79: Alien3: The Gun

Last weekend I went to Galloping Ghost Arcade to celebrate a friend's birthday. It's the biggest arcade in the country: a low converted office building out in the Chicago suburbs with room after room completely full of cabinet-style arcade games laid out in tight rows. They're all free-to-play (you pay a cover at the door), which was great news for me, because I'm terrible at most video games. I got my butt kicked at Pong, then dove down one of the aisles to see what else I could find. After dabbling in a few other options, I found what I didn't know I was looking for: a little enclave of Aliens games.

Most Alien franchise video games seem to be based on the movie Aliens, rather than the original. I think this makes perfect sense: Aliens came out in 1986, and its action sensibilities are better-suited for the lights and sound of a shopping-mall arcade than its colder slow-burn predecessor. There were at least three different Aliens games at Galloping Ghost, plus a Capcom Alien vs. Predator fighter game. But the one I was most interested in was a bundle of contradictions in an arcade cabinet called Alien3: The Gun.

For those who haven't seen the film, Alien3 is the bleakest of a very bleak series. The movie crash-lands Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) on a prison planet populated by convicts who have converted to a fundamentalist flavor of Christianity and refused to leave, even after serving out their sentences. There's only one xenomorph stalking the prison, but there's no way out, and Ripley and the prisoners have no weapons with which to fight the alien. The film is all rust and shadows, more existential drama than anything else; its pace is slow. Alien3 is the antithesis of Aliens, and a bad candidate for adaptation into an arcade game, which is probably why Alien3: The Gun isn't actually a video game version of Alien3. It's a continuation of the Colonial Marines plot thread from Aliens slapped on to the setting of Alien3.

I was interested precisely because the contradictions are obvious at a glance. Where the movie is all drab shadows, the arcade game's cabinet is splashed in neon yellow and hot pink, with two large space marine guns mounted to the front. Those guns are heavy, and they pack a kick. Every time you pull the trigger, the gun shakes. And you have to pull the trigger a lot, because the xenomorphs are swarming out of the walls; you're playing as an anonymous space marine tracing the steps of the squad from Aliens, which leads you to the prison planet of the third movie. The pixel graphics are genuinely beautiful, with the aliens' teeth and claws lovingly rendered in dusty purples (for the adults) and sickly yellows (for the facehuggers). I was lucky the game was free-to-play; there are so many monsters that dying isn't a question of if, but when, and I died a lot.

Each stage gets more hectic and more complicated, with boss battles against giant variations of aliens, until you're tempted to just shoot everything that moves. But as the game progresses, more and more prisoners run around the tunnels–a detail lifted directly from the movie–and there's a penalty for killing anyone that isn't an alien, which fits the generally-pacifist ethos of the prisoners from the film. The end seems to take place moments after the actual ending of the movie. Ripley never appears; she's dead by the time you would have reached her, but the game script doesn't even mention her existence. Instead, a crowd of Weyland-Yutani space marines show up, armed to the teeth. They confront you for killing xenomorphs instead of collecting them as samples for the bioweapons division, and then the game fades to black, implying that you've died.

It's a moral victory of sorts, because you never once allied yourself with The Company in-game. This is in thematic harmony with Ripley's death at the end of the movie, but it feels more hollow, because at least Ripley gets to choose. Alien3: The Gun is on rails, and your sole purpose as a player is to blast aliens without asking any questions. You're not even a character, you're just a trigger finger. Alien3 the film is about rejecting ideologies that reduce people to their jobs and their worst traits. At its most hopeful, it's about reclaiming your identity from people who will take it away. Alien3: The Gun is fascinating because it doesn't just try to rehash the plot of an un-translatable movie in video game form, but at the same time, it still manages to completely miss the point.

What I wrote:

For Bright Wall/Dark Room, I wrote about Princess Cyd, a movie that captures Chicago summertime like no other.

What I talked about:

I returned to the Think Christian podcast to talk about Wilco's latest album with Josh Larsen and Aarik Danielsen.

What I'm listening to:

Technically, this is also a What I'm Reading section, because the podcast I listened to was a recommendation from Phil Christman over at The Tourist. This past weekend Christman re-posted a review of The Relentless Picnic podcast, which is coming back after a long hiatus. I picked up an episode called The Cave, which stacks three separate conversations about mortality, and humanity's relationship to it, on top of each other. At the risk of hyperbole, this episode knocked me sideways and moved me deeply. I suspect I'll be doing a deep dive on the rest of the podcast this winter.