Nostalgia of Nostalgia

I am a fan of movies, I love them dearly.  Possibly because for most of my life I have been more than ready to detach.  Not because my life was particularly difficult or sadder than anyone else’s.  I’ve never given much thought to it until I rewrote this paragraph five times and I think I’ve got it figured.  When I was four, possibly five, years old I was on a tire swing for far too long spinning in one direction.  I “my first kegger” projectile vomited from the wood chips below my feet all the way to the county line.  From that day until I was probably fourteen I refused to go on swings, roller coasters, those weird “join the navy” rooms on hydraulics with a video, none of it.  I would have none of it.  So movies were my roller coasters, my swingsets, my whatever the hell else looked fun enough to make me puke.  (Excluding IMAX, which also made me vomit around the same age)

I also play video games.  Part and parcel.

Now, to the purpose of this post: I remember the first time I watched “Aliens”.  I was in fourth grade, at my friend Pat’s place.  It was a huge deal for me.  I had just moved from reading the “Redwall” series of books to a simultaneous read of the “Ender’s Game” series and “Hitchhiker’s Guide” series.  I don’t know where we stand as a culture, if Fantasy and Sci Fi fans are distinct, at odds, or can coexist and I do not care.  I like both but I have a preference for Sci Fi because of “Ender’s Game”.  The book is excellent, but for me it was going from Fantasy (past) to Science Fiction (future).  Retreading is less interesting to me than building and growing and searching.

So, anyway, I see “Aliens” at a fragile time for the nerd side of me, and it took hold.  Hard.  

I remember when the end credits rolled - wordlessly we began passing around Patrick’s collection of toy guns.  As we retrofitted them all to look somewhat similar to M41A Pulse Rifles a stillness came over the room.  We realized that before we could go outside and save the colonists of LV 426 (prior to the massacre, this was our story now) we were going to have to “call” which character from the movie we were.  We could not play “Aliens” as ourselves, we had to choose one of the Colonial Marines from the film and pretend to be that character.  All the imagination in the world does not matter when you are in someone else’s narrative, those characters were ours in Patrick’s backyard but they came with baggage.  You can veil the truth of the film as much as you want running around and pretending: but in your heart you know Frost doesn’t make it and Hudson cracks.  That’s why we argued about who we were going to be, we were calling “shotgun” on fun.  And who the fuck wants to be Wierzbowski?

For the rest of that year we discussed the film, dissected it, talked about where they should go next in the franchise.  We thought an all out assault on the home world of the Xenomorph’s was the only logical conclusion.  We were right and Fox was wrong.  Prison colony with no guns and one dog xenomorph?  Cloning?  Aliens fighting Predators?  The fourth grader in me is disappointed every time a new addition is added to the franchise.  Not because I want to go out with my friends at 27 years old and pretend to be Drake (who, were I to play now, would see the one on his right at the door of the APV and make it).  And not because I am owed something (that’s never the case in this life) but because I’m still deadlocked in someone else’s story.

Here is the point to this rambling: “Aliens: Colonial Marines”.  I get another chance at pretending to exist in the narrative.  I won’t have the creative control that I had blasting apart aliens with a nerf gun I added cardboard to with my friends but it is as close as I will get.  It is nostalgia for a fourth grade me who was nostalgic for a movie that came out two years after I was born.  It is, like everything, imperfect and exciting one way or another.

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This is super nerdy video game shit:  this game is a team up between Sega and Gearbox.  What is more exciting about this tandem to me is the fact that Gearbox is involved.  You can say any goddamned thing you want about the complete and utter shitstorm that was ‘Duke Nukem Forever’ but their resume is impressive.  

‘Borderlands’ changed the landscape of shooters to me, as a fan of RPG’s more than shooters and someone who had grown weary of ‘Fallout 3’ after a seventh play ‘Borderlands’ was a pleasant surprise.  Now I do not expect this game to have a single RPG element, I’m assuming this is going to be more of a ‘Call of Duty’ meets ‘Dead Space’ but I could be entirely wrong about that having only watched the trailers and read little on the actual game.