Does 'Alien' have potential in games?

In the vacuum of the games industry, no one can here your pleads for a sequel! 

It doesn't get much more classic than Ridley Scott's 'Alien' franchise, the first of which presents a stunningly grounded sci-fi arthouse monster story that elevates itself far beyond its station by merit of the sheer quality of presentation. James Cameron's 'Aliens' would present itself as something of a aspirant to that coveted role, however, itself presenting a much more action heavy, and thriller-adjacent, sequel rife with swarming monsters, explosive machine gun fire and endless quippy and quotable movie moments. For years fans of each have argued back and forth about which is better, an argument I have no horse in personally, because the only question I have to ask with this franchise is thus: which iteration of the franchise has more of a future in the gaming space, and why does it seem like it's only the action-heavy Aliens sequel? Does 'Alien' not also have it's credit and purpose?

Firstly, let's establish the difference. Alien presents a simply iconic and distinct look of the industrial space-age future, one that feels so tactile and believable compared to the technical utopian visual of Star Trek that it's impression is stamped forever on Sci-Fi iconography. Alien stars a highly intelligent yet utterly inhuman monster, one that seems to hunt down and victimise the crew throughout the entire movie tearing them apart as if for fun; hardly ever does it feel like the crew of the Nostromo have anything resembling a chance to survive for be merit of their brawn, and even their sharpest wits seem a mere pittance to the unknowable intellect of the 'perfect organism'. Aliens, on the otherhand, is more visually generic with it's look at space-age colonies, and due to budget constraints their 'xenomorphs' are considerably less impressive and artistically shot. Their monsters are mindless and charging, like stumbling ants with nothing but murder in the brain who charge into death by turret fire with little more intelligence than a computer drone. The movies have their considerable variations of vision.

Yet if we look at the amount of games that have birthed from the original Alien vision, only two really come to mind off the top of my head. One is Dead Space, and Dead Space 2 by extension, which both borrow heavily from the basic premise of Alien as well as the visual motif of 'industry in space', bringing rough and dirty utility to space-faring innovation. Their monsters aren't quiet as imposing and overbearing, as merit of it being it video game through which players are usually expect to go through hundreds of enemies in their campaign to survive, but the 'Necromorphs' certainly carry the 'fear factor' for what they've capable of doing; growing out of the bodies of the deceased on shock body horror glory. 'Alien Isolation', on the otherhand, is direct adaptation of the source material that does everything in it's power to faithfully recreate the world, feel and emotions of Alien to a game playing public. From visuals, to themes, to even the presentation of the Alien as this unkillable, overbearing menace that seems to toy with you as it hunts with an advanced AI that never seems totally stumped by your efforts to sneak around it. Both are gaming classics in their own right, both have very few companions to share that space of their respective subgenre with.

Aliens, on the otherhand, possibly by merit of it's premise, has many more entries under it's wing. You have Aliens Colonial Marines, a legendarily shoddy first person shooter that may or may not have been the operate factor in the smuggling of assigned investment money towards the betterment of Borderlands 2. (Allegedly.) You have Aliens Versus Predator: a severely underrated three-person narrative following various sides of an extra-terrestrial conflict that allows you to play as everyone with a stake in the battle, with a simply sublime multiplayer mode welded ontop for good measure. Aliens Infestation, a side-scrolling DS game. 'Aliens: Fireteam Elite', multiplayer Xenomorph hunting. 'Aliens Trilogy', a doom-like loosely based on the films. Aliens Versus Predator (the originals). And the upcoming 'Aliens: Dark Descent', which sounds like the Alien-Amnesia crossover that no one could have ever foreseen.

On it's surface the reason why should be pretty obvious. When it comes to designing games, we're all more comfortable designing products where the main way of interacting with the world is to shoot big guns extensively, then we are with the types of games that exploit psychological horror in their attempt to unnerve us. A lot of expertise and specialised passion needs to go together to make a game like 'Alien Isolation' work, and nearly as much passion needs be spread about the audience for them to like and get aboard with what it wants to create. But a game about marines shooting aliens? Well, that has some of that all important, investor pleasing, universal appeal; doesn't it? There's FPS lovers and makers popping around this industry like flies ever since the 2000's boom of shooters, might as well capitalise on that by making Aliens themed shooters, no?

To be fair to them, I at least think that some of these shooters are inventive; and almost none have been bottom-of-the-barrel trash. Colonial Marines at least attempted to be a worthwhile shooter with broken squad based mechanics, unimportant new Alien variants and a proposed canon narrative that poked giant holes in some of the most hated plot elements of the Alien canon. Fireteam wanted to bring a cooperative shooter angle to the formula, albeit in a manner I found exceedingly generic. And Alien Dark Descent purposes to throw in some light 'XCOM' style tactical precision with group squad orders and permadeath and all that goodness. Still, I can't help but wonder what would happen if the less trigger happy elements of the Aliens franchise had their day.

The Resident Evil franchise has proved that horror can have it's loud and quiet entries, sometimes one after the other, without the world totally folding in on itself from the sheer paradoxical nature of it all. Alien Isolation has remained the franchise's sole venture into exploring it's traditional roots and it is one of the highest regarded horror games of it's generation. So why have we never gotten anything even close to a sequel? Or heck, any other interpretation of the Alien formula that respects the majesty and integrity of the original design? Or at the very least make a Five Nights at Freddy's reskin, I mean come on! I know that Alien has potential in gaming, I've practically seen it- but I cannot prove that it has a future... which to me is the sorer spot.

The quality of gaming AI and bots

Machine or man?

The gaming culture is one of ebb and flow, fads and trends, habits that come and go. Sometimes that is for the best, and sometimes it's for the worse, but either way, it makes gaming and game design a world in constant flux. To pull out that Bennett Foddy quote again, "It's like building on drying concrete." We all have those eras of gaming that we wish we could return to, times that we can point to and go "There! They had the right idea with that one." But time moves ever onward. That cannot prevent some wistful folk, like myself, for sparing a nostalgic thought about what was and what might be had certain trends played out differently, with that in mind, let's talk about AI.

No, I'm not talking about the traditionally accepted definition of AI (Which can be more accurately defined as 'super-intelligent AI') but rather the collection of algorithms and processes that make up the mind of a computer; it's 'Artifical Intelligence'. In gaming, we commonly use the term 'AI' to refer to the handling of bots and NPC's by the software, it's a catch-all term that encompasses their behaviour, reaction and believability. A game that would considered having 'good' AI, would be one wherein the NPC's make appropriate use of their tools, navigate their environment succinctly and pose an actual threat to the humans; whereas a 'bad' AI would be the type you see running into walls and standing around waiting to be shot.

In the early days of gaming, AI wasn't too much of concern for programmers as their games were a lot more simplistic in scope. Enemies didn't really need to be programmed with a wide range of possible actions and route planning algorithms, they just had to operate a simple patrol task with the player's one job to be to avoid them. It was in this vein that famous video game bosses such as Super Mario Bros' Bowser, resorted to little more than jumping up and down and shooting fireballs every now and then. The only real challenge on the player's part is jumping over the Koopa king and hitting the axe-switch to plunge him into lava. Difficulty ramped up as patterns became more unpredictable and/or erratic, which is why many a player still has nightmares about the Hammer Bros from Super Mario Bros 3 and the Gorgon heads from Castlevania.

Games gradually evolved throughout the years, however, and so too did people's perception about what made good enemies in video games. In my opinion, the real watershed moment was when 3D world's became a thing with the advent of the Nintendo 64. Suddenly, AI would need to navigate a whole 3D environment and it became difficult for Developers to get away with simple patterns for the enemy AI. Now they had to code in path-finding and write in extra rules to determine line-of-sight and determine when to use certain abilities. The old guard method of planning would be to have enemies attack the moment they rendered on the screen or whenever the player got too close, now games consoles had become so powerful that this was unfeasible, enemies could be rendered from far away and players could navigate in 3 dimensions, requiring the system to evolve.

This really started to take route in the early 2000's when Developers began to expand the sorts of games that they could make. On of the biggest games of the time that boasted about it's AI's capabilities would have to be, possibly the first game I ever played, Metal Gear Solid. That was a game which ushered in a whole new genre of play, stealth, and with it a whole new set of requirements when it came to coding enemy AI. Patrolling guards had to follow their routes, sure, but they had to be able to react to their situations in a way that felt dynamic and realistic. Should they become alert, they needed to comb the area in search; if someone held them up with a gun, they needed to freeze in fear of their life. This revolutionized the way that people viewed AI and laid the ground works for where it would evolve next.

From this point onwards it became something of a point of pride for developers to boast about the cool new AI that their games had to offer and boast about how clever it was. Battlefield 1942, for example, had one of it's key selling points rest on the strength of it's bots and their ability to mimic real life opponents. (Isn't that weird? A purely online game that teases the offline components.) This trend caught on too, with future online games like TimeSplitters putting considerable effort into ensuring that their offline play was just as exciting as their online play. During this time it was actually feasible for an offline gamer, like I once was, to buy the newest multiplayer centric game under the knowledge that I wouldn't be left out.

One might have thought that this influx of innovation would be never-ending considering the huge jump forwards in software tech in the years since, however that has not been the case. It seems as standard AI procedures (AI good enough to hold their own against a human) became less of a novelty and more of the norm, there grew less of an incentive to strive for improvement in this general area. Games stopped boasting about how smart their AI was and some multiplayer titles started forgetting about AI Bots altogether. (COD has never had AI bots in their multiplayer as far as I know.) I guess that creating the perfect online opponent was too close to literally cloning gamer brain patterns for Devs to continue down that road. (Although, some of the best advancements in the development of general AI have been made in Video game settings. Maybe these game companies are selling themselves short.)

In the modern age, the only time you'll hear a big fuss made about the quality of AI is when something truly spectacular has been achieved. Who remembers the reveal gameplay demo for 'The Last of Us' when we saw Ellie dynamically react to a situation when the player was in trouble? It was an incredibly impressive showcase and one that should have, in a perfect world, sparked interest in bot development for the future. But it didn't. The same was true for the impressive AI systems behind the Xenomorph from 'Alien: Isolation'. With a reputation for being the 'perfect organism', Creative Assembly knew that they had to do something more imaginative with their Alien beyond giving it a patrol schedule, and so they designed two AI 'storytellers' to manage it's behaviours. One storyteller would give the Alien's AI clues as to where the player was, simulating the 'it's always nearby' paranoia from horror movies, whilst the other would send false clues to distract the alien, ensuring it wasn't always on the player and making it's movements difficult to predict. Despite the creation of this ingenious system, 'Alien: Isolation' was not the spark to revive the AI trend.

So is the concept of great AI complexity dead in the world of gaming? Not quite. Some games have started to look into bringing bots back into multiplayer games, like Battlefront 2, and advanced AI scripting is slowly becoming more of a talking point thanks to pioneers like 'The Last of Us part II'. But perhaps what we really need is a huge leap forward in the technology to really fan the flames of creativity once again in the minds of creators and push the boundaries of what can be possible. I've seen AI demos in simulated environments that go so far as to start simulating the action/reaction motion of human emotions, effectively creating artificial wants and needs; the least we can do in gaming is create an AI that chooses to take cover once and a while.

Aliens!!!

Beep, Beep, Beep.

Where will you be on September 20th? If it's not in Lincoln County, Nevada planning to storm Area 51 then you clearly don't have enough free time on your hands. Perhaps you've heard of the latest troll to cross the Rubicon from the realm of the Internet into real life; the "Storm Area 51, they can't stop all of us" Facebook event. It's a funny little event wherein the organizer (Who's name features an expletive) proposes that the general public amass to charge down the infamous military facility in order to free the imprisoned aliens that are obviously there. To cap it all off, he tells us that they will meet at the Alien Tourist Centre to coordinate and "If we Naruto run, we can move faster then their bullets". (God, I feel like an aging fox news presenter right now.)

I must admit, I love this whole thing to bits. The endless memes about proper alien-care procedures, the speculation about how many people will actually turn up and the disapproving stern response of the United States military. If I could afford a plane ticket I might actually consider going myself just to give the whole thing a look over. And who knows, maybe they are hiding Aliens there. Okay, I'm not going to go all conspiracy-nut on you, I'm just an Alien optimist who thinks it about high time we finally found something. Although, if the US military were really hiding extraterrestrials at a secret military facility there would be serious political ramifications as other superpowers start asking why the US have kept such a incredible scientific discovery to themselves. Ugh, I'm letting my imagination take over from my common sense again. This is why I should just stick to Video games. Speaking of...

One of the most popular tropes of Science fiction writing is the inclusion of some form of extra-terrestrial life. You seem them on TV shows like in The Looney Tunes, V, Captain Scarlett, Mork and Mindy, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5 and Star Trek; or in movies like in Star Wars, Guardians of the Galaxy, District 9, Mars Needs Moms, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Pacific Rim?, and, uh, Star Trek. And you can also find some pretty cool aliens in Sci-fi Video Games too. It's almost the height of any creative's career to get the chance to invent a whole new species. How are they similar to us, how are they different? How did they evolve, what is their culture like, how do they speak? So much goes into the lore surrounding bringing an Alien to life that the visual depiction sometimes becomes an afterthought. And there is no medium better for bringing Aliens to pop culture life than Video games.

Speaking of pop culture Aliens, why don't we start with one of most iconic Aliens of all time: The Xenomorph. First born from the fever dreams of H. R. Geiger, the Xenomorph was rebirthed in 3d  to terrify audiences in 1979's Alien. Everything about the Xenomorph's design and lore gelded together to create an creature so terrifyingly deadly that it single-handily reshaped the public's definition of the word 'Alien'. If you need a reason as to why that was the case, just look at the thing; It's nightmarish. It's almost insectile body and arachnid tendencies wrapped in that vaguely humanoid bio-mechanical exoskeleton is enough to creep me out any day of the week. Couple that with the fact the being is supposed to be incredibly intelligent and violent, and you have a creature that you most definitely don't want to be stuck in deep space with.

It is inevitable then, that the Xenomorph would eventually show up in a slew of games in order to stick players in that exact scenario. However, it is hard to get a depiction of 'The perfect organism' quite down pat, so a lot of games took a few liberties with the creature when pixelising it. Like 1996's Alien Trilogy did. In Alien Trilogy, the Aliens you face are less unstoppable-killing machines and more slightly-resilient-cannon-fodder. It does make sense, I suppose, seeing that the game pits you against hundreds of them in a DOOM-style first person shooter. The game wouldn't be so fun if the first alien you met immediately decapitated you every time.

That wasn't the only game to feature Alien's however. Aliens vs Predator bought the Xenomorph's to life in all their scary, wall crawling glory. Rebellion even allowed you play as one for a full story length campaign. Then there was Gearbox's Alien Colonial Marines which became infamous for making the universe's smartest killer dumber than a lobotomized cow. Luckily, Creative Assembly's Alien Isolation arrived to make the Xenomorph scary again. Isolation managed to capture one aspect that no other game before it pulled off, they made the Alien smart. Through the use of a clever paired AI system, the Xenomorph (Creative Assembly were confident enough in their creature's scariness to only need one.) would systematically hunt down the player, sniffing them out through grates and in cupboards unless they kept on the move and quiet. Oh, and he can hear the beep of your motion sensor. (So unfair.)

Some games went for a more traditional approach when it came to bringing Aliens to life in their game. Just look at the Zetans from the Fallout franchise. Little green men with comically large heads? Check. Little flying saucers that are inherently not aerodynamic? Check. An inexorable, unexplainable desire to conduct anal probing on abductees? Unfortunately, check. The Zetans appear very much to be your stereotypical 50's alien with the big eyes and the laser guns, and this isn't due to lazy design choice. Anyone who has played Fallout would no-doubt be aware that the game stylizes itself around the aesthetic of 1950's Americana. That means wingtip cars, beehive haircuts, art deco architecture and the constant drone of crooners from the inescapable radios. It makes sense, then, that the Aliens of this universe would resemble the look that was popularized in that time period.

When the Zetans appear in the Fallout games it is usually as a little non-canonical Easter egg, but it is always in a grand fashion. In Fallout 3 you see a flying saucer careening out the sky and find another crashed with a dead alien not too far away; Fallout 4 combines these encounters into one of its own; And 'Mothership Zeta' features a full-on invasion ship, prison break, space walk and Star Trek-esque star ship battle. Fallout 76 even has it's only little reference with the rare appearance of the cryptid known as 'The Flatwoods monster'.

Of course, there is always one entry in these list-blogs that is practically a shoe-in. I couldn't rightly sleep at night if I didn't mention Mass Effect's smorgasbord of interesting aliens creatures, alien societies and alien cultures. There are just too many to count. You've got the criminal Batarians and Vorcha, The war-mongering Turians and Krogan, The religious Hanar, The clever Salarians and the wise Asari. And then there are the dull humans, stuck in the middle of them. Bioware had the clever idea of sanitizing all these aliens species by combing them into one intergalactic community from the beginning of the game. They retain being a diverse and interesting bunch to learn about but you can still wrap your head around it all without combing through hours worth of data log entries.

These aliens weren't even just humans with differing numbers of head ridges. (Looking at you Star Trek) They came in all different shapes and sizes and looked fundamentally unique from one another. Bioware made another smart move here, deciding to trace all the races back to their evolutionary ancestors so that the end results looks striking but familiar. Krogan are evolved from fish, Salarians from amphibians, Hanar from jellies, and so on. Some did point out that it is strange how most of these Aliens evolved to become humanoid but the Andromeda took the time to address this by labelling it a  natural evolutionary quirk. After all, two legs and two arms are the only tools one really needs.

There are so many more video game Alien's that I could talk about but that I just don't know enough about to get into. The Covenant from Halo: never played a Halo beyond Reach, heinous as that is to admit. The Aliens from Nier Automata: I'm fairly sure that they are intentionally unexplored to leave the attention on the evolution of their robotic children beside the evolution of man's androidic successors. The Timesplitters: Those things are just freakin' monsters, I don't know what more there is to say. The Video Game Sci-fi world is brimming with incredible depictions of extraterrestrials, and we'll likely see more in the future as the scope for what's possible to create exceeds the scope of what's possible to imagine.Who can predict how revolutionary the next gen will be for game development and the effect that might have in subsequent games. We likely won't know for sure until at least 2023,and the Aliens will probably be here be then. We can just ask them how accurate all these video game ET's are. Does this mean that we'll see any of these beings when we collectively Naruto run past the gates of Area 51 and into the alien holding pens that definitely exist? I sort of hope not. Especially if there's a Xenomorph in there.

PSA: Do not actually storm Area 51 for the love of god.

PS: If anyone does I reserve the right to accept absolutely no responsibility for your likely death and/or incarceration. Because at that point it really is your own fault now isn't it? Play stupid games win stupid prizes, isn't that what they say. Seriously though, I just know that someone is going to take it too far and dare the Area 51 Guards to do something. Remember we're talking about a live-fire testing zone people! If you're looking to get a brand new hole in you there are plenty of easier ways. Aw crap, now it sounds like I advocating for suicide. Don't do that either, okay. Unless it's legal euthanasia like they have in some places. In that case, go nuts. Who am I to tell you how to live your life. Okay, now I am advocating suicide. Disregard everything I just said.