Video games are dead to me. The last time I bought a new game was when GoldenEye 007 came out on the Wii, which means that a remake of what is largely considered the first great console shooter (never mind those who say "best shooter/game of all time") was the last game that I considered worthy of a week-one purchase—and even then I didn't pay full price because I'm cheap/poor. But then Aliens: Infestation came along and I had to rethink my life choices.

James Cameron's Aliens, while good, is easily my least favourite movie in the series (if you can ignore the last quarter of Resurrection, the fourth film had way more atmosphere and far less Bill Paxton than the first sequel), but it's the one that spawned everything from games to comic books, a lot of which are very good. If you've ever played any of the Aliens Vs. Predator games, the weapon options and even the sound of the marine's pulse rifle were lifted directly from the second film, so I give it a passing grade based solely on its legacy.

Being an Alien fan, though, I picked up Aliens: Infestation yesterday because it's the only game I've been looking forward to besides Mass Effect 3. I've finished the first segment aboard the Sulaco and now I'm reporting back to you to let you know that the game is aaaaaaaaall right [/thumbs up and winky face].  It was made by Wayforward, the same team that did Contra 4, so you should know that it at least has potential to be good. But Infestation takes that potential goodness and converts it into kinetic goodness using physics or something.

The game is hard—not in a one-hit-you're-dead way like Contra, but in the when-your-marines-die-they-stay-dead way. You can think of each marine as a life, only each life has its own backstory and probably a wife and kids, too, if you want to get particularly morbid. You can find and recruit other marines as you explore to fill up a spot on the roster, but there are no differences between characters in terms of gameplay. However, when you give each "life" a unique name and history the impact of losing that life feels more substantial than seeing Mario fall into a pit for the eight-thousandth time. I've reset my DS repeatedly after losing Paulson because I'll be damned if the black guy is going to die first. I let Whistler bite it during the first boss, though, because he was slightly more annoying than the butch latina.

I have one complaint so far, and it's about the graphics so you know that it's going to be petty. The tile placement of the back- and foreground can look really lazy sometimes, so much so that in one of the earlier rooms there was a table placed in front of one of the crates that you have to jump over. Since the table is bright white and the crate is dark brown in a dark room, it looks like the table was blocking my path and not the crate. So now everytime I see a white table in the game I feel the need to vault over it, which makes my marine look like a moron. Thanks a lot, Wayforward.

That's about as much as I can cover right now. I may do a full review when I finish the game, but by that point it won't matter because everything about the game will have already been said by someone else in much simpler terms ("Hurr, 4/5").