Today's piece for the Daily Banter takes a look at what the hell went wrong with Aliens: Colonial Marines.Short answer: a lot.
Here's the opening shot:
"I’ve never attempted to dissect a video game before. Yes, I’m an avid gamer and on more than one occasion I’ve jumped neck-deep into the hype for an upcoming title that I’m excited about. (Beginning on September 17th of this year, don’t even bother trying to contact me for at least a month, seeing as how I’ll be immersed in Grand Theft Auto V to the point where my fingernails will likely grow into my XBox controller.) But I generally just play and don’t really think about the ins and outs of how a game was created, what succeeded, what failed, what behind-the-scenes machinations may have played a role in what ultimately became the final product.
Given that the video game industry, now grandiloquently referred to as 'interactive entertainment,' is a $70 billion-a-year business and is expected to climb to around $90 billion-a-year by 2017, though, I don’t think it’s too inside baseball these days to wonder aloud what happened when something goes horribly wrong. When a highly anticipated and oft-delayed game fails on such a spectacular level that it actually leaves not just the fans but the industry itself trying to figure out what the hell happened. When rabid gamers and even the makers of the title itself hint at looking to the legal system for the satisfaction they absolutely didn’t get from the game. When it threatens to ruin an entire software company. When it creates an actual, honest-to-God scandal.
Such is the case with Aliens: Colonial Marines."
Read the Rest Here
