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003 - Aliens vs Predator 2

posted: 2025/03/29

I have been a proud fan of the Aliens franchise for the majority of my life. If we're being honest I was probably a little young when my older brother first showed me the director's cut of Aliens on a pirated tape back before that edition was common knowledge. Seeing as most of my cohorts back then had only seen the theatrical release, there were loads of confused conversations stemming from my having never seen the theatrical release and not realizing the version I saw had new footage that my friends had not previously been aware of. Sadly I can't claim any cool special knowledge for the original film, which I absolutely saw way too young.

None of that really matters for the purposes of this discussion, mind you. What does matter is that I'm a long time fan. Similarly I've been a long time fan of the Predator franchise. My dad has always been a super big cowboy movie fan, and yet somehow Predator 2 was among his list of movies he could enjoy. Usually he considered horror movies like these franchises were known for a bit too gory for his liking. And that probably they needed more of the Duke in them. He might have been a right piece of shit, misogynist, and even a little racist (read VERY racist), but you gotta give John Wayne a little respect for his effectiveness on screen.

But again, this too is not the purpose of this article.

What is the purpose? To reminisce over the merging of the two aforementioned franchises. Aliens vs Predator. For my fellow comics fans out there, this might take some space in your collection too. Maybe like me, your first exposure to this merger was an arcade cabinet that played like Double Dragon with guns where 2 humans and 2 predators beat the stuffing out of hordes upon hordes of xenomorphs.

And then the mid 90's FPS craze hit. In the wake of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and then Quake, the games industry was abuzz about 3D games. But not just 3D graphics, top tier money makers seemed to always be specifically your Doom/Quake style first person shooter. And before the close of the decade Rebellion Developments had gotten the green light from Fox Interactive to release a shiny new FPS on the world in the vein of Doom and Quake, this time letting the player take on the rolls of the Colonial Marines, the Predators, and even the eponymous Alien.

The first game was fantastic at developing the atmosphere of the original films that it took inspiration from, but it has to be said the game was in many ways very minimalist. Minimal polycount (it was still the late 90's after all), minimalist story, minimalist lighting, minimalist diversions from what mattered most: Aliens killing Marines, Predators killing Marines, and of course Marines accidentally killing Marines.

It did include the first version of a now relatively popular multiplayer mode I have ever seen, I'm sure someone out there could find a previous example but AvP 2000 (as it's now often referred to as) had a horde mode. Get a couple of friends together, play as Marines or Predators (or both!), and face off against endless waves of xenos. Considering it was a game mode with no definite ending, and as Marines you'd have to keep cycling through parts of the map to regain ammo from a very limited set of spawn points, it was actually a ton of fun!

The one thing about AvP is that if you want to play Marines in multiplayer and keep your K/D ratio up you had to learn to work as a team and communicate. Even Predators could get overwhelmed by xenos if they weren't careful.

All of this to bring us to the topic at hand: the sequel to Rebellion's 1999 Aliens vs Predator: Aliens vs Predator 2. This time developed by Monolith using their in-house Lithtech Engine. This game was much brighter, the character models had a bit more personality to them, there was an actual storyline, and the xenos now had to contend with the Alien Life Cycle. That's right, you don't start as a hulking death machine this time. Oh no! You gotta survive as a face hugger, impregnate someone, then burst from their chest and scurry to safety where you can molt into your final form.

The game was much more fleshed out in every respect than it's predecessor, but most of all was the game experience for Alien players. Not only did you have the Life Cycle mechanics, you know had a selection of various types of Aliens to choose from.

In both the original AvP 2000 and AvP 2 there was species deathmatch, basically your standard FPS deathmatch mode but where the 3 species are split into teams. Once again the Marines team required communication to survive, and if you saw anyone take a face hugger you stood over that body until the chest burster started tapping out to light that fucker up. Chestbursters were way easier to spawn camp than to catch if they got away. And any full grown xeno could easily end a wary Marine in an instant. However, this created a fun opportunity for the Alien players as often times the Marines, having turned their attention to the soon to be born Alien, would leave their backs open to the hive's benefit.

What still stands out as the most interesting quality about the game though is not it's mechanics, or it's concepts, or even the IP. What to this day gets me most is how, as a rabbid Alien player, not once did I ever see Alien players chat in game. Despite this lack of verbal communication we all just sort of knew how to coordinate actions and attacks. No leaders emerged or anything. No instructions. It was like something evolutionary came out of us. Instinctive maybe? You just sort of innately understood how to move as a group. When to go another direction. To wait for the right time to strike and to keep the Marines always looking the other way.

Predators were always tricky to fight as they had the electrical vision so they could easily spot us coming from miles away. If it was just Aliens vs Predators, ie no Marines, the game turned into a protracted form of Whack-a-Mole. Predators were built like tanks and carried about as much ammunition. Their one weakness was that Humans didn't show up on their visual mode for hunting Aliens, Aliens wouldn't show up on thermo (the one for hunting humies), and neither would show up on the ultraviolet vision mode (used for predators to hunt other predators). This meant that hunting predators was all about opportunism. Get the drop on one while it was distracted killing some Marines. The Aliens were very squishy but even against Predators were capable of a one hit kill, provided they could get close enough.

But this experience always left me wondering about that. How a bunch of monkeys playing a video game where they play as ant-like aliens who can coordinate without language and often without training, and yet act as a single cohesive force. I feel like there's a psychology paper in there somewhere but I am certainly not qualified to even try to formulate that study, let alone write said paper.

I'll stick to my video games and my programming, thank you.