Five Great Aliens Alternatives to Colonial Marines

Bummed by how uneven Gearbox's new shooter turned out to be? Soothe your pain with its best predecessors.

By: Jeremy Parish February 13, 2013

Despite a few misgivings about Aliens: Colonial Marines, we had high hopes that it would finally give us the faithful first-person shooter adaptation of the films we've been pining after for so many years. Needless to say, the end result really disappointed us. Our own Jose Otero says "ACM isn't the tense, atmospheric shooter everyone initially hoped for, and this awful game offers little beyond surface-level fan service," and reviews across the Internet almost universally range from "mediocre at best" to "absolutely dreadful." All the perfectly recreated sound effects and acidic blood in the galaxy don't mean a thing when the underlying game feels so slapped together.

On the plus side, at least it works better as an Alien tie-in than Prometheus.

The Odyssey of Skulls of the Shogun

Developer 17-bit gives us a look behind the scenes at their darling turn-based strategy game.

By: Jose Otero January 31, 2012

It's a sunny and brisk winter morning in Seattle on January 14, 2013 as Jake Kazdal arrives at his independent game studio, 17-bit. I find a few of his employees huddled around a small TV as they start their workday with an impromptu session of Steel Battalion for the original Xbox. Another person sits at his desk designing an invite for their game's launch party at the end of the month.

To most bystanders, the lack of activity in the office might signal an uneventful day for these developers -- a work environment known for its mix of deadlines and play time, as the team slowly churns their concept into a video game. But today's an exciting day for everyone in the company: After a grueling three and a half years of development, their game, Skulls of the Shogun, is almost ready for download on Xbox Live Arcade -- one of three Microsoft-exclusive digital storefronts where people can purchase it at launch.

Do Violent Games Speak to a Lack of Creativity or Lack of Conviction?

Cover Story: Were this year's bloodiest announcements inspired by a failure to innovate?

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everal developers may be aiming to add meaning and context to the violence the dominates gaming's most popular titles, but fans of senseless virtual slaughter needn't worry: This year's E3 offers plenty of opportunities for savage, imaginary brutality. In fact, Monday's press conferences pounded the concept of violence into our eyes, ears, and minds with relentless persistence.

Why were this year's E3 press briefings -- Microsoft, Sony, Electronic Arts, and Ubisoft -- so laser-focused on visual savagery? Is the idea of gaming as a virtual charnel house the best way these developers and publishers know to cover their failure to come up with more nuanced approaches to game design? Or do the bloody shootings, stabbings, and dismemberments speak instead to publishers' lack of confidence in gamers' willingness to support a game that doesn't pander to their most vicious instincts?

Video Game Rumors from Another Reality

Cover Story: Not only are these game rumors not true, they're not even real rumors... at least, not in our world.

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n another world -- a more interesting world than our own -- the rumors below rule Internet forums, spread like the plague through the school yard, and merit regular debunking by Snopes' video game urban legends section (which doesn't even exist in our reality; that's how lame real life is). Please enjoy this glimpse into the playground lies of another universe's video game fandom.

Re-Examining the Role of Digital Death

How death has evolved over the four decades of gaming.

By: Nickolai Adkins May 9, 2012

There is possibly no greater representative icon for the entirety of gaming than that of the game over screen. That negative void with stolid letters painted cryptically across; there is a certain mysticism surrounding the screen, the dark back corners of arcade holes that once used to thrive, and the natural competition to overcome the inevitability of failure that it represents.

Bore with the medium's creation in arcade cabinets and the surrounding culture that developed after their inception, the challenge of prolonging play time and avoiding inevitable failure in death became the central function for nearly every game created to date. In the form of a barrel throwing gorilla, the simple existence of a play clock, infinite and unseen pits that trail into the unknown below the screens of any number of platformers, or even in competition between players, video games have always been a participatory form of near exclusive survival.

The 2D Platformer Renaissance

Fez leads the resurgence of a genre once proclaimed dead.

By: Jeremy Parish April 16, 2012

One of the most common refrains being espoused by people discussing Fez online is that the "fake retro 8-bit" style of games is growing long in the tooth. That strikes me as a limiting and narrow-minded perspective; Fez's aesthetic is a deliberate stylistic choice that required a fair amount of artistry -- the game excellently depicts things like frogs with remarkable minimalism! -- and it serves a functional purpose as well by helping enable the game's optical-illusion-based core mechanic. Sure, lots of games have mishandled the faux-8-bit look, but when it's used well (as it is in Fez), it becomes as a valid a visual style as the high-poly-count, four-rendering-pass "realism" of AAA shooters... which, incidentally, will look painfully dated five years from now. At least the pseudo-classic look front-loads its visual obsolescence.

Most importantly, Fez's throwback style helps communicate the relatively simple nature of the game mechanics, which makes it not only a viable look but an appropriate one, too. It serves as a sort of graphical shorthand to clue viewers into the fact that it's not a complicated, cumbersome-to-play contemporary game but rather one that hearkens back to a simpler age. And it's only one of many recent and upcoming games to look back to these simpler play mechanics. As anyone who spent a little time on the show floor at PAX East can attest, the 2D platformer is undergoing a revival of sorts. Liberated from the "handheld ghetto," where most self-proclaimed hardcore gamers will turn their nose up at any game regardless of its excellence, the side-scrolling run-and-jump game has set up camp in the indie game space of consoles and PCs. The genre never died; it simply needed a safe place to live, where gamers' obsession with visual bang for their gaming buck doesn't overshadow the quality of the software itself.

How Would YOU Fix Skyrim?

You've heard our ideas for smoothing over Skyrim's flaws. Now let's hear yours.

By: 1UP Staff March 20, 2012

Not too long ago, we published our thoughts on how Bethesda might go about fixing some of Skyrim's more significant issues -- if not with a patch for Skyrim, then at least when The Elder Scrolls VI rolls around in a few years. Some of them were practical, nitty-gritty suggestions, while others were more an act of free association. And you... well, you had many opinions about our thoughts. Both the 1UP community and a number of Elder Scrolls fans at Reddit had plenty to say about our piece and where Bethesda should take the franchise. We've rounded up the most thoughtful (and civil!) responses below; turns out you folks have some well-informed and interesting ideas about Skyrim. We'd like to play your version of the game.

Do something with your septims in Tamriel
Thoughts from 1UP member 00grifter

Dark Done Right: How Mass Effect 3 Goes Grim Without Going Overboard

Even a paragon can feel comfortable as this universe grows ever darker.

By: Jeremy Parish March 15, 2012

Off the lobby wing of the Citadel's Huerta Memorial Hospital, an asari therapist sits with a commando of her own race, quietly talking about the roots of the soldier's post-traumatic stress disorder. The warrior, whose name is never given directly -- she's simply labelled PTSD Soldier -- slowly reveals her story and the events that have made her refuse to be around humans or even take a shower. It's an ugly story of brutal decisions made in the name of survival and desperation, one that fills the listener with a mixture of pity and revulsion.

Elsewhere in the Citadel, an Alliance soldier begs her commanding offer for reassignment to the Reaper front, despite the fact that her survivability against the Cerberus terrorist organization to which she's currently assigned to fight is incalculably higher than it would be battling the nigh-indestructible alien monstrosities currently laying siege to the galaxy. To her, the prospect of almost-certain death in the face of the unknowable is preferable to the possibility of facing a Cerberus squad; her brother was recently conscripted into the terrorist organization's ranks, you see.

The Calculus of Death in Mass Effect 2

How one man beat the odds and survived Mass Effect 2's suicide mission through lore, character building, role-playing, and happenstance.

By: Thierry Nguyen March 2, 2012

"It's a suicide mission -- everyone can die. We tell you that from the beginning. You better make good decisions." That was Mass Effect series executive producer Casey Hudson's warning to me when I started playing Mass Effect 2. He elaborated that every one of my squad mates would live or die based on how I playd through the entire game. Such a statement inspired me to play something besides my usual "critical path only and just move on" approach and instead appealed to the min-max player hidden deep within me. If I'm assembling an intergalactic Dirty Dozen, then I want all of them to live, dammit.

As a refresher, the Omega 4 Relay serves as ME2's Rubicon -- once you fly through the Relay, a hidden formula begins tracking specific decisions you've made, derives some numbers, and then crunches said numbers to determine who lives, who dies, and when and how they go. After I finished the game and asked Hudson in a later interview about who on the development team can break down the formula and how it works, he told me that was impossible. "You can't just talk to one guy about how the endgame works," he said. "You'd have to sit down with the five or six people spread across different teams and disciplines to get the full picture of how it works."

Mass Effect 2 and the Advent of the Mainstream RPG

BioWare completely changed the Mass Effect series with its second chapter... and by extension changed the entire genre.

By: Jeremy Parish March 1, 2012

In 1987, Nintendo developed Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, the sequel to the incredibly popular and wildly influential NES hit The Legend of Zelda. It was in many ways a dramatic departure from its predecessor: An action-oriented platformer built on the success of a quest-driven proto-RPG. Its determination to buck expectations resulted in a slightly uneven title which, in hindsight, is broadly regarded as the black sheep of the entire series.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, we had Mass Effect 2, which did something remarkably similar to Zelda's first sequel. A series that was in its first installment a numbers-driven RPG dressed in the trappings of a squad-based shooter has all but abandoned those RPG mechanics to become, unabashedly, a squad-based shooter. It's an uncannily deep shooter to be sure, but it represents a dramatic change of genre nevertheless. Yet the transformation of Mass Effect is much less obvious than Zelda's was; the advance of technology has made it easier to hide such substantial mechanical shifts. Zelda went from a top-down Adventure derivative to a side-scroller that seemed more akin to Dragon Buster or Castlevania with its emphasis on reflex-heavy conflict and a reliance on action concepts like lives. Meanwhile, aside from its streamlined HUD, Mass Effect 2 still looks like the same basic game its predecessor was. Underneath that surface, however, RPG-based dice rolls and randomness have been abandoned in favor of direct point-and-shoot action. And unlike Zelda, it's been met with nearly universal critical acclaim for so elegantly bucking expectations.

You can chalk that up to any number of factors -- changing tastes, maybe, or perhaps the fact that the original Mass Effect was a godawful hodgepodge of ill-fitting elements that mostly got by on sheer chutzpah and desperately needed reinvention -- but nevertheless it's interesting to consider that one of the most dramatically divergent video game sequels in recent memory earned its plaudits by stripping out many of the role-playing elements that made the first game so unique. Meanwhile, Final Fantasy XIII took largely the same approach to its design, yet it was incredibly divisive: A virtual line in the sand across which different schools of fans lob complaints and epithets at one another. Again, you can spin this however you choose -- FFXIII botched its attempt, possibly, or then again maybe its fans simply aren't as accepting of evolution -- but the fact of the matter is, the role-playing game is changing.