Past and Future Collide for Game That’s “Scary as Hell”

January 22, 2010 – With just under a month to go before it hits game shelves everywhere, Sega continues to ramp up the marketing efforts on its highly anticipated Aliens vs. Predator. A sequel to the 1999 classic of same name, which pits two of the scariest and greatest movie monsters of all time against each other and the bands of unwitting and unfortunate marines who also happen to be caught in the struggle. Today, Sega released a new “heritage” trailer in which they discuss some of the improvements they have made over the original and what we have to look forward to in general.

I was going to start this off by saying “get excited” but after watching the adrenaline inducing trailer it kind of goes without saying. Fans of the original game can see in the comparisons that the trailer has that graphics and overall presentation are definitely getting a massive boost, no surprise given the technological leaps and bounds that have occurred since the original game was released. Anyone who has been following production of this game as closely as I have will notice that there isn’t a whole lot of new information about the game in this trailer, nor is any of the game play different from what we saw at E3 or the trailers that have followed since then.

One thing that continues to jump out at me is that the success of this game is going to come down to one big thing. I’ll give you a hint, its a “b” word. No, not blood, though between the Aliens’ acidic green blood and the copious amounts of marines that will be killed bloody is definitely one way to describe the game. No, this game is going to be all about balance. Balance between the three races, in both the single and multi-player aspects. Clearly the Predators have a plethora of cool gadgets, their stealth mode is a great advantage, as is the ability to make “Trophy Kills” (essentially ultra graphic stealth instant kills). All that and I haven’t even mentioned Predator vision, or their athletic ability that lets them jump around the environment. Aliens are all about speed and getting up close for the kill. Check out the trailer at 1:48 and you’ll get a sense of the blistering pace that the Aliens can move at. Oh and did I mention they can climb up on walls and ceilings essentially attacking from anywhere? Yea, that too. That kind of speed might make the learning curve on them higher than the other two races, but as the adage in sports goes “speed kills”. Finally, we have the marines, the poor marines. From the trailer it looks like the marines strength is numbers, using gadgets like the sentry guns and motion sensor, and bullets, lots and lots of bullets. Its likely that we haven’t seen everything from Sega, but if there is a balance issue in the characters it will be with the marines. They just look incredibly outmatched at the moment.