the art of taking quarters from you lol
I’m glad to see AVP 2010 receive some level of praise. I’ve always enjoyed the game but for some reason it was always panned. Looks great graphically even by today’s standards. Gameplay might have been slightly clunky but regardless it was fun. Hopefully a new AVP game comes soon because I’ve been waiting for the series return ever since!
If you fix the letter "E" in the coding in colonial marines making the xenos disperse and attack properly, it is a great game.
I’m guessing you were the one from IGN that gave their review of Alien Isolation
Damn. No Aliens arcade.
I hope someday they make AVP arcade and Aliens arcade available for gamers at home!
Yes that would be amazing. Emulating arcade games is a hassle.
There was an Alien Comic RPG came for PC in the 90's that was very difficult and atmospheric. Definitely an acquired taste. The fact you don't like Isolation is INSANE!!!
Missed avp 2. Literally one of the best horror shooters out there.
8:35 fuck yeah, steez, stylin on em
The sprites in the Atari Jaguar look better than the sprites in Alien: Trilogy on the PS1, which is surprising.
A superb video, JG! Absolutely fantastic. I agree with everything you especially about AVP for Jaguar. I owned that game twice complete. The first copy I bought new when it was on store shelves. It was coveted because of its low numbers in circulation and novelty. But after that, if was boring as $hit. I obtained a second copy somehow and flipped it quickly afterward. I look forward to more Fireteam, especially since I can play it on an ample console (my new PS5) rather than a console that will freeze multiple times then practically burst into flames (my former Xbox Series X). Of course, Fireteam wasn't the only game my X did that on, but I digress.
Even though not a paper Alien game, the arcade game, Xenophobe, was modeled after the Alien IP, although in a fun & campy way. It's especially fun to play on the arcade machine or MAME. The Atari Lynx version was pretty decent. The 2600 version was abysmal and the 7800's was alright. I believe there's an NES version too, but I am hazy on whether it was good or not or if it even existed without looking it up! HA!
A stellar video. I know it will get many, many views as it should. You labor paid off!
Thanks man! And yes Xenophobe is awesome lol. I have it on the Lynx.
We need to exchange PSNs and do some fireteam for sure!
@@Johnnygrafx I will send you my PSN next time I turn on my PS5. :-D I have to re-up though. I haven't been on there in a long, long time.
I've played a few of these and it seems really hard to do a good Alien game. Going to try Issolation next.
Yeah, depends on what you're looking for I guess. If you want straight up horror like the first movie you could definitely enjoy isolation.
Stoked for this!
It's the longest video I think I've ever made lol
Hey, what’s your favorite Gear appearance Aliens Fireteam Elite, I like the Weyland Yutani PMC armor and gear.
I don't recall the names, but I rather like the bulky armor meant for the heavy classes!
I don’t know why, but I was hoping you’d cover some of the non-Alien games that were clones of the IP: Silent Debuggers and Alien Syndrome, for instance.
Yeah I did consider that but when the video got 30 minutes long I had to draw the line lol.
I will absolutely find an excuse to talk about silent debuggers one day though!
Shame that the two best Alien games (after Isolation) aren't in this Video, AVP2 and Dark Descent are phenomenal, yes you can't really get AVP2 legit anymore, but there are safe to places to get it which I won't mention by name, but they should be easily recognizable as big community hubs
Man how cool would it be if Alien Trilogy got a remaster or even remake.
That's the dream. They are remastering that star wars dark forces game, which is also under Disney. So maybe there's hope for Alien Trilogy?
Amazing Job my friend!!!
Thank you good sir!
Great video. You reviewed a bunch. Wished you had time to show 2 of the arcade games Aliens and Alien the Gun...even one side game that isnt alien but a knockoff version of it called SpaceGun. But otherwise it's a great game.
I was pumped for AVP 3 but it severely disappointed me. One of the few times I ignored reviews and was wrong to do so.
I don't think you mentioned they just reused ALL the levels for all the campaigns. Unforgivable game design out-done by AVP 2
If you actually read/listen to the book alien: infiltrater, aliens fireteam story makes a lot more sense the book is a prequel to the game
As Dark Descent rekindled my fandom, I'd picked up Fireteam Elite as well. Whilst purely technically, I can't fault the game, it's still both borderlining on movie parody and is a rather simplistic shooting gallery even for its subgenre. They didn't even put much effort in, simply ripped similar games and reskinned zombies et all for aliens. If you would exchange those aliens for armed Trump supporters, Nazis or Evil Chicken from the dark side of moon, all storming your display en mindless masse, it wouldn't change a thing.
So many missed opportunities to at least adapt the format some to what made the movie/s tick. Such as things escalating through the course of a mission, rather than you being bombarded every fifteen feet from the get-go. More elaborate ways and less one-way ticket corridor levels to set up turrets, weld doors shut and plan for an incoming wave/invasion.. and some of that would be actually pretty low hanging fruit rather than anything elaborate, e.g. how CoOp stuff like GTFO rips the motion tracker from aliens and turns that into something CoOp with tension here and there. Even a couple iconic setpieces rather than the repetitive "push a button for another wave to appear" trick, hell ANYTHING.
But then I came off Dark Descent, which is the most Aliens faithful since forever, the first in decades that's actually even tried. Man, this is a good one. ua-cam.com/video/8v5jTvF86V0/v-deo.html
You left out some old 80s era Alien games. Most of them were shitty to be honest :D but that Arcade Aliens game wasn't too bad. There was an Alien game for Spectrum and Commodore that was just horrible. You just had like a map of Nostromo and I have no idea what was going on there. Then you had 2 versions of Aliens that were both horrible. There were probably more, but I can't remember :D
Btw - I liked the music from the NES Alien 3 that was made by Jeroen Tel. There's just something about that soundtrack.
You had me until Alien Isolation. THAT is a Great horror game !
Hey, lots of people love it and I'm happy for them!
you miss a lot of awesome aliens games... AVP for arcade made by Capcom.. Aliens Infestation for nintendo DS Alien vs Predator 2 for PC by Monolith :(
The point wasn't really to catalogue every single one, just to talk about the ones I've played 👍
U missed out alien vs predator the capcom beat em up, utterly fantastic
when they put Christmas hats or pumpkins in an non-pertinent context they make me want to vomit!
jag-wire...really!?
how you miss avp2 homie
I tried lol. Couldn't figure out how to get a copy up and running in time to include here.
I'm gonna make a follow up video eventually though so I'll try to figure it out for that 😅
Your IGN style review of Alien Isolation is very.. cringe.
Isolation is a masterpiece. Best game in the entire Alien game franchise.
Blerg
You know that the Super NES 1 what's the better looking one but you guys back then our Genesis fans just like you are a Sony fans the Super Nintendo one was the more false Superior one out of the Genesis 1 Alien 3 was better when the Super NES
Like you say you were young and dumb so you couldn't understand how to take advantage of a better looking game that was way better designed in the first two so that's why you put that one down for the Genesis version but the Super NES won't was a lot better and I played it and I was much older than you back then so I understood the difference between the three