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Fix the AI in “Aliens: Colonial Marines” With This Mod!
Look, we all know how much of a dumpster fire Aliens: Colonial Marines turned out to be. Not only did Gearbox farm out the development to other studios while they focused on Duke Nukem Forever (yes, we know) and Borderlands 2 and pulled a bait-and-switch in the graphics with the E3 2012 demo and the retail version, the AI for the Xenomorphs is egregiously stupid. Well, at least for the last point, we can now fix it thanks to the modding community.
An Australian modder named James Dickinson aka TemplarGFX discovered the bug last year while working on his mod that would give the game a much-needed overhaul. Going through the configuration file for Colonial Marines, Dickinson found a line of code that looks like this:
ClassRemapping=PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachXenoToTether -> PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachPawnToTeather
Because that last ‘tether’ is misspelled, this string doesn’t do anything. As a result, this instruction that’s supposed to let enemies know where they’re supposed to be fighting and how, doesn’t actually do its job. As Dickinson explains on his ModDB page for his project, this can be fixed by simply removing the extra ‘a’ that appears in that line of PecanEngine.ini, which by default you can find in the My Documents\My Games\Aliens Colonial Marines\PecanGame\Config folder.
Now obviously, this won’t be doable on the console versions of the game, but if by chance the game is up for sale on Halloween (or even sooner), it might be worth it to grab it and get this mod to give us what we all should’ve gotten in the first place.
In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war, but it was a cheerful illustrator from England who helped to define the terrifying war-torn imagery that inspired what we now know as Grimdark (a hybrid genre combining horror with sci-fi/fantasy).
Unfortunately for fans of Warhammer 40,000, Trench Crusade and countless other sources of Grimdark thrills, veteran artist John Blanche passed away this week after struggling with health issues for the past few years.
While the artist retired back in 2023, he leaves us with an enormous legacy of iconic artwork that continues to inspire gamers and storytellers around the world to this very day.
The news is especially gloomy as it was only last year that Daniel Lowman and Napoleon Dynamite himself Jon Heder released The Grim & the Dark: The Search for John Blanche, a documentary following Heder’s exploration of the Grimdark genre culminating in a heartwarming encounter with Blanche in his own home.
Below is one of my favorite pieces by Blanche, his highly influential depiction of Warhammer 40k’s God-Emperor of Mankind on his Golden Throne.
We send our deepest condolences to John Blanche’s family, friends, and fans.
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