I'm amazed that the multiplayer demo that was released is pretty much the exact same thing we were playing at E3 over 6 months ago. In fact, I think they SLOWED DOWN the movement rates of the alien and predator.

As an alien, where in the first game you were fast like lightning, you're too slow to catch up to a running marine now. That's just absurd. Also, the predator is damn near immobile, since he can't jump more then a few feet and really lacks speed... again, can't outrun a marine, but is slower than the alien.

What were these people thinking? The netcode is too crappy to handle fast movement, so lets put everyone's feet in molasses? I don't really need to go into the other problems they have, such as the brower that didn't work until patched today, and other such things... but there's one glaring piece of "cheese" that deserves derision...

The predator's shoulder cannon - my oh my what a cheesy weapon it has become. If a predator gets a lock on you with this baby, kiss it goodbye. I've seen aliens leap halfway across the map, down behind the tower and into the tunnel, and it'll do a 180 and fly down in there after them. That's just unspeakable.

I played some last night and I don't like. Everything's moving so fast... Playing as a marine I couldn't even turn around fast enough to shoot back before an alien could kill me. They'd come out of nowhere. I'd be bleeding before it even showed up on the tracker screen. And the Predator was impossible to use. You have to hold down the cloak button? Christ! I could never get a lock with the shoulder cannon and all the other weapons were completely useless. And playing as an alien was just too disorienting for me. I never played the first game. Everything seems terribly unbalanced in their favor though. I played on a Team DM server for a little while and it took the alien teem only like 2 minutes to reach the 50 kill limit (with half the players as aliens and half distributed in the other teams). The combined kills of everyone else would be like 1/3 of that at the end of the round.

The aliens' attributes work better in the single player game where you can restrict their movement in narrow coridors giving the mariens and predators a chance to defend themselves, but in a huge open arena? I think the Single player game will be good, but I won't be playing online. What was the first game's multiplayer like?

I don't know. Maybe I just suck. I can't play Counter Strike because I die in like 20 seconds. I'm better in the Opera and the Wolfenstien test.

On a completely unrelated note I think Alice Cooper must have gone broke recently. All of a sudden he's doing a bunch of commercials. Like for CompUSA and *I think* the Marriot. Maybe he took a bath in the stock market.

Brad Grenz

I played AvP on a LAN with some friends for a while, and it was great fun, but apart from the uniqueness of playing the alien, it wasn't as much fun as other shooters. And in multiplayer the alien character seemed fundamentally flawed, as it had to win every battle or die. Because the only way of healing itself was from eating its victims then it only took a couple of near misses before it was all over. In our games we found that the alien would generally do badly, but we didn't play it to the limit.

Tim (aka Gx_Farmer)
http://www.mrfixitonline.com

Well I have heard in the full version they will have faster alien classes. Also if you cant catch up to a running marine I suggest you "pounce" you use the E key. Also what do you mean you have to hold down C to cloak? You just press it once.

Also as far as I can tell no class is really overbalanced I"m on a dialup and on a computer that shouldnt even be able to run this game and I can keep around par with most people useing any race against anyother race.

The predators shoulder cannon is deadly It may be overpowered at least against marines who actually lose in a mid range long range fire fight against it. Though if you do some fancy foot work it seems you can avoid the direct blast.
Also all of the weapon and alien types arent in the demo so everything could be obsurdly unbalanced or pan out just fine hard to say.

I will say the feel of this game isn't like anything else I'v ever tried though I didn't try the first one. when I'm an alien and I quickly scale a wall wind up behind my enemy and tear him apart from behind its a great feeling. What's more when I'm a marine its a great feeling hearing that beep then seeing a white spot on my radar coming closer closer then disapearing. Followed immediatly bye a black black blur lunging and tearing me apart. I'm no writer like most of you guys so I'm probably not conveying this too well but this game just has a real special feel to it.

I couldn't get the cloak to stay on unless I held down the button.