"Don't relax just yet, Marines!"

I swear I heard that phrase about a hundred times while playing through Aliens Vs Predator. It’s pretty much the only line of dialogue that they bothered to record for the humans, so when you’re stalking the marines as the Predator or the Alien that’s all you’ll hear them say. There are one or two lines that are uttered when you are pouncing onto your prey; ‘There it… !’, ‘Urk!’, and ‘Gar!’ do feature as you eviscerate and decapitate your enemies, but when you’re silently traversing the levels getting ready for some tasty murder nearly all you’ll hear is “Don’t relax just yet, Marines!” Again, and again.

And the frequency of it! Dickhead Number 1 would be saying it, only to have Dickhead Number 2, too excited to wait three seconds for his time to blurt out the same tired line, repeat it over the top of Dickhead Number 1. It’s like when you get a bunch of people singing the different lines of “Row, Row, Row Your boat” at different times so that there’s a clashing cacophony of unbearable nonsense reverberating around your skull! Just terrible.

Couldn’t they have recorded a couple more lines? How much longer would it have taken? How much more would it have cost? Did no-one playtesting this game ever say “Hey boss, this ‘don’t relax just yet marines’ line sure is getting bloody annoying!” Maybe. Maybe not. And that’s the big problem with this game. Large problems that were easy to fix were overlooked or ignored. It’s just really lazy game making.

I wasn’t a big fan of this one. Each of the three campaigns was short and re-trod the same three locations as the previous ones, just in a different order. More repetition. It seems to be the main motif of this game.

FIFA 12 – Virtual Fulham FC

There were no Premier League games this weekend due to World Cup Qualifiers, so no FIFA was played by me as a result.

So now that AVP’s finished I guess I’ll concentrate on another repetitive game, LA Noire. Hurray. I’ll try to mix that up with a bit of Alan Wake before tackling Dead Space 2. There were never any scary bits in AVP so I’m looking forward to a couple of games that build tension and create atmosphere. I’m looking forward to being scared. I’m looking forward to not relaxing just yet, Marines.