Gearbox Software fights a losing battle against the bugs in Aliens: Colonial Marines

By Anthony John Agnello March 8, 2013

Aliens-Colonial-Marines — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Part of the problem with Aliens: Colonial Marines is that, in addition to having some serious, fundamental flaws at a conceptual level, the product that actually released for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 is simply broken on a technical level. It is, pardon the pun, riddled with bugs. Spotty artificial intelligence, broken path finding, and terrible net code are just a few of the problems that players have taken to the Internet to complain about in the two weeks since Gearbox Software and Sega foisted their horrifying sequel on an unsuspecting public. It is a losing battle, and arguably a lost cause, but at least Gearbox and Sega are trying to fix the game.

Gearbox released a new Xbox 360 patch for Aliens: Colonial Marines that aims to repair some of the issues that plague the game. In the story mode, the biggest fix is repairing some of the non-player characters path finding abilities, keeping them from wandering off towards the wrong goal or spawning in the wrong places during certain story sections.

Other fixes to both the multiplayer and single-player games show just how broken Colonial Marines was when it shipped in February. One fix was built to repair “issues where multiplayer/co-op clients could see interactive objects displayed in different states.” This problem isn’t marked as “rare” in the patch notes either, meaning that two people playing the game online would regularly each see different parts of the environment.

PC and PlayStation 3 Aliens players will have to wait for this patch. Gearbox didn’t give an estimated release date for either platform.

Editors' Recommendations

Embracer Group finally sells Gearbox Software, but keeps Gearbox Publishing

Topics

Sci-Fi

Anthony John Agnello

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Anthony John Agnello is a writer living in New York. He works as the Community Manager of Joystiq.com and his writing has…

Gaming

Sea of Thieves beginner’s guide: 16 tips for new pirates

sea of thieves how to play solo sanctuaryoutpost 2

Cooperative piracy simulator Sea of Thieves is a game that drops players right off the plank and into the deep end of the ocean as soon as they start it up. You're left to figure out how to do almost everything alone or with a crew of friends. All of it is picked up through experience as you play, which is part of what makes Sea of Thieves interesting. There are tons of little nuances and best practices, however, that you need to become an effective pirate.

If you want to win sea battles, escape plunderers, gather treasure, and generally be the best pirate on the Sea of Thieves, there is a lot to learn. Luckily, these tips will make you an effective sailor, a deft brawler, and a smart privateer when you join up with a crew. Going it alone has its perks as well, so check out our tips for your lone pirate voyages.
Start with the tutorial mission

Gaming

How to hack in Fallout 4

A computer terminal in Fallout 4.

No matter what perks or skills your character has in Fallout 4, hacking will always come down to your ability as a player. There's no way to cheat the system here, and if you don't grasp what the game is asking you to do, you're mostly out of luck. Terminals will hide great loot behind their cryptic puzzles, as well as allow you to take over certain controls to turn your enemy's security against them. Some have very interesting logs about certain characters or events for all you lore junkies out there. Hacking has tons of uses, so let's brush up on your computer skills and give you a refresher on how to hack in Fallout 4.
How to hack in Fallout 4
When you first interact with a terminal to hack in Fallout 4, it will be a little overwhelming. As long as you have a high enough hacking skill to attempt a hack, you can go right into the minigame.

The basic idea of hacking is to find words hidden in that jumble of letters and symbols. Your goal is to find the correct word to crack the terminal before you run out of attempts. Once you find any word and select it, the terminal will tell you how close that word is to the correct one based on how many letters it has in the same space as the answer in the form of a likeness rating. The higher the rating, the more letters it has in common. It is somewhat similar to Wordle, only you don't type in the words yourself.

Gaming

Best PS5 SSD deals: Add more storage to your PS5 from $120

A 2TB WD Black

When the PlayStation 5 was originally released, it had the option to expand its internal memory, which was quite small at the time at a little under 900GBs. Of course, the issue is that there weren't any SSDs that worked on the new standard the PS5 was using, so even if you wanted to upgrade, you couldn't. Luckily, since then, there have been a lot of great SSDs for the PS5 that have been released, and upgrading its storage is pretty easy and can be done by pretty much anybody, provided they have a screwdriver. So, whether you picked up a PS5 from one of the PS5 deals or already have a PS5 and want to upgrade, be sure to check out the SSDs that will work great for your PS5 below.
Our favorite PS5 SSD deal

It wasn't that long ago that you'd have to pay well over $100 to get an SSD for your PS5, and often, it'd be slower than the pricier alternatives. These days, you can buy a Samsung 980 Pro 1TB SSD with heatsink for just $120 from Best Buy, thereby saving $45 off the regular price of $165. The SSD offers speedy performance while also having its own nickel-coated high-end controller to help deliver effective thermal control. It means it won't overheat and performance won't be compromised. Being a PCIe Gen 4 SSD, you get twice the data transfer speed of PCIe Gen 3 which is useful. Offering maximum read speeds of 7,000 megabytes per second, it's a good upgrade to go alongside your existing hard drive with 1TB offering plenty of extra space at a shrewd price.