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You find yourself creeping down a pitch-black steel corridor. You're armed to the teeth, but your flares only create a tiny island of harsh, purple light three feet in front of you. That's no good against terrible, spindly shadows that flit at speeds you've never seen in a game before.
Blip. 30 meters. Blip. 20 meters. You see a single dot moving across the little readout of your motion tracker. You saw the film. You guess what's coming. Suddenly, your flare fizzes out, leaving you in darkness.
Blip. 10 meters. You fumble in the dark and find the image intensifier. One flick and the screen lights up in an eerie, green shade.
Night vision comes at a cost — you can't view the tracker anymore. Suddenly, a mixture of hiss, screech, and bestial growl blares through your headphones. A black shape skitters into sight, ricochets off the walls, and screams along the floor towards you.
Doom has conditioned you to backpedal as fast as humanly possible and spray pulse-rifle rounds down the corridor. The muzzle flash whites out your vision. You hear a wet, squishy impact.
You cease fire. Vision returns. Smoke rises from a pool of acidic blood. Disengaging your image intensifier, you check the motion tracker.
Blip. One meter. You have just time to drop a flare before a loud snap announces your failure. What remains of your skull hangs from the jaws of your first alien encounter as the creature clings to the ceiling above.
Game: over. Pants: browned. Back in 1999, Aliens vs. Predator didn't redefine horror games — it fucking defined them.
Scores of inadequate pretenders from the last decade shiver in the dark shadow it casts. Their developers filled them with cheap shocks complemented by overbearing musical scores and safe-haven cut-scenes.
Meanwhile, Aliens vs. Predator takes place in oppressive silence as you try to hide from opponents who are infinitely faster, stronger, and more numerous than you. You will come across long corridors of absolute darkness, which pressure you to light your path either with wild gunfire, blinding flares, or night vision that cripples your ability to sense danger.
Back in those days, F.E.A.R. meant something other than slow-motion gun battles in office buildings and little girls with psychic powers.
We've waited a long time for another Aliens game. The frustrating thing is that loads of them exist. Mobile phones see the largest catalog, while the PSP follows up with tie-ins to the beyond-horrible Aliens vs. Predator movies (I'd describe them as looking fan-made, but that does the fans a disservice).
The most recent was Rebellion's 2010 "successor" to their 1999 classic. My scare quotes drip warm sarcasm all over the floor, so let me qualify my point while the gimp mops it up for me.
The main reason Aliens were such a terrifying prospect back in the day was not because they're so well-designed. It wasn't high-res textures of chitinous exoskeletons or procedurally-animated tail whip physics. It was their blistering movement speed.
The films were terrifying because we couldn't see what was after the crew of the Nostromo, and our imagination filled in the blanks. While that doesn't work in a first-person perspective, you can't see something that leaps from floor to ceiling and runs circles around you faster than you can turn your head.
In 2010, the Aliens move like old people fuck. I had no trouble picking each one out with my motion tracker and flashlight and then disassembling them with my pistol. Not to mention how boring the alien campaign becomes once you realize the only reliable way to defeat enemies is to get behind them and pressing the "kill" button.
In 1999, we could dismember an entire roomful of marines in seconds or be embarrassed by a single civilian with a pistol, both of which depended solely on our skill and cunning. It was a simple game of hide-and-seek. The design tested marines by their nerves and caution, while it tested aliens by their cunning and speed. A brilliant layout for incredibly tense gameplay, where victory goes to whoever is least afraid.
No game since then has understood this. Not Monolith's Aliens vs. Predator 2, not Aliens vs. Predator in 2010, not even the glorious Aliens vs. Predator: Extinction (which, for the record, had real potential). And this alien tail of disappointment painfully twists as it buries itself into my chest cavity. Its name is Gearbox.
I don't trust them. They stole my heart in Half-Life: Opposing Force only to crush it underfoot with the piss-poor PC port of Borderlands. Now they have fallen silent with only a few, old screenshots of their latest project — Aliens: Colonial Marines — floating around the Internet. They are spectacular.
They've promised a character-driven storyline — marines with personality. A story set immediately following Aliens. A mission to recover Ellen Ripley and the squad who followed her into hell. Four-player, local co-op where aliens are fast, merciless, and burst suddenly from the world geometry to drag you under. Acid blood that cripples players who touch it and burns through steel doors. A.I. that will outflank, outsmart, and terrify us.
We Alien fans are a patient lot. Eleven long years have passed since our last truly great game — 24 years since our last good film. Sure, Duke Nukem leads the pack in cautionary tales from development hell, Sega has drawn out Sonic's death more excruciatingly than any other, and George Lucas has milked Star Wars to the point of emaciation. But the 20th Century Fox franchise has punished its fans more than any other in history.
It isn't the waiting. You get used to the waiting. It's the hope. Despite the countless abhorrences that the license has birthed, we have never lost faith that one day someone might understand why James Cameron's career is on the wrong side of its peak, why Rebellion still exists, and what keeps surrealist artist H.R. Giger's creature lurching onward.
Sometimes, I wish I could get out of this chicken-shit outfit, but I know that it's worth sticking around, just in case. Because if anyone ever does make a game that does this incredible franchise justice, it will be the best game ever.