Lights off, nappies on! It's Alien: Isolation and The Evil Within H.R. Giger’s Necronomicon used to be my bedtime book of choice. There’s something about the design of the original Alien that left me with a pseudo sexual queasiness, all moist egg vaginas and huge phallic headed xenomorphs. As the flickering 20th Century Fox Logo fills my screen, like some Videodrome VHS tape, I get a familiar …
If they ever remake Alien (the original one) in 3D, Pampers will do a very brisk trade opening a booth in the Cineplex hallway.
Though, looking at the pics, some of the phenomenal scariness of the original H.R. Giger creation has been lost in the game. It just does not look right. Probably for the better. I would not want to wake up screaming in cold sweat for the a week after playing it.
One of the best (scariest) thing about the original Alien was that for most of the film you only ever got very quick glances at small bits of it, so you never really know exactly what you're dealing with. You just know that there is something horrible and dangerous lurking somewhere and that it's going to kill you... actually not just kill you but bite you and feed on you, which triggers some very very deep-rooted, instinctive, primal fear. You just don't know when or where, but you sure know it's coming and it's coming for YOU.
It's a LOT scarier to give the viewer some glimpses and allow their imagination to fill in the blanks, because when the mood is set right, each viewer's imagination will 'fill in the blanks' with something that's particularly scary for THEM, and in any case much more scary than anything you can depict on film. That's the same trick Spielberg pulled in the original Jaws, most of the film you just see nothing at all, or just a fin, but that relentless, menacing 'duh dum' in the background is enough.
Once you're actually putting your movie monsters front and centre, more often than not t^hey are a lot less scary, and sometimes even funny as in 'how bad is that man-in-a-rubber-costume' funny, and that just ruins the spooky build-up.
"One of the best (scariest) thing about the original Alien was that for most of the film you only ever got very quick glances at small bits of it, so you never really know exactly what you're dealing with."
Such as the scene where they open a hatch, and the alien is behind it posed as you would if you were hiding behind a door, in a monster suit, waiting to scare your kids when they opened the door - at which point it's clearly a:
"man-in-a-rubberlatex-costume"
If memory serves, yes, most of the glimpses were as you described - but that scene in particular has always grated with me. (Except when I first saw it - early mid-80s when I was a bit younger than the BBFC rating said I should be. And at which point a number of us young lads all thought Ripley looked a lot like one of our teachers.)
Still a fantastic film overall, though.
I wonder if it's time to break the seal on the Blu-Ray box set?
"for most of the film you only ever got very quick glances at small bits of it"
A couple of reasons for this -
1. The film crew struggled to operate the 'alien'
2. H.R. Geiger himself who was an advisor to the production hated their implementation of the alien.
If I remember correctly, Spielbergy's sparse use of the monster shark in Jaws was also related to technical difficulties / lack of believability with the fake shark. In both cases it's probably a combination of filming accident and editing design that the minimum screentime of the monster worked so effectvely.
I just wish that some more modern directors would actually learn these lessons from the past!!
"1. The film crew struggled to operate the 'alien'
2. H.R. Geiger himself who was an advisor to the production hated their implementation of the alien."
1) I think you're thinking of Aliens - there was no need to operate the alien in Alien, as it was indeed "a man in a suit" (albeit a very tall man!); however the alien queen did require a crew to operate it and was, by all accounts, somewhat problematic
2) H.R Giger designed and built the alien for Alien, along with Carlo Rambaldi who worked very closely with the artist; Giger was far more than an advisor and did not hate the implementation as he was largely responsibl;e for it (read the excellent book "Giger's Alien"). However he definitely had issues with Alien 3, and it is likely this you are thinking of.
Agreed. Having played this through, I felt the alien was a little too "Humanoid" both in its stance and its movements. There was also something human about its behaviour, especially its search patterns.
There was some indefinable element of the original Alien that was somehow lacking.
That said, with the Oculus Rift hack it was one harsh experience....I may be scarred for some time.
I like this game, a lot(Alien Isolation). Does a great job of capturing the atmosphere and it is scary. I can feel my heart rate start to race as soon as the alien is near. I die mostly because of the bloody annoying androids, though I feel most scared when I know the alien is around stalking me. Love the manual game save too, really makes you aware that you have something to lose instead of just losing a few minutes of play, you can easily lose 20 minutes or more of gameplay. My partner finds this frustrating though, so clearly this is not for everyone. My 64 year old mother is also playing this - being a big fan of Alien, when I told her about it she was very interested, so I bought her a copy - finally she is learning how to use the PS4 controller now that she has a game like this that makes her want to progress. My nephew (20) does not like this game much, he prefers faster-paced FPS so after 2 minutes of sneaking around becomes quite bored and restless.
I have tried to use the camera to rack my head movement, but that is not working for me. Also, did a few tests to see if the mic picks up noise to attract androids/alien. Nothing so far and they are both on for this game.
I assume you are talking about "The lights are on, but nobody's home. Or so it seems" piccy.
Yes!, - probably one of the weird keyboard ones. (Although they have put on those flimsy eighties plastic filter things over the screen to make it B&W rather than B&G. Not sure how they did that, but it's the future!).
The article I read said this was set up by Oculus themselves, so I imagine they dump victims in with the alien almost immediately, YouTube and the like are full of boring pointless videos made by individuals, as the articles say you have to go a few levels before you meet the alien.
I absolutely love this game; although it can get intense enough that I will play for an hour, get to a save point, and then quit and go play something else for a while just to let the lingering feeling of dread fade away and my heart rate slow to something approaching normal. The creators have used sound FX, music, light and a cleverly programmed AI to produce an experience which lingers long after you exit.
This is, without a shadow of a doubt, the game that Scott/Giger's alien deserves (at last). I'm also amazed at how well it runs; even though my processor is slightly below the required spec I am getting 60fps with the settings on Ultra at 1650x1280 (althought the 4Gb 6600GTX may be helping there!).
> There’s something about the design of the original Alien that left me with a pseudo sexual queasiness, all moist egg vaginas and huge phallic headed xenomorphs.
Shame to say you have put words to that lingering subconscious feeling that has been disturbing me ever since. Thanks for that :(
I saw the preview and I am afraid that I am going to have to give this a miss. Not because of how it looks but the fact that I am still a gibbering wreck from playing the first Bioshock and there's no way that I am going to cope with this.
Yours hiding behind the sofa watching old Dr Who reruns...
admittedly if you're an Alien/HR Giger nerd you can pick minor holes in it all day long:
the creatures head carapace isn't semi-transparent at the front so you can see the human skull inside like mr gigers original
the creature has six individual fingers where originally it had only four - the middle two were double boned but fused together
the creatures central fifth exhaust pipe at the base of its neck seems to be missing
the creature didn't inherit raptor-style dinosaur legs until 'resurrection'
but these totally petty niggles are so far outweighed by all the other lovely touches that are in there, including:
the DLC mini-missions on board the nostromo with everyone apart from ian holm stepping up to re-voice their characters
a flashback sequence halfway through the main story that takes you to the original planetoid for a 10 minute mini-mission that is just so well done it's worth playing the game purely to see it
when you distract the creature by throwing a flare or a noise-maker down a corridor and it stoops to investigate, its tail starts whipping around like an angry cat - sooo sexy!
really there are only two things that imho would have helped give the game a touch more immersiveness:
a huge message from the devs at install stressing the importance of adjusting the gamma level correctly, because the wet-look fresnel shader used on the creature starts to look more like velvet if the gamma isn't dark enough
at the beginning of a survivor mode game there should be a huge ghost train style klaxxon go off as soon as you've geared up and opened the door - just to give it a bit more 'here we f*ckin' go!' vibe
if you can play this on a firepro w7000 your eyes will love you forever ;-)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
