Aliens: Colonial Marines wasn't a fun game to play , it was no fun to make , and I wouldn't be surprised if the poor sales assistants stocking it all got nasty cuts from the box - like the tomb of Tutankhamun, anyone with any connection to it seems to have suffered in one way or another. And now we have another casualty: Michael 'Corporal Hicks/Kyle Reese' Biehn.
Not only was Biehn's character shoehorned into the game in the most ridiculous manner (although part of me is grateful the team invented a way to reverse Hicks' pointless death at the start of Alien 3), it seems lending his voice to the project just "wasn't fun at all".
As Biehn explained in an interview with Game Informer , Aliens: Colonial Marines "seemed kind of passionless. I think in movies, television, and the gaming world, you get some people that are really, really passionate, and some people that are just going through the paces. They think that because they have a brand name they're going to get a hit game or hit movie out of it. That certainly was the situation on [Colonial Marines]."
By contrast, Biehn had a much better time providing the voice for hero Rex Banner Colt in Ubisoft's 80s sci-fi love letter Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.
"[Creative director Dean Evans] is such an interesting and creative presence. He has such energy and such passion," Biehn continued, conforming to at least seven Hollywood cliches. "One of the things that I really, really enjoy working still in this business is finding people that have that kind of passion."
If you want to hear more of Biehn not having a good time, Gearbox and friends recently released a single-player expansion to Colonial Marines called Stasis Interrupted, which as you may have guessed is the surprising sequel to Girl, Interrupted tells the story of what happened to poor old Hicks when he was supposedly being killed in that stasis pod.
Ta, Joystiq .
