Quote from: Xenomrph on Jan 16, 2013, 02:33:56 AM
So? Literally every movie after 'Alien' (up to and including 'Prometheus') have differences and have introduced new elements or retconned things assumed to be true in the prior movies, and people have gotten over it. What makes this game a special case where introducing new things is suddenly forbidden?
Because the people behind this are the ones who are making such a big deal out of
needing to explain the magical Sulaco eggs - which is all well and fine. But to do so and then immediately introduce just-as-perplexing things which also wouldn't make terribly much sense, makes an instant mockery of that very mindset.
Like I've said before, I'm open to being pleasantly surprised. I'm just not seeing anything which gives me much hope for that.
QuoteWhy? Does it really matter?
It doesn't.
QuoteI still think my Left 4 Dead example is plenty applicable, and for reasons The Runner demonstrated on prior pages. To take a movie example, it's like people who complained that '28 Days Later' wasn't a "zombie" movie strictly because the movie didn't actually feature the dead coming back to life, and because the "zombies" run. Despite the movie following all the conventions of a typical "zombie apocalypse" movie. It's hardly an isolated case, too - Stephen King's book 'Cell' doesn't feature the undead, but the book is still a "zombie" book and is even dedicated to George Romero. Likewise, John Carpenter's original 'Assault on Precinct 13' is a zombie siege movie, but doesn't feature any conventional George Romero zombies.
But like I said, the analogy fails
precisely because none of those properties are sequels/prequels to one another. They're
not set in the same continuity. Just using the same generic plot device. You can compare the sharks from '
Jaws' to the ones in '
Deep Blue Sea', but that's all it'll ever be; a speculative comparison. The process of comparing them doesn't carry any weight.
The moment one is meant to be set in the other's continuity, then comparisons become
much more valid.
QuoteAll 4 Alien movies are radically different from each other in tone, style, and execution, but (most) people still consider them to be legitimate Alien stories. Colonial Marines doesn't appear to be straying terribly far from the 'Aliens' mold other than dialing everything up to 11 (more Marines, more military hardware, more Aliens) and certainly isn't any different from the other movies than they are compared to each other. They just happen to be tossing in some Alien enemy varieties because it's still a videogame, and frankly I find that completely forgivable.
But that's the crux of the matter. If they'd just said, "Hey, we're making a game, have fun with it!" Nobody would care. But they
repeatedly went over that line, in the same way as those behind '
Requiem' repeatedly went over the line from saying, "Hey, we're making a movie, have fun," to constant references of how it was going to be 'gritty' and totally, 100% non-canon breaking, whatsoever. Only for the central plank of it to revolve around the hyper-bizarre Predalien shenanigans.
The moment you make a boast like that, you actively
invite criticism over your claim to be 100% canonical, because you, as the person in all those interviews you're pumping out, are the one who's making such a big deal over it.
Will the game be fun? Maybe. Who knows?
Will the game fit in with continuity? Maybe we'll get plausible explanations for all the new Alien types, how there's a new Queen, how above-ground colony facilities survived in the remarkable state they did and so on, but the signs aren't looking good... Especially in light of:
Spoiler
Hicks surviving, which has to be one of the most perplexing things, so far.
Remember all the debates before the last of the AVP games got released to us, about how/how 'Number Six' was meant to be more intelligent than the others? Where the facehuggers were meant to come from, every time it held a victim down for one? Turns out, the game never bothered to give explanations for any of those things. They were
purely for aesthetic reasons and that was, literally, as deep as the thought process went.
I hope it
will be fun. I hope that it
will give lots of people happiness. I just have severe reservations about the claims that everyone will accept it as the 'true' sequel - which, in itself, is mildly offensive, to be honest. I'm no great fan of '
Alien 3', but remarks like that unnecessarily devalue the hard work which went into making it.