[Joe Moore]

Preview of New Alien Xenomorph for NECA Aliens Series 11

[Kalash]

Aw shit!

WE PRAETORIAN NOW?

[En Sabah Nerd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kalash

Aw shit!

WE PRAETORIAN NOW?

Praetorian crossed my mind but I don't know. Most versions of the praetorian give them a queen-like crest since they are infant queens. It could be an original design for all I know, it's not anything I'm recognizing.

[Kalash]

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

Praetorian crossed my mind but I don't know. Most versions of the praetorian give them a queen-like crest since they are infant queens. It could be an original design for all I know, it's not anything I'm recognizing.

True. Some people on Twitter are thinking it might be from that Defiance comic.

I think I'm just praying too hard for a Praetorian.

[Jester]

Spitter or Arachnid.

[En Sabah Nerd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jester

Spitter or Arachnid.

It looks similar to the Spitter but I'd hope NECA would steer clear of that awful game for as long as possible. Also the Spitter head was totally smooth on top except for the spikey bits, it didn't have the ridged bony warrior-like section. Spitters also had those axe attachments on their sides. It could be a Kenner because way too many of the Kenner aliens didn't have enough discerning detail to be able to predict what NECA will do with them. For all we know it could be Arachnid, maybe Scorpion, or even a stretched interpretation of Panther.

[suchaname]

Cougar/Panther came to mind for me, but Google 'unproduced Kenner Alien toys' and look for the one that folds up into an egg. Crest is identical, if maybe left field for NECA.

[Jester]

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

It looks similar to the Spitter but I'd hope NECA would steer clear of that awful game for as long as possible.

If NECA had any tendency to "steer clear" of "awful games" they would never have produced those Isolation figures.

Personally, I really hope that the sculpt being previewed is for the Spitter, because A:CM is one of my favourite games, and seeing NECA produce any of its creatures would mean we're that much closer to the titular Marines, or even better, the Weyland-Yutani PMCs.

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

Also the Spitter head was totally smooth on top except for the spikey bits, it didn't have the ridged bony warrior-like section. Spitters also had those axe attachments on their sides. It could be a Kenner because way too many of the Kenner aliens didn't have enough discerning detail to be able to predict what NECA will do with them. For all we know it could be Arachnid, maybe Scorpion, or even a stretched interpretation of Panther.

Maybe, but then again, NECA has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to futz over certain details, so, for example, Vasquez has no knife strapped to her boot nor Frost to his belt, Hudson has no bandages on the fingers of his right hand, Hicks's chin-straps hang loose off his helmet (which has raised, visible bolts all along the reinforced frontal plate) and the clamps on the Marine lamp-pack are mis-positioned.

[En Sabah Nerd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jester

If NECA had any tendency to "steer clear" of "awful games" they would never have produced those Isolation figures.

Personally, I really hope that the sculpt being previewed is for the Spitter, because A:CM is one of my favourite games, and seeing NECA produce any of its creatures would mean we're that much closer to the titular Marines, or even better, the Weyland-Yutani PMCs.

Isolation was generally well received as a good game, Colonial Marines was not. Average critic scores for Isolation on each current gen console at the time of release are about 80/100 while average scores for Colonial Marines top at 48/100. Isolation was not fault-free but it's hard to forgive CM for its numerous bugs and more so its complete continuity errors, chiefly the fact that Hadley's Hope is somehow still standing after the ending of Aliens.

Quote:

Maybe, but then again, NECA has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to futz over certain details, so, for example, Vasquez has no knife strapped to her boot nor Frost to his belt, Hudson has no bandages on the fingers of his right hand, Hicks's chin-straps hang loose off his helmet (which has raised, visible bolts all along the reinforced frontal plate) and the clamps on the Marine lamp-pack are mis-positioned.

Those are all really minor details as opposed to the fact that this sculpt just doesn't look like a Spitter because it isn't overall smooth on top and doesn't have those side fin/axe things at the front of the head.

[Jester]

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

Isolation was generally well received as a good game, Colonial Marines was not. Average critic scores for Isolation on each current gen console at the time of release are about 80/100 while average scores for Colonial Marines top at 48/100.

I'd say that there's a great degree of confirmation bias at work there. On the one hand, I think a lot of people were really desperate to have a "good" Aliens game after all the negativity directed at Colonial Marines, and on the other, there's a fairly aggressive subset of the Aliens fandom that get their noses severely out of joint when their slobbery darlings are portrayed as anything less than nigh-on-unstoppable, which overlaps with another subset which prefers the first and third films to the second (Alien 3 being largely a by-the-numbers retread of Alien). Positive reviews for Isolation tend to focus on elements of the game that appeal to these demographics, such as "Strong Female Character," the centrality of some chick called "Riley" and the extremely limited availability of weapons and the fact that the xenomorphs are entirely unkillable by the player outside of scripted events. By contrast, Colonial Marines takes its cues directly from Aliens, which establishes that, for trained, heavily-armed soldiers, the threat isn't so much the xenos themselves as the interference and malicious intent of fellow humans. Since both games suffered from their fair share of bugs (and many of Isolation's, such as the Magic Inventory-Eating Elevators, actually worse than anything in Colonial Marines), it seems more likely that rather than being objectively better in any sense, Isolation simply appealed to a more vocal segment of the fan-base, which not coincidentally also happened to have an intense dislike for Colonial Marine's more measured, less "xenophilic" approach to the material.

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

Isolation was not fault-free but it's hard to forgive CM for its numerous bugs and more so its complete continuity errors, chiefly the fact that Hadley's Hope is somehow still standing after the ending of Aliens.

That's far less a suspension of disbelief than Isolation asking the player to accept that a major space station was built and was operating in the Zeta Reticuli system for decades before the loss of the Nostromo without anyone ever once deciding to check out that weird signal coming from LV-426, or the crew of the Nostromo never once thinking of heading for said station for help after Kane was attacked, or basically anything relating to anything Weyland-Yutani does throughout the entire game.

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

Those are all really minor details as opposed to the fact that this sculpt just doesn't look like a Spitter because it isn't overall smooth on top and doesn't have those side fin/axe things at the front of the head.

Those are really minor details.

[En Sabah Nerd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jester

there's a fairly aggressive subset of the Aliens fandom that get their noses severely out of joint when their slobbery darlings are portrayed as anything less than nigh-on-unstoppable

I never got where those people came from. In the first film they make a clear point that the crew are basically just space truckers and that they have no weapons or experience to combat such a creature. They have to scrounge up what they can to make a flamethrower and the other things are just cattle-prods. Of course the alien kills all but one of them. Had the crew been all ex-marines who were armed with guns the only person Big Chap would've killed for sure would have been Kain. The threat of the alien in the first film was that it was alone and could hide to pick off the crew one by one with little opposition. In Aliens the threat wasn't that each alien was capable of killing five guys on its own the threat was that there were a ton of them fighting a single unit of soldiers in confined spaces. The alien is supposed to be the perfect biological killer but that doesn't mean it's ultimate above technology, this is why Predators use advanced weaponry to hunt aliens.

Re: games; I never played Isolation but I watched a playthrough online and I will say that it didn't look like a game for me. I'm not huge into games where I'm gonna be hiding in a locker for minutes waiting for the AI enemy to leave the room. I also thought the ending was poo since it just sorta ends. Isolation did look great though but then most current gen games look good thanks to video-tech advances. I did play CM because a friend of mine got it and it was just so mediocre. I was clipping through everything (that was actually funny when I wound up inside the other marines so I could see through their teeth but it's still bad) and then multiple times I would run face-first into an alien only for them to just stare at me and do nothing. It didn't feel like I was playing in the world of Aliens when the aliens weren't threatening to attack me at all. It sucked the most because I remember thinking that the first trailer was pretty damn cool, the one that they ended up getting sued over for claiming it was "actual gameplay" even though the final product didn't look half as good. Hey on the bright side it's still not the worst video game about aliens, that title goes to the champ of bad: ET.

I'm sure we'll learn more about this sculpt withing following weeks or by Toy Fair for sure (I don't know of any other conventions/showings in between now and then where they could show more). I feel like some Kenner homage is the more likely guess but I suppose we'll just have to see.

[Trivial Psychic]

I'm seeing either the Kenner Killer Crab, Arachnid or the Wild Boar Alien, which if they do the latter, I can picture him having a swap out head to replicate the action feature "spines" that popped out of the Boar Alien's head when he was lowered to the ground. I'm not seeing the Scorpion Alien here, because in reality, the original Kenner figure was intended to be a representation of the maturized Xeno the USMC faced in Aliens, and there was nothing really scorpion-like about it. Of course, NECA could take some liberties and create something new for it, but theoretically, they have already done Scorpion a few times now, and I think in the long run, when he is released, he will probably be a repaint with minimal retooling like Renegade "Pudding" Predator was...

EDIT: Some photo references to the Xenos I mentioned...

Scorpion


Killer Crab (who actually looks more like a scorpion than the "scorpion" alien does...lol)


Wild Boar


Arachnid (who on a second look, the new head sculpt looks closest to this guy...)

[En Sabah Nerd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trivial Psychic

I'm seeing either the Kenner Killer Crab, Arachnid or the Wild Boar Alien, which if they do the latter, I can picture him having a swap out head to replicate the action feature "spines" that popped out of the Boar Alien's head when he was lowered to the ground. I'm not seeing the Scorpion Alien here, because in reality, the original Kenner figure was intended to be a representation of the maturized Xeno the USMC faced in Aliens, and there was nothing really scorpion-like about it. Of course, NECA could take some liberties and create something new for it, but theoretically, they have already done Scorpion a few times now, and I think in the long run, when he is released, he will probably be a repaint with minimal retooling like Renegade "Pudding" Predator was...

I kind of don't want them to bother with Scorpion Alien until they've run out of the rest because like you said it was just their basic warrior with small additions to make it '90s extreme. Nothing about it was particularly scorpion in nature. They just added some spikes to its limbs, I live in Texas and have seen plenty of scorpions to say that none of them have random spikes jutting out. Kenner didn't even give it pincer-like hands or a larger more scorpion looking barb on the tail end. When they repainted it for the two pack with Hudson it really just looked like the movie aliens. Maybe it's for these reasons that if NECA does Scorpion I could see them redesigning it to look more like this rather than just the plain warrior head we've gotten so many times now.

Edit: The more I look at this the more I agree with suchaname that it really does look like the alien we never actually got with the big egg on its butt that opened up.

[Jester]

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

I never got where those people came from.

I think they're the inspiration for those people who worship the xenomorphs in the comics.

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

In the first film they make a clear point that the crew are basically just space truckers and that they have no weapons or experience to combat such a creature. They have to scrounge up what they can to make a flamethrower and the other things are just cattle-prods. Of course the alien kills all but one of them. Had the crew been all ex-marines who were armed with guns the only person Big Chap would've killed for sure would have been Kain. The threat of the alien in the first film was that it was alone and could hide to pick off the crew one by one with little opposition. In Aliens the threat wasn't that each alien was capable of killing five guys on its own the threat was that there were a ton of them fighting a single unit of soldiers in confined spaces.

Yes, and even then, Cameron had to stack the odds in the aliens' favour, by leaving no one onboard the Sulaco to keep an eye on things, taking away most of the Marines' primary weapons in the hive and killing several through a string of extreme bad luck (Dietrich toasts Frost which kills Crowe, because Frost had the ammo-bag, which freaks out Gorman which distracts Apone, and so forth). Regardless, the surviving handful of Marines likely killed off the majority of the 150-or-so aliens on LV-246.

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

The alien is supposed to be the perfect biological killer but that doesn't mean it's ultimate above technology, this is why Predators use advanced weaponry to hunt aliens.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it "perfect." The only evidence we really have in favour of this is Ash's comments (who'd only been able to examine the facehugger and maybe the embryonic chestburster) and we don't have any reason to doubt Bishop when he observes that the Ash models were prone to being "twitchy."

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

Re: games; I never played Isolation but I watched a playthrough online and I will say that it didn't look like a game for me. I'm not huge into games where I'm gonna be hiding in a locker for minutes waiting for the AI enemy to leave the room.

Yeah, that's definitely not to my taste, either. Also, most of the time that isn't spent hiding from the xenos consists of opening and shutting doors.

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

I also thought the ending was poo since it just sorta ends. Isolation did look great though but then most current gen games look good thanks to video-tech advances. I did play CM because a friend of mine got it and it was just so mediocre. I was clipping through everything (that was actually funny when I wound up inside the other marines so I could see through their teeth but it's still bad) and then multiple times I would run face-first into an alien only for them to just stare at me and do nothing. It didn't feel like I was playing in the world of Aliens when the aliens weren't threatening to attack me at all.

I encountered the odd hesitant alien once in a blue moon, and once saw one hanging by its tail from the ceiling after I killed it, but that's pretty much the extent of my experience with bugs. I did get the PC version though, which seems to be substantially less buggy than the console equivalents.

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

It sucked the most because I remember thinking that the first trailer was pretty damn cool, the one that they ended up getting sued over for claiming it was "actual gameplay" even though the final product didn't look half as good. Hey on the bright side it's still not the worst video game about aliens, that title goes to the champ of bad: ET.

There's definitely a substantive complaint to be made about Gearbox's handling of the game's development, considering they apparently took most of the cash Sony gave them for it and funnelled it into the development of Borderlands 2 instead. Still, I enjoyed playing the game. All I really wanted going in was the opportunity to blow away xenomorphs with a pulse rifle (without any obnoxious Predators crashing the party) and that's pretty much what I got.

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

I'm sure we'll learn more about this sculpt withing following weeks or by Toy Fair for sure (I don't know of any other conventions/showings in between now and then where they could show more). I feel like some Kenner homage is the more likely guess but I suppose we'll just have to see.

Indeed.

[En Sabah Nerd]

So I guess on Twitter they sorta confirmed it is from the Aliens: Defiance comic series. NECA retweeted some account which stated that that's what it is and that it'll be in series 11. Still gonna be waiting for more information.

[Jester]

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

So I guess on Twitter they sorta confirmed it is from the Aliens: Defiance comic series.

Okay, but why? Seems like a terribly obscure choice of subject matter.

[En Sabah Nerd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jester

Okay, but why? Seems like a terribly obscure choice of subject matter.

It does seem really out there since it's such a new comic you'd figure it isn't THAT popular but then again Genocide isn't terrifically popular and it has some and is getting more figures. Honestly something from a comic is likely more well known than a figure based solely on concept and the concept design Big Chap and albino Warrior were received great by the fans. It's likely a safer bet for a figure than some other things they could have pulled from. I can't seem to find any images though of whatever it is in the comic that looks like this but then I haven't tried very hard at it.

[snake5289]

Didn't even know they were still making Aliens and Predator comics. Guess I have some digging to do.

[En Sabah Nerd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by snake5289

Didn't even know they were still making Aliens and Predator comics. Guess I have some digging to do.

After Prometheus came out they had a boost of interest at Dark Horse to start doing stuff with Alien, Predator, and Engineer too. We got some stuff just to mix the new species better in with the others. I think the big popular one (that NECA pulled the Ahab Predator from) was called Fire and Stone which had stories in all of the running books like an Engineer versus a Predator.

[snake5289]

That does sound like it'd be a pretty sweet fight.

[En Sabah Nerd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by snake5289

That does sound like it'd be a pretty sweet fight.

I thought it was a neat fight since Engineers were shown to be physically imposing and fairly tough in Prometheus and we already knew that Predators were also far superior to humans physically. Of course the predator won because between the two you could more easily spin the predator as the "good guy" and he also had some of his weapons to use (mainly his wrist-blades and plasma caster). The Engineer put up a fight though and I guess since they're biology wizards they know where to put the hurt to stop an enemy.

[Jester]

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

It does seem really out there since it's such a new comic you'd figure it isn't THAT popular but then again Genocide isn't terrifically popular and it has some and is getting more figures.

Most of those are straight-up repaints, though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

Honestly something from a comic is likely more well known than a figure based solely on concept and the concept design Big Chap and albino Warrior were received great by the fans. It's likely a safer bet for a figure than some other things they could have pulled from.

The comic barely moved 10,000 copies per the most recent issue, and the design doesn't have the advantage of being immediately visually distinct, colour-wise, from the normal xenos like the Genocide or the concept figures. It's the same black(ish) xeno body with a new head.

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

I can't seem to find any images though of whatever it is in the comic that looks like this but then I haven't tried very hard at it.

It's pretty dull-looking, IMHO.

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

I thought it was a neat fight since Engineers were shown to be physically imposing and fairly tough in Prometheus and we already knew that Predators were also far superior to humans physically. Of course the predator won because between the two you could more easily spin the predator as the "good guy"...

[En Sabah Nerd]

Between the 3 species it's easiest to spin the predators as the being the best option. Ever since the first AVP comics there has always been a "hero" predator that works with or at the very least doesn't kill the humans. The aliens are always just savage animals that kill on instinct which makes them the go to bad guys and the engineers while not fully explored definitely harbor no love for any race and seem intent on destroying humans. Predators have an honor system so it's easy to write out a plot where this honor system makes them the alien species we root for.

[Jester]

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

Between the 3 species it's easiest to spin the predators as the being the best option. Ever since the first AVP comics there has always been a "hero" predator that works with or at the very least doesn't kill the humans... and the engineers while not fully explored definitely harbor no love for any race and seem intent on destroying humans.

That may be so, but we don't know for certain yet what the Engineers' intentions are, or if they're a monolithic bloc with regards to their attitudes towards their apparent offshoots, and as the Engineers are apparently also humans (of a sort, anyway) according to Prometheus, I'd rather cheer for them than a bunch of reptilo-arthropoid pseudo-primitives whose entire society revolves around hunting other species, including humans.

If I were a Psychology major, I'm sure I could pen a fascinating term-paper on the neuroses behind writing for the latter. I mean, you have to be a pretty odd duck to fantasize about identifying with and finding favour from a stratum of ostensibly superior beings that normally consider your kind game animals...

[En Sabah Nerd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jester

That may be so, but we don't know for certain yet what the Engineers' intentions are, or if they're a monolithic bloc with regards to their attitudes towards their apparent offshoots, and as the Engineers are apparently also humans (of a sort, anyway) according to Prometheus, I'd rather cheer for them than a bunch of reptilo-arthropoid pseudo-primitives whose entire society revolves around hunting other species, including humans.

If I were a Psychology major, I'm sure I could pen a fascinating term-paper on the neuroses behind writing for the latter. I mean, you have to be a pretty odd duck to fantasize about identifying with and finding favour from a stratum of ostensibly superior beings that normally consider your kind game animals...

Just going off of Prometheus the Engineers, for whatever reason, decided to exterminate the human race. The Engineer in Fire and Stone also continues to kill humans on sight. This is not necessarily representative of the entire species but as it is they are shown to be hell-bent on wiping humans out. Predators are definitely not good guys since their culture revolves around hunting and killing but we have directly seen that some of them adhere to an honor system. The movies have directly shown that normal Predators leave unarmed/defenseless people alone, currently it doesn't look like the Engineers would have shown any leniency. Alien: Covenant could show us otherwise but right now Engineers are sort of positioned as the most evil of the three species because their apparent goal of extinction is deliberate.