"I Just Wanna Know One Thing..."

Author Alec Worley has written a great article on the brilliance of the marines' briefing scene in James Cameron's Aliens, and why it works so well.

Check it out here.

Aliens: Theatrical Cut vs Special Edition

"Another Glorious Day in the Corps!"

Aliens: Another Glorious Day In The Corps! is a new co-operative, miniatures, boardgame from Gale Force 9, based on the battle of Hadley's Hope in James Cameron's seminal Aliens movie.

Originally scheduled for release any day now, in the current climate who knows when we'll actually get to see this in the wild!

This is definitely one to keep an eye out for.

Hopefully, we might hear something on, or around, Alien Day (April 26)

I can't help but be reminded of the incredible Leading Edge boardgame from back in the day, which I played the hell out of and then - for inexplicable reasons - sold, much to my enduring chagrin.

As that old game now commands seriously silly money on the secondary market, I guess it only makes sense to purchase this new game instead.

And it's got miniatures... and we all know my love of miniatures!

Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps! is a co-operative survival board game where you and your team of specialist Colonial Marines will gear up with serious firepower and head into Hadley's Hope to find survivors and answers.

But you're not alone. To survive, you'll need to work together, keep your cool, and stay frosty to fight off relentless Xenomorph ambushes and get out of there alive.

Players can play up to six different missions, taking them into different areas from the Hadley’s Hope terraforming facility to the deep, dark recesses of an xenomorph nest.

Aliens also offers an exciting campaign mode to play four of the missions linked together, so players will need to fight relentless xenomorph attacks and keep each other alive all the way to the end of the campaign.

The remaining two missions are purely about survival, it’s kill or be killed. The players are dropped into the game with nothing more than a pistol. They will need to scavenge weapons and gear while hordes of Xenomorph aliens are trying to get at them. How long can you survive against the odds?

Here's a first impressions video, of a prototype edition, from last year's Gen Con (and GF9 were already talking about expansions!!!):

Underwater Alien Art From The Abyss

Looking for inspiration for unusual underwater alien species for your games?

Then check out this concept art from the legendary Jean Giraud aka Moebius for James Cameron's wonderful 1989 movie, The Abyss.

Originally sourced from Monster Brains.

It's The Only Way To Be Sure

Avatar (2009)

No wonder Avatar was such a big hit at the cinema - in this shallow age of ours it is the ultimate expression of style over content.

If as much time and devotion to detail had been spent on the script as is put into the building of the world of Pandora, it could have been amazing.

As it is, Avatar - out on DVD in the UK tomorrow (Monday) - is a beautiful movie let down by a hackneyed script, full of unnecessarily drawn-out scenes for James Cameron gets to show off his swanky CGI.

There are lengthy portions of the film where there are no humans on screen, just CGI aliens and beasties in front of CGI scenery when you realise that this is a studio head's wet dream - the technology has finally arrived to eliminate pesky, temperamental actors from the whole film-making equation.

Sam Worthington is Jake Sully, a wheelchair-bound marine called back into service to replace his dead scientist twin brother on a trip to the alien world of Pandora. There he will be bonded with an 'avatar' - a vat grown clone of a native that was created with a combination of his brother's DNA and that of one of the locals, the giant, blue-skinned Na'vi.

It is supposed to be a scientific mission to learn the ways of the hostile Na'vi and hopefully negotiate a way for the humans to obtain the rare precious substance called Unobtanium (don't get me started on that particular red flag!), but he is approached by the stereotypically two-dimensional military commander Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) to act as a spy in the Na'vi camp, obtaining useful "intel" for when the military move in to forcefully evict the Na'vi from their sacred lands.

Unsurprisingly, it all goes a bit Dances With Wolves and Jake falls for Na'vi princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), comes to realise that the humans are the bad guys and helps the Na'vi drive the invaders from their lands.

And for some reason this takes two-and-a-half hours.

That said, Avatar is never boring, it is a visual treat with alien flora and fauna - but isn't exactly food for the brain, despite its best efforts to drive home a pro-Green, anti-corporation message. Both sides in the fight are such stereotypes - with the noble savages of the Na'vi on one side and heartless military machine of the Earth forces on the other - that it's not that easy to take the conflict seriously.

It's simply 'ewoks versus The Empire' writ large and with a quality of CGI that would make George Lucas weep.

The planet of Pandora is the true star of this film, with its cornucopia of native life forms, totally integrated ecosystem and freakish geology - the flying mountains are breathtaking, an amazing realisation of '70s prog rock album cover artwork.

But let's address the elephant in the room: Unobtanium, the McGuffin that set this tragic chain of events in motion, a substance so valuable that no one ever explains what it does (or why it's so valuable) and is promptly forgotten about after 20 minutes and never mentioned again.

The moment corporate stooge Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) delivers his expositional infodump to Dr Grace Augustine (Sigourney 'Ripley' Weaver), the head of the Avatar program and Diane Fossey to the Na'vi, about the whole raison d'etre for the human presence on Pandora - which you would have thought she was probably well aware of - you know James Cameron isn't trying very hard on the scriptwriting side of things.

Once you accept this and just enjoy the idea of watching the best-looking video game you've ever seen, Avatar is a lot of fun - but purely on a superficial level.

While his friend tried to explain the "brilliance" of Avatar

Once again Our Valued Customers has nailed a key issue of geekdom in a brilliantly well-observed single panel.

Aliens (2000)

To 'celebrate' (in my own strange way) the release of Wizkids' Aliens Vs Predator Horrorclix figures, I thought it was time to dig out one of my all-time favourite monster movies for another viewing: Aliens.

I still find it hard to believe that when I saw the original cut in the cinema in 1986 I didn't like it!

I'd gotten used to the single xenomorph in Ridley Scott's Alien being virtually indestructible and my 19-year-old brain found it hard to process these gun-totting marines mowing down bugs left, right and centre.

By the next time I saw it, I'd come to my senses!

In all its 2000 director's cut, two-and-a-half hour glory, Aliens is the definitive example of how to make a great science-fiction flick with just models, puppets and men in rubber suits.

Forget Titanic and finding "Jesus' tomb", this is what James 'King of The World' Cameron should be remembered for.

He not only gave us a truly monumental "last stand" storyline, but a script peppered with one-liners that have become everyday parlance for geeks and university students around the world ("Game over!"; "Get away from her, you bitch!"; "Have you ever been mistaken for a man?" "No, have you?"; "Another glorious day in the corps"; "It's a bughunt"; etc etc etc .

Now I can't wait to crack open my pack of plastic aliens and start eating some scientists! I hope they bring out some marines ...