Campaign Notes: All PDAs, Notes, Comp Screens, and Logs!

[Joss Blaney]

Hey everyone.  I'm a huge fan of Aliens vs Predator 2 and have always been in love with the game's story.  I'm particularly obsessed with the little viewable notes you find throughout the game.  You see these in games all of the time now, but AvP 2 was on the vanguard of implementing them back in 2001.  There was a topic started on The Alien Experience Forum back in 2010 for collecting them all and putting them up for people to see.  I'd been working on taking screenshots myself, so that finally inspired me to put them all up on DeviantArt:

http://zang-zip.deviantart.com/gallery/

I've got them broken up into separate gallery folders for each species' campaign, and they are in the order of when you find them.  I also included the text for each opening cutscene and those mission logs you get with level objectives.

I also put them up on the AEP forum, if anyone would like to read through that topic:
http://www.alienexperience.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=e8a354211332af6b4b5896ac67f6d977&topic=6586.0

Anyways, I just found this forum and was very excited to see people still discussing the game after thirteen years!  AvP2 has become pretty outdated graphically and there were certainly more limitations in a game's ability to tell stories back then, but I have always been blown away at the level or writing in this game.  It takes a little bit of work to uncover all of the plot threads they developed, but when you do, it's clear how much work Monolith put into bringing the AvP universe to life.

Enjoy reading through the notes and I hope people are interested in discussing some of the side stories they contain.

[Corporal Hicks]

Nice work. I'm sure people'll get a kick out of this. I'm gonna enjoy reading through these.

[TorsoInvader]

Wow this is great!

Thanks for posting it. 

[Joss Blaney]

Of course!  Have fun sifting through it all.  It really is pretty amazing how much text all of those notes add up to be.  Those writers went to town fleshing out the setting of the facilities on LV-1201 with these babies.  They bring the human population on planet to life and give you a good idea about the off camera day to day goings-on.

[The Necronoir]

I may be wrong, but I vaguely recall mention of being able to view all these logs as a simple text document in the game files. From there it would be a simple matter to format them in Word and make a .pdf from it. Worthy pursuit though!

[Joss Blaney]

Oh yeah, you can see them that way.  Its been so long since I did it that I don't remember exactly how, but you can extract the game files from one of .rez folders and access the cres.dll file.  You can find all of the dialog from the game there, as well as the logs and notes, plus a bunch of deleted stuff as well in text form.  I used that to make a transcript for the game in Word, with all of the notes and deleted content included.  Never posted it anywhere though, and never thought to put it into a PDF...

[HuDaFuK]

Does Primal Hunt have any collectible notes/PDAs?

[Randomizer]

 Yes , there are , especially in the Pod 5 levels .

[HuDaFuK]

Anyone made any notes of those? I'd be interested in reading them (don't have the game).

[Joss Blaney]

You know, I never played Primal Hunt either.  The lack of involvement by Monolith, along with the poor reviews and silly magic artifact plot-liine made me decide it wasn't worth my time and money.  The prospect of finding all of the notes was honestly the one thing that intrigued me enough to want to pick it up.

I don't have pictures of the notes and I have no idea how many there are, but I was able to read a few of them on forum member Xenomorph's "Let's Play" videos that he made for Primal Hunt a few years back.

Here are transcripts for the two that were legible enough to read (both from the Predator's final campaign mission in the Pods, and both relating to the native fauna enemies introduced in this game):

A PDA
From:  Dell Walters
To: Jan Simmons

It was actually kind of funny in a sick sort of way.  Nelson was kneeling down at the perimeter splicing a split cable when that bhulagh came charging right for him.  The dummy didn't even notice until it was right on top of him.

Poor thing hit the fence and went off like fireworks.  I felt sorry for it, but damn if Nelson didn't have to change his underwear after that! : )
I guess you just had to be there...

Dell


And a Note:
Data obtained from the implantation experiments seems to confirm Eisenberg's theory of host genetics affecting Alien larvae development.

The smaller, faster "runners" found on LV-1201 develop only from quadruped hosts, while the larger drones result from the impregnation of bipedal hosts.  The DNA sequencing of LV-1201's indigenous creatures bears remarkable similarity to native Earth life - the peculiarity of which is a topic of much debate here - and that may explain why there is not more variation between the larvae spawned from LV-1201 hosts versus those spawned from specimens of Earth origin.

So far, we have only witnessed these two variations, but it is conceivable that a radically divergent host DNA might yield greater developmental divergence in Alien larvae.

Dr. Courie
3/24/2230

Interesting tidbits right there, especially the second note.  That one is found near the end of the Predator campaign, and was clearly placed there to foreshadow the Predalien, but it ends up doing a whole lot more.  Not only does it explain why there is such a large, active Xeno Hive on LV-1201 prior to human arrival (and why it is made up of solely drones and runners) but it could also serve as quite a connector to the whole human/Engineer DNA concept from Prometheus.  It's interesting to me how well AvP2's story fits into the radical changes introduced all these years later in that movie.  Too bad AvP2010 decided to pursue the AvP movies' much less compatible story.  A proper sequel to AvP2 could address a lot of the confusing inconsistencies from Prometheus and actually strengthen the continuity between the Alien quadrilogy and the new prequels.  Never gonna happen though.  Oh well.

[Kimarhi]

Primal Hunt was okay but its pretty much a retread of the first game environs wise after you progress midway.


I remember reading in its development that there was several different ideas they were trying to develop with the concept before going with the prequel setup.  One of which was to have a burned marine in the AvP2 single player marine campaign come back as a WY combat synthetic. 


I thought that AvP2 did the best worldbuilding of just about any of the more recent Aliens or Predator related material.