Getting [Steam]-Rolled 9

[Rutskarn]

I've reached a final analysis on Aliens vs. Predator (original). It really isn't scary, now that I'm no longer 7 years old, but I will say this much: it's intense in a way that a lot of games aren't. Sure, there'll be five minute segments where you'll just be wandering around picking off aliens, but sooner or later you're going to be low on health, moving through a dark area, and you're going to see five aliens rocketing towards you at mach 10 when you've only got ten bullets in your magazine (and you can't reload unless you've burnt through the whole thing). You're going to have to run away and aim for the heads and pray you don't run into one coming the opposite direction. And avoid the facehuggers. Facehuggers, man. Those little pasty bastards.

It's not many games that have enemies as squirrely as the aliens. They'll come at you quite fast, from any angle, and the motion detector's basically no help at all. Especially if you play without flares, like a real warrior me, it's certainly not boring.

Oh, yeah, there are other campaigns besides Marine. Eh--Predator's pretty fun, I guess. I have to say that I feel substantially less cool than the one in that movie, although that might be because on this difficulty your energy levels are depleted quicker than a can of pringles taped to Jibar's gut and you've got the robust constitution of a chain smoker in a plague ward.

And I don't care for the Alien campaign, which is 33% wandering around the floors and ceilings of painfully samey hard-to-navigate surfaces, 33% telescoping the bones in your pinky by holding down the goddamned wall crawling button, and 33% getting instantly punked by any enemy if you're on a manly difficulty. It is actually harder to kill an alien as a marine than it is to get killed by a marine as an alien. You'd think that the ultimate killing machine would evolve plot armor.