In space, no one can hear you scream “THAT’S RAD” when you see Alien: Isolation is the latest free game on the Epic Games Store. As their Christmas celebration of daily giveaways continues, you have until tomorrow to grab the fine first-person horror game that’s sorta a sequel to the classic film. It’s a good’un, I say despite having given up on it myself because I’m too much of a spacebaby.

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Andy Kelly, the fella from cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer who’s behind pleasant ‘look at pretty video game locations’ video series Other Places, has kicked off a new subseries focused on the sounds of virtuaplaces. Which is a splendid idea. Video game sound is easily overlooked because 1) you can’t actually look at it 2) you’re trained to appreciate ambient images more than ambient sounds 3) it’s hard to hear when you–you reading this–are looping Drowning Pool’s smash hit Bodies on Winamp. Which is a shame. A soundscape can be beautiful, bringing what we see to life and becoming a location to enjoy in itself. So Kelly is tromping into video games to make field recordings, starting with Alien: Isolation.

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The mysterious Alien: Blackout has now been announced, six weeks after the name leaked, and sadly it’s not a sequel to Alien: Isolation. Alien: Blackout will bring back Isolation protagonist Amanda Ripley, but for a pocket telephone game rather than anything PC-y. Blackout actually sounds a bit like ye olde Alien game from the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, putting us behind a computer terminal using surveillance cameras and such to direct the crew around and evade the alien. Or a bit like Five Nights At Freddy’s. But whatever it is, it’s not a PC game, so it’s beyond our purview.

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A new Alien game is skulking in the dark, early stages of development, according to the videogames division of Fox. Details about the xenomorph s next appearance are still hidden in the vents but if we give the flamethrower of journalism a little puff of the trigger here Ah yes, it s a shooter. A little more juice maybe Aha, it s being made by the relatively young development house Cold Iron Studios, and will “explore areas of the universe that fans haven’t got to experience.” Cool. All right, just a bit more on the gas oh no that s too much you d better stop. I said TOO MUCH JOURNALISM. ABORT. ABORT. (more…)

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

You probably haven t and you probably shouldn t. A year before the world finally got the Alien game it deserved with Alien: Isolation, the burning wheely bin known as Aliens: Colonial Marines was dragged into public view and stank out the industry with countless bugs, terrible writing, awful levels and magically teleporting NPCs. There were so many problems, they were coming out of the god damn walls. … [visit site to read more]

Before my parents abandoned hope of me not growing up a degenerate and allowed me to watch murdermovies, I was fascinated by the local swimming pool’s Aliens arcade cabinet and Terminator 2 pinball table – Cool Things I couldn’t have. Ooh, the hours I spent watching bigger kids play or waggling the joystick as demo as I pretended to play the demo! This… isn’t quite going where I wanted to. Let’s skip ahead to the bit where I explain that an Aliens> table is coming to Pinball FX2 this month as DLC. Also coming are an Alien vs. Predator table (boo!) and an Alien: Isolation one too (ooh!).

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There was much confused rejoicing earlier this month at news that the honest-to-God Alien (and also Leatherface, but whatever) was becoming a fighter in Mortal Kombat X [official site], but now there is even more confused snarling. It turns out that only the konsole I’m so sorry, console versions of the game will be receiving the Kombat Pack 2 DLC which contains the new chaps. The PC will also be denied the Mortal Kombat XL bundle-o-pack. It’s an as-yet unexplained and perhaps unwise move from Warner, the publisher already accused of unduly mucking PC-folk around with that very messy Arkham Knight port.

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This is the first entry in a new column called The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites a developer to help him put their game up on blocks and take a wrench to hack out its best feature, just to see how it works. It s about the sweat, grease and genius behind the little things that make games special.>

Alien: Isolation is an AI-driven science-fiction horror game featuring, for the most part, a single, unstoppable opponent. It s pretty much a game version of the first Alien film: confined to a space, all you can do about the xenomorph that s hunting you down is to distract, avoid or briefly scare it. And all around you lies terrible temptation. They feel like they ll solve all your problems. They feel like safety. They feel like places you should stay inside. But they won t; they aren t; you shouldn t. They are:

THE MECHANIC: Lockers

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Oh boy, am I conflicted. Fallout 4 s main plotline requires that I do this thing> and as far as things> go, it s a pretty major thing> and a major thing> that you d expect someone with the maternal instinct of my character Halle to crack on with straight away. The trouble is, rather than doing this major thing>, for at least an hour now, she, and when I say she , I mean I , have been poking around Sanctuary, scrapping anything that glows yellow so I can salvage enough materials to build a house big enough for me and my Minutemen companions. I had largely avoided Bethesda s drip-feed of Fallout 4 pre-publicity but when I somehow found out that the game had settlement building, I think I might have involuntarily passed a little wind in joyous anticipation.

That’s because I ve felt a similar rosy inner glow while hanging around other hubs and houses in many other games I ve played. I think it s easy to underestimate the value of having a home base option, especially in open world games where there is a free-roaming element, but it’s a part of why I love certain games.

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I had twin criteria for this. The first was ‘is it a decent game?’ and the second ‘does it meaningfully evoke the spirit, themes or characters of the movie in addition to having Quite Good Guns And Graphics?’ The second saw quite a few games which would otherwise qualify ruled out. This year’s Mad Max, for instance, was an agreeable murder-romp but it’s much harder to argue that it nails the desperation or oddness of the films it’s based on. Star Wars: Battlefront, meanwhile, is an OK online shooter with marvellous graphics, but it’s too mechanical to ‘feel’ like Star Wars once you get beyond the spectacular presentation. Ah, ‘feel’. That’s the thing, isn’t it? Does a movie game make you feel like you’re a part of that movie’s wider world, or is it just wearing its skin?

It’s that question which most informed this list. I don’t disagree that there are, in some cases, better games-based-on-movies if ‘game’ is the foremost criteria, but these, in no particular order, are the ten games which most understood and even grew my appreciation for their subject matter, rather than simply piggy-backed it. (Additional FYI: I decided not to include any superhero games, reasoning they’re really their own thing rather than innately movie-based).

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