Despite a few misgivings about Aliens: Colonial Marines, we had high hopes that it would finally give us the faithful first-person shooter adaptation of the films we've been pining after for so many years. Needless to say, the end result really disappointed us. Our own Jose Otero says "ACM isn't the tense, atmospheric shooter everyone initially hoped for, and this awful game offers little beyond surface-level fan service," and reviews across the Internet almost universally range from "mediocre at best" to "absolutely dreadful." All the perfectly recreated sound effects and acidic blood in the galaxy don't mean a thing when the underlying game feels so slapped together.
On the plus side, at least it works better as an Alien tie-in than Prometheus.
About an hour into Aliens: Colonial Marines, it's hard to find a reason to keep playing. At least that's exactly how I felt during my solo campaign run. Xenomorphs -- the creepy, black-suited extraterrestrials from the Hollywood films -- often slipped past my dimwitted allies to attack me directly. In some instances, they visibly brushed shoulders with my teammates, as they pounced towards my avatar and took a swipe at my head. Honestly, it's a strange sight to witness at first. Can the nimble Xenos even see my allies? It's hard to tell, but one thing became clear to me at this point: I'm the only target on the field that matters, and unless I round up four buddies for a coop session, no one is coming to my rescue.
Digital distribution has given the independent games scene a major boost. No longer are publishers or shareware discs needed to get the creations of small developers with no marketing budgets or prowess into the hands of gamers. Over the last decade, we've seen the level of attention indie games receive in the media greatly increase, oftentimes approaching that of games from major publishers -- perhaps not on par with the latest Call of Duty or Halo, but anyone who routinely reads a gaming website or magazine has likely seen the name Braid or Super Meat Boy pop up once or twice.
What we hear about much less often, at least in the West, are the games being made by independent developers located in Japan. There are, of course, exceptions, like Q-Games' PixelJunk series making a name for itself, and the wonderful Cave Story now having made it to a handful of platforms in the U.S., but the key thing to note is these are exceptions. The number of independently developed games in Japan that we see released or even talked about here is not reflective of how many of these games there actually are. But with numerous hurdles in the way -- language and time zones, for starters -- most of them go unnoticed if they don't have the good fortune of being developed by an especially prominent individual or company.
The nature of the "exclusive" has been an increasingly hot topic among game fans since at least the 2000s. One game can be seen as the savior of the platform; the one that will boost it to new heights, because watching big companies make money is fun, right? But in this generation, more and more exclusive games end up becoming multiplatform titles available to anyone, where it doesn't matter which system you bought. Eventually, the scorned fanboys move on to their next point of contention, and everybody expects it to happen to big-budget third-party console games. But what happens when an exclusive handheld game goes straight to consoles in just over a year?
Capcom made waves when they first announced that the canonical third Monster Hunter game was coming to the Wii, and got even more excitement when they localized it for America and Europe. Though as big a franchise as it is in its homeland of Japan, Monster Hunter Tri didn't quite blow up in the West the way it could have (or should have, depending on your thoughts). The good news is that it effectively has another chance. Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate is the most content-rich Monster Hunter game, with more new monsters to go and (try to) kill, more equipment to craft and amass, and a pile of other checks and balances to further hone the game. Even so, there's several previous Monster Hunter games that suggest if you build it, they might not come.
Which is too bad, because Monster Hunter is good fun with the right level of dedication, and it's multiplayer-driven, which is not hard for Western gamers to get behind. Sure, one player can accomplish a lot by themselves, but to beat monsters the best and fastest ways, teamwork is a necessity. Like the PSP Monster Hunter games, the 3DS version allows four-player local multiplayer, yet won't be able to go online (an unfortunate carryover from the Japanese version, but ad-hoc Monster Hunter rules the country anyway). However, the Wii U version is fully set up for playing online, and will work similarly to the original Wii version. As a consolation of sorts, due to the boon of having Ultimate on two systems, that means if a friend or three come over with their 3DS versions, they can use that to play in a local, Wii U-hosted multiplayer excursion as well. I tried it out myself, and it works as advertised.
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