http://store.steampowered.com/app/49540/ The game is probably going to suck but I am a sucker for the franchise so I will buy it after seeing and listening to that promo.
Is this the kind of game you enjoy, br4d? Interesting. I usually dig for strategy games and whatnot - that usually consumes a few months to complete a single campaign. I haven't seen any good one coming out as of late - which I feel is a crying shame. Let me know how this turns out. I might take a flyer.
Shooting Aliens in the dark since 1999. It's a lot of fun because the games are scripted like a horror movie but have the pace and action of a shooter.
Looks cool. It's one of those games I'd take a chance on when Best Buy inevitably gives it a $39.99 pricetag a few weeks after it's release. Will have to see the reviews.
The game is getting absolutely slammed by the reviewers and on the gaming blogs. Turns out Gearbox outsourced the single player campaign to another studio, thought to be Timegate Studios. These are the guys that rescued the Duke Nukem Forever release when the dev there ran into difficulties. Apparently they were less successful here. I'm going to wait for the inevitable price drop on Steam before I buy this. I have to buy it just to see but I'm not spending $50+ and then another $30+ on DLC's. I'm guessing I will get the whole shebang for about $30 in a few months.
Wow, this one is a mess at this point if you go by the blogosphere's reaction to it. People who are not big fans of the series are panning it heavily while the home crowd is mixed. I'm thinking at least part of the heavy downside noise on it is pure bullshit though. If you're not a big fan of the series why would you have spent the $50+ to get the game? I smell a lot of trolls in play right now. For the fans there is the inevitable disappointment that the game is not great. I think that's kind of unavoidable in a high profile franchise, particularly one where the average fan is middle-aged and has been waiting for a long time for the one great game to come out. It appears as though each layer of the development process has contributed it's own special detriments to the overall process. Fox approved several changes to the canon, like Alien classes and weapon loadouts, that make the game appear less authentic than it might. They also approved a script that is pretty pathetic even from the fanboi's perspective. Sega apparently did a very poor job of managing the contract with Gearbox, allowing them to repeatedly put the project off despite contractual deadlines being breached. They chose not to create a messy court fight in the hopes that Gearbox would eventually put their full efforts behind development of the game, a hope that never came to fruition. Gearbox basically just flipped the project off, repeatedly delaying it in favor of big money producers developed in-house and their progeny. They out-sourced key components of the game, like the single-player campaign, and basically did very little in-house to assure the product would be high quality when it released. TimeGate, the company that Gearbox out-sourced the single player campaign too, created a truly mediocre experience which required frantic last minute re-development on the part of Gearbox when they finally brought it back in-house a few months before the planned release. The end result is yet another weak product in the Aliens universe of bad games.
I think the answer is the same as all answers in this arena since 2004: blame Blizzard Entertainment for creating a multi-billion dollar franchise in World of Warcraft that has birthed a world of big studios gobbling up small developers and then putting out weak products that are all marketing and no fun to play.
I don't think it's that simple though. There is a clear change in the video game landscape, from the 90's to today's world. Nobody enjoys the kind of intense concentration that marked the games from the 90's any more. Clear example is the fading franchise of turn-based strategy game. Microprose, and SSI all went to the Dodo's way, not because their products were inferior; instead because they couldn't keep up with the seismic change in the gaming landscape in general. The few remaining turn-based strategy games stay alive simply due to their name value from the 90's. (Good example for this is the Civilization franchise. I couldn't find any other relevant turn-based strategy game that is still alive and kicking as of now.) Jane's franchise had to suffer the exactly same fate - not because their product were inferior. It was the change of the scenery, and the shift of the demand from the gamers in general. As you can see, these studios were churning out quality product one after another - but that still wasn't enough in the end. WoW is another prime example of such a trend; before, we had Everquest, and before that, we had text-based MUDs. (In case of EQ, it was based on Sojourn.) In WoW, we have a massive graphical IRC client that allows you to do some gaming - but in the end, it was watered down version of what existed before. Last, but not the least, today's 'it' item in gaming world is casual game - which includes SNGs (it's already fading.) By population break down, these hard core gamers comprise less than a quarter of the entire gaming population. More than half of them are casual gamers - and now, combine that with the marketing aspect of the game kicking in, and we have these inferior products in the market. It's pretty sad cycle, really.
Blizzard made MMO's mainstream. Mainstream MMO's generated cash on a level that gaming had not produced before. Mainstream MMO's also began to put pressure on gaming stores because people wouldn't come in and buy a game a month any more, instead they just kept playing the MMO and occasionally bought an expansion. It really was Blizzard that destroyed the PC gaming industry by making a few games extremely profitable and drying up the market for everybody else. Only the big publishers could survive in that environment and they gobbled up any promising smaller companies. Consoles took the place of PC's as the main non-MMO gaming platform because they were cheaper to develop software for and the platforms themselves were cheaper also.
