Boys and girls, just look at that headline right there. Aliens: Colonial Marines (also known as Colon Marines here at NAG, because it’s such a crap game) has sold 1, 310, 000 copies in Europe and America. Over a million copies of arguably one of the most rubbish game to come out of this generation, and definitely the most rubbish game of 2013 so far. By generally accepted publisher mentality, the game should get a sequel.

Despite the fact that you might have been burnt by this game, let’s look at these figures objectively because they provide proof of two things. The first thing is that it proves there are people out there who purchase games even though the title might have been critically panned. Those people might also be the type that buys games based on covers or recognisable IP without reading up about them first. That’s not the most interesting thing to note here.

The second thing that these sales figures prove is the power of the pre-order. More importantly it shows the power of the pre-order when coupled with review embargos that are nefariously timed so that cancellation of pre-orders is impossible without a time machine.

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Holy cow, this story is just becoming more and more sordid. Destructoid (and yes, you might say that Jim Sterling has a bit of a chip on his shoulder at present) has a new source who has corroborated previous claims that Gearbox downscaled the development team for Aliens in order to bolster their Borderlands team. This new source (who is also an ex-Gearbox developer) worked on Colonial Marines for about a year between 2007 and 2008, but during that time he witnessed some of Gearbox’s alleged shady dealings.

“Gearbox was taking people off the project [Aliens: CM] to put them on Borderlands 1,” the anonymous source told Destructoid. “At some point in 2008, SEGA temporarily pulled the plug on the game. They caught wind of Gearbox shifting resources (despite still collecting milestone checks as if the team were full size) and lying to SEGA AND 2K about the number of people working on each project.”

If this guy is telling the truth, and there’s no real way of being certain due to the fact that he’s divulged this information on condition of anonymity, then the implications are pretty massive. Here’s developer Gearbox taking SEGA resources and pumping them into Borderlands development instead of Aliens: Colonial Marines – you know, the game SEGA was paying them to make in the first place.

Source: Destructoid

On Tuesday, Gearbox Software and SEGA unleashed Aliens: Colonial Marines on the gaming masses. The general consensus (unless you write for website EGM and you huff glue before reviewing vidja gaemz) is that the game is utter rubbish, chockfull of dumb Xenomorphs with no AI and even dumber marines. There’s a video floating about the interwebs showing how you can literally run through a level, straight past dozens of aliens who ignore you once you’re a certain distance from them.

Aliens: Colon Marines spent six years in development. That’s a hell of a long time for a game this terrible. Now that everyone has seen just how bad the game is, somebody at Gearbox has spilled the beans on Reddit, providing some insight into just what happened to make this game so awful.

Obviously, there’s no way of actually knowing for sure whether this person is really from Gearbox, but they realise that themselves and begin their lengthy post by saying “due to me breaking NDA [Non-Discluse Agreement], I can’t provide any proof that I’m not just talking out of my ass.” It’s also worth pointing out that the contents of this Reddit post matches up with other rumours regarding the development of Aliens: Colonial Marines.

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Gearbox Software (the super-cool people who brought us stuff like Borderlands) and SEGA are about to unleash Aliens: Colonial Marines. The game has a worldwide release date of 12 February, which means that next week Tuesday we can all shriek in terror, soil our undies and cry like babies while we look on in horror as our hapless marine gets mutilated on screen by hordes of slavering aliens.

To celebrate the impending terror fest, Gearbox has released an extended edition trailer for the game. It’s pre-rendered and all very fancy with its super slow-mo deaths and leaping face-huggers. You can find the trailer (you guessed it!) after the jump.

In related news, it’s been revealed that Colonial Marines will get a helping of DLC on 19 March entitled “Bug Hunt”. From the sounds of the Walmart flier that accidentally outed the DLC, “Bug Hunt” will be a Horde style multiplayer mode. Yeah, we’re thinking the same thing: $15 for a multiplayer mode? Yikes.

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