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ALIENS ONLINE: written by CapnKirk+A*K+ Aliens Online was a game based on the movie Aliens. It was available on the Gamestorm gaming service and was developed by Mythic Entertainment (the same people that now have a very successful product called Dark Age Of Camelot). For $9.95 a month you got unlimited play and persistent characters, plus you could play all the other games that Gamestorm provided. The original press release can be found here: http://www.mythicgames.com/alienspr.html While Aliens Online never made it out of the beta stage, had Doom-style graphics, was very buggy, was hosted on a laggy ISP and had terrible support, most people still joined Gamestorm just to play it. And when AO shut down, many people wrote many petitions to bring it back, even in its current buggy state. Even a year later we started to petition again. Why you ask? Aliens Online was a game where you made friends that you saw every single day. It had one of the strongest communities I have ever seen. Even with dated graphics and without even a "mouse look" feature, the gameplay was very exciting, scary, and even funny. There were times where you would be laughing your ass off, and there were times you had this feeling of impending doom. I used to get chills playing the game. There were times I would open a door or an elevator and an alien would be waiting there. I would jump and my heart would start beating faster. Truly a pisser! Sometimes you would be one of a handful of marines left in the mission and you could hear them being killed one by one. You ran through the map trying to finish the mission objective or just trying to stay alive and pick off the remaining alien players. Good players required skill and strategy at its core. Instinct would take over as you played the game. Many times I would be running and I would have an eerie feeling that there was an alien player behind me. 99% of the time I was right and it was a blast to turn around and see an alien charging at me! It truly proved to me that you don't need good graphics to have great gameplay. I can't imagine how much better the gameplay would have been if we had a simple thing like a mouse look feature to look up and down. The aliens weren't able to walk on the walls either, but even with all its flaws and shortcomings, the atmosphere in this game was just amazing. It wasn't a "deathmatch twitch game" atmosphere, it was more like "Aliens the Movie Experience" or a "Simulation of Aliens the Movie" if you will.
	The staging area is where you started out. This area showed the missions being played and their current status, who was online and where they were, private chat tables and a chat box on the very bottom. Depending if you logged in as an Alien or Marine the skin for the staging area was different.
	When you first arrived in staging you would be greeted by many of your friends either in the chat box or a private message. It was like when Norm walked into Cheers. If you were in a squad (and most people were) you would look for other squad members and join up with them in a mission already in progress or start your own mission or go solo. You could even start a fireteam where you would be the fireteam leader and 3 other marines would join. Fireteam Lead victories were one of the many requirements to advance your character. Other requirements can be seen in this screenshot.
Marines: You could choose from 4 different types, each having advantages and disadvantages. If your specialty was heavy weapons, you would do more damage with the powerful smartgun, but couldn't run very fast. Opposite this was the Scout who could run fast but couldn't take much damage. Then you had Infantry which was an all-around balanced type of marine. There was also a medic who was supposed to be able to heal other marines, but that was never implemented before the game went offline. You could also choose to be male or female, choose from different heads, torso's, clothing and could store up to 3 different characters in one account. The more kills and the more victories in various missions and maps you got gave you medals and points. You would start out as a Pvt. and work your way up from Pvt. Pfc. LCpl. Cpl. Sgt. SSgt. MSgt. to the almighty "tank rank" GSgt. The higher Lieutenant and up ranks were for the System Ops only. Every time you gained rank, your character's attributes like speed, stamina, dexterity and strength would increase. Marine weapons included the pulse rifle, grenade launcher, pistol, shotgun, flame-thrower and smartgun. There were also mines you could lay on the ground, grenades you could throw, and the all-important motion tracker. Marines also carried 4 health packs you could use as your health bar went down from attacks. If you had any health packs or mines on you when you died, other marines could strip your corpse and use them.
Aliens: You could choose to play as a facehugger, a drone, a queen (when you had enough points) and empress (even more points). When you got enough points for empress you still selected queen but your were stronger and in the game it would say Empress. Aliens ran very fast and could jump very high. They had the claw attack and a much stronger but slower tail attack. Queen and empress were very big and very strong. Aliens were also able to see marines on their "minimap", marines also had this map to navigate, but aliens did not show up on the marines map. Marines had a certain pool of lives called "billets" they could use before the mission would close and not let anymore in. As long as there were billets left, you could rejoin after dying. When player controlled Aliens (PCA's) died, they could jump into the body of computer controlled aliens (CCA's) as long as there were free drones around the level. But when not controlled by a player, these CCA's were controlled by poor AI and would attack marines and be easily killed, taking away the pool of alien lives. These drones were on the map until they were used up and killed, but once the queen was killed all the facehuggers that weren't controlled by a player would start to die.
The goal of the aliens was a very tough one: they had to keep the hive safe from them dirty apes (as the Aliens would like to call the marines). Having the disadvantage of the computer controlled aliens taking your 100+ lives away pretty quickly, you would try and stop the marines before they advanced too far into the level and save your fellow aliens to keep your lives up. As well as not being able to have long range attacks like the pounce in AvP2, you would have to use the vents to get in close and ambush the marines. That would not always work however. You would always pack hunt as alien, gaining strength over marines in overwhelming numbers, or kill off the lone wolf marines that would wander off not knowing their fate. If you were good enough to kill plenty of marines and win several missions then you could gain the high ranks of Queen or even Empress - if you reached that goal you could actually start your own mission. You chose what level you wanted and it would appear as a fresh level for your alien hive to control. Many times marines would do what was called "Drone chasing" (kill computer aliens and not player aliens) and hurt a level and kill off the queen so they could gain easy points/rank. For more screens/goodies on Aliens Online visit our sponsors The Kindred website and make sure to check out the Aliens Online Theme Song.