The plot and atmosphere of Alien would be hard to replicate in a video game, though. Different media, different requirements. It's not surprising video games reduced it to "wade your way through hundreds of xenomorphs!" which is kind of missing the point of Alien, and perhaps even of Aliens, action flick though it was.
I'd be very interested if a developer could pull off a game where it's just you, a group of survivors whose morale you have to monitor, and a single alien picking you off one by one. Or has something like that been produced? I can't say I follow this franchise closely in video game form, for fairly obvious reasons.
Someone raised this in the Colonial Marines thread, I believe. That would basically be a cross between Amnesia (Dark Descent) and an Aliens RPG, where the game design is radically different.
The problem being a game of that type is unlikely to ever be made using the setting which is too expensive for something qualitatively different to current iterations.*
A video was posted of exactly the type of game you describe in that thread:
Alien, 1984 (Atari)
*And I think most people generally forget that Alien is not really a science-fiction film, but a horror / thriller / splatterfest relocated to space. The narrative form taken by
Alien is the same narrative form as
Halloween, or
Evil Dead, or the later Jason Voorhees/Nightmare on Elm Street films. People trapped in a confined space confronting a nebulous, essentially magical/mystical force (because its material existence is incomprehensible to them) which slowly picks them off one by one as it builds tension towards the splatter-fest climax: the protagonist comes out of the blood bath scarred, but alive. The later Aliens films take on the narrative tropes of other popular films or novels of the genre, so
Aliens becomes analogous to
Starship Troopers (the novel, before you jump down my fucking throat), a critique of militarism relocated to a space colony where humanity finds itself pitted against an incomprehensible and overwhelming enemy. The Aliens franchise, as a filmography is not consistent in any way, shape or form, and to suggest that a video game set in that "universe" must be absolutely consistent as if the creatures and characters are canon is ridiculous. Ripley's continued presence in the films is fan service, nothing more. Her appearances after
Aliens are given such flimsy, absurd explanations as to render them unbelievable, for example.
So what
Alien do you want, bonescraper, villain and evdk? In
Alien, we find a facehugger, and later the full-grown xenomorph born of the dear departed.
Aliens introduces the Queen and her "elite" guard of xenomorphs, which of the two shown, each appear different to the xenomorphs seen throughout. Each subsequent episode of the films has introduced to the "canon" or significantly altered it, but you want to argue for some essentialist or privileged
Aliens canon vis a vis the creature design? Ridiculous.
It makes infinitely more sense for Obsidian to take the designs and tailor them to work in an rpg. To do otherwise is to pastiche the existing designs from the films and attempt to shoehorn them, which means we end up with the trash already extant in Aliens games.
but the animation is nice.
