Mighty Steve - Hello and welcome to the Official Xbox 360 magazine OXM report. I'm here in the plush boardroom of Rebellion HQ with the CEO Jason Kingsly and he's going to tell me a little about erm Aliens vs Predator. So yeah, tell me a little about the game.
Jason Kingsly - Well that's it. That's the question. It's a huge game to summarize in a few sentences. Erm...well obviously Rebellion are well known for the Atari Jaguar version a long long time ago and the subsequent PC version in 1999, I think it was. We're excited to be working with Sega and Fox on the sequel. Or a re-imagining really 'cause we're not necessarily thinking of it as a sequel. We're thinking of it as a "what would we have done had we had had the machines back in those days that we can do now". We don't know yet but we hope it's going to be a massive success.
MS - This must pretty much be the dream license for you guys...
JK - It is but it's also slightly terrifying in that can we do it a third time? You know, can we really make a great game a third time. I mean, we're determined to do that and we're pulling out all the stops to try and achieve it. Er...I guess time will tell and so far it's looking bloody great.
MS - Obviously the series has a rich pedigree. What are you looking to bring over from the classic AvP games.
JK - All the good bits [laughs] is basically that and then add to them. So for example playing the Alien I think it's absolutely essentially that and it has been right from the very beginning that you can walk on walls and the ceilings and geometry and the landscape becomes very much part of the gameplay for the alien player as it was in the original. The Predator, obviously we're trying to recapture, go back to the original movies and recapture what the Predator was with the way the Predator maneuvers around the landscape which is also quite exciting. We couldn't do in the originals at all, we just didn't have the computing horsepower but now we do. And of course the marines. The marines gotta be great. There are some brilliant shooters out there that quite frankly rip-off the marines, in fact most of them probably rip off the original movie so we gotta go a little bit further with that.
MS - Is it a challenge to balance three completely different characters?
JK - It's a complete nightmare [laughs] I mean, let's face it that the Predator really is the big guy, he's the one with all the high-tech weaponry and all the abilities and er and all that kind of attitude and scale. The marines are kinda stuck in the hard place and the alien itself is kinda, not a mindless killer, but it is the weapon. The alien is the weapon itself so yes it's a complete nightmare. I mean, going back to the days of the original what we tried to do was make it so that everything, for example multiplayer, players could score things the way they wanted to and that's something that I think is really important, that we try to recapture so that each are kinda building on their own strengths and hopefully hold a paper, scissor, stone philosophy so that there's no one perfect solution to every situation.
MS - So the trophies kills are quite violent. Is that the nastiest thing in the game or do you have any more grizzly surprises for us?
JK - [laughs] The trophy kills are big big debate. This is obviously a game based on adult rated movies and we want to make sure that it's very clearly an adult rated game. It's an issue for me - computer games are not for kids. Some computer games are for kids. We're not making a computer game here for anything other than adults. I think, hopefully, the marketing, will make that very clear. It'll have a big red "18" on front of the box so I don't want anybody complaining that a 12 year old is playing the game when they shouldn't have got hold of it so that's very clear. Within that context I think that violence is part of the character and the world. We're talking about fantasy worlds here, about fantasy creatures and we're talking about trying to umm build up a mythos and yeah... It's pretty..I remember the first time I saw it, particularly one of the predator kills and everyone went "ooohhh" [laughs]
MS - That was pretty much my reaction as well...
JK - Umm...it is what the Predator does in the movies. It's implied in the movies. You see skinned corpses in the movies. Yeah, it's a challenge not to make it too gratuitous or over the top and give it a reason for being there. No every kill...It's not going to be an easy thing to achieve. You know, you do not need to do it every time but I think that's errr part of the Predator character, the mythos.
Here ya go. Annoy any poor grammar as it was quite a tedious task and I can't really be arsed to go over it.
