Alien: Isolation for PS4

[LegacyCosts]

That's why its great not caring about trophies/achievements, not having to do inane tasks for little to no reward and getting to avoid making a fantastic game monotonous.

[QuasidodoJr]

I still enjoyed the game. To me, it’s more a test of the game’s worth than anything. If I still walk away from a game with positive feelings after earning the platinum, then it’s definitely a great game.

[LegacyCosts]

Originally Posted by QuasidodoJr

I still enjoyed the game. To me, it’s more a test of the game’s worth than anything. If I still walk away from a game with positive feelings after earning the platinum, then it’s definitely a great game.

I don't think a game should be evaluated by its trophies

[QuasidodoJr]

Most games trophy list just gets you to actually play all of the content provided. I also still play plenty of games where I don’t bother with the platinum, because I know it’s one that will be too difficult for me. But if I play a game and I enjoy it and the platinum seems attainable, then win/win. If you don’t care for trophies, cool beans. Do your thing!

[emailking]

Originally Posted by QuasidodoJr

Earning the platinum for this game can be quite the task. Playing the entire game without dying is the hardest, by far. If either the alien or a facehugger get you, it’s instant death.

I believe you just have to revert to your 2nd last save (it keeps two saves at all times). You can also use your previous save if you can load it before the actual death animation, if dying is inevitable. Even if you mess that up you can still use a save backed up to usb or the cloud. I definitely died many times when I got that trophy.

Originally Posted by LegacyCosts

I don't think a game should be evaluated by its trophies

I wouldn't evaluate the quality of a game by its trophies. But it does sometimes sway me on whether or not to play. I've avoided some games because the plat was daunting. And I've played plenty of games I would have had no interest in if not for an easy plat. Trophy collecting is part of the fun for me. A hobby in itself if you will. But I've also played plenty of games I wanted to play but have no chance at the plat (or am not willing to put in the time).

[kristoffer]

It nearly killed me, but I finally beat mission 6 in the old hospital. I won’t tell you what difficulty setting I am playing on.

[emailking]

I never tried the nightmare difficulty they later added. I did beat the game on the hard difficulty.

[Vincanws]

Picking up comment up thread from 2 years ago, a good plat should encourage the player to utilise a games mechanics in a different or fuller way somehow so that in getting the trophies they've encouraged the player to learn or master all that the game has to offer that some might otherwise neglect before moving onto the next game etc.

A recent example for me was Kena Bridge of Spirits. Most of it was fairly standard fare, but it requires a master mode run as well which didn't take that long to do, but definitely made me play a lot different from the normal run, and I used skills from the skill tree I hadn't touched in the first run, etc. And there are a few trophies that encourage the player to use specific skills as well that some might otherwise choose to ignore.

[kristoffer]

Just finished mission 13. That was a bit of a challenge without

[Show spoiler]my weapons!

[Leonidas King]

Glad more are playing this. It was definitely a great game with a great atmosphere. I started playing it right in the middle of lockdown last year for the first time.

[Warm Gun]

In Defence of Alien: Isolation - YouTube

Game's okay. Anniversary review is shallow. There's so much to dislike about this game, yet he could barely think of anything.

For example, how far too generous the crafting materials and resources are on even the higher difficulties and how boring it is that nearly all of 'em are just thrown or placed as mines, but on the highest difficulty IIRC some become TOO rare and the alien becomes too much of a satellite.

Should have let you make your own difficulty by adjusting each of the parameters: alien, items, HUD (whose absence is annoying on the highest because the level design doesn't really have a natural flow like those of the better survival horror games of old).

Old tech comes off as more stupid than in original movie.

Interacting with devices feels like playing with dumb toys.

He's also wrong about the difficulty. Only so hard if it's baby's first stealth game. I mostly didn't wait like the original reviewer apparently did, I progressed as the alien searched.

Story was shitty.

Wanted a sequel as much as anyone, for a time, but fans make me wanna be the contrarian by overrating it significantly.

The rounded monitors from the movie I'm okay with because it gives the feeling of them looking back at you. But then you also have stereos, cassette tapes, big printers, AA batteries... Even filmmakers and science fiction artists in the 1970s would have thought this (then) present day tech was dumb.

















Dumbest of all is the release for the docking clamp. They designed it like the nuclear self-destruct in Alien and even write "nuclear bolt" on the screen. It's just a docking clamp. Nostalgia-mining is so dumb sometimes.



HUD removal on the highest difficulty is mostly fine, but health indicator should have stayed. She would always know the shape she is in.

Other AI is actually dumb. The humans see their buddies getting killed by the alien in the same room and still they shoot at Ripley when she's discovered and draw the alien. Developers don't think enough about behavior when designing AI.

Elaborating on the middling level design that's reliant on the pointer... Without the pointer, it took me an annoying length of time that I'm too embarrassed to specify to get from the Martial's Office back to Ski/Med Tower. Yet using the pointer feels too much like hand-holding. Sevastapol is a bad maze that really needs proper signs and maps on the walls, like any international airport. I couldn't use the pause map because Nightmare disables it. If getting to the map progression standard of something like old Resident Evil makes the game somewhat shorter, so be it.

Don't know how the IGN writer can possibly say that it wasn't too long. There's too little variety in the things you do (fixing the most broken down space station in the universe, next to the one in Dead Space) to carry the game for that long, too many tedious baby puzzles.

Stupid that an old handgun blows up an alien's skull in Aliens, but all the guns in this game do nothing. If they wanted an invincible enemy, they shouldn't have put guns in the game. So goofy. But they were very liberal with the alien. It's much bigger than in Alien and Aliens and doesn't stand the same. Stands like a dinosaur instead of a hunched over human. Look at the feet.

Making Amanda Ripley the protagonist was a mistake. Now I have to think she went through this big adventure when I watch that short scene in the Special Edition of Aliens. Actually, who am I kidding? The theatrical cut is the default. It's a better cut. Ripley didn't have a daughter, because if she did she'd be the worst mother for leaving her for months or years on end. Also makes Newt feel like a weird replacement and makes the mother-daughter theme too on the noise. It's not like Ellen Ripley needs that motivation to protect Newt, after they bonded. A good adult should do that anyway.

Always found the glowing beacon pretty silly looking. I've been told that in the Alien novelization it's described as an obsidian box with an oblong piece sliding back and forth in the middle.



The scale of the pilot's chamber is totally off. They made it much bigger for no other reason than wanting it to look imposing, but it looks much more wasteful.





The exploration of the derelict is actually dull, because it plays out almost exactly like in the movie and doesn't let you do anything but walk forward. Aliens came out seven years after but still didn't waste the viewer's time by showing that again. There is only an external shot of it with Newt in the big vehicle with her family in the Special Edition. You also play that chapter as another character, who could have simply told Ripley/the player what happened.

Really wish they would have used egg-morphing. That they had shown it. The developer said in an interview that there is a queen somewhere on the ship, but the positions of the eggs don't make sense for that. It's implied in the original Alien, either cut, that the alien can reproduce, but for some lame reason all media after Aliens has to say there is a queen. How far-fetched is it that the one facehugger that the ship brought back was a queen? The solitary alien in the original movie was scarier.

Basically this:

"Aliens is a fun movie but what frustrates me about it is that it takes a concept that was inscrutable, symbolizing an uncaring universe, and diminishes it so we can relate to it. The aliens are now just man-sized bugs with a hive and a queen. It's unclear to what extent the creature in the first movie even thinks, or if it does if its thoughts could ever be understood by us, but in Aliens the queen clearly has a *****y domineering personality and sort of becomes a Disney villain, fighting Ripley at the end over who gets to be Newt's new mother. Cameron has a way of turning everything into a cartoon."

He could have also talked about some of the technical issues. The (choppy) cutscenes looked like the devs ran them through the lowest settings in Handbrake. Check out those marcoblocks.



I extracted one of the USM video files and found it's MPEG-1. Who in their right mind still compressed videos for PC monitors and HD televisions in MPEG-1 in 2014? I wanted to compress a video in MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and 4 to see what the visual difference is, but Handbrake doesn't even have an option for outputting in MPEG-1, because it's so dated and obsolete. 12 Mbps for 1080p is kind of low, but I've seen videos at the same bitrate that look much better, only they aren't in MPEG-1.



The extracted MPEG videos are a solid 30 fps, not below 20 as rendered in the game. Knowing nothing about game code, I tried simply renaming the extension on the extracted file to see if the cutscene would play smoothly, but it didn't work. Don't think it's a problem with the USM format. Witcher 2 had USM files that played fine. Isolation is just broken, can't play the videos back right.

Alien: Isolation's videos aren't choppy. The game plays the cutscenes back choppy. - YouTube

Lol...

Yup, it makes no sense.

“Ouchy, human toy hurt, I better run”

Why not just kill the pesky human, if you are immune?

[Warm Gun]

Columbo: "One more thing!"

The aliens being very difficult (and dangerous, because of instant-death acid) to kill would have been pretty cool. So much vital resources and alerting of other aliens that it's still mostly smarter to stay hidden. Mostly. Could use environment to destroy them as well. A crusher press, a molting factory, containers dropped...

[Warm Gun]

Sequel apparently in early development. From the Alien: Isolation Facebook page.

[emailking]

A sequel would be cool. I'd also love a remake for PS5 and maybe with a PSVR 2 mode.

[xian]

Has anyone else had issues getting DLC to show up? I bought all the add-on missions in the PSstore, but the only one that shows up besides the main game is the Nostromo level. Apologies if this belongs on a different troubleshooting thread.

[emailking]

Wish I could help, it's been so long and I don't remember. I don't recall having an issue accessing them.