Creative Assembly keeps making me more confident about Alien: Isolation. They really seem to get what made Ridley Scott's 1979 film so terrifying: it wasn't about inexplicably stupid scientists making dumb decisions with trillions of dollars of technology, as in Prometheus. Rather, it was about a group of terrified space truckers, doing the best they could with the crappy tech they had on hand, making all the right decisions and still getting killed by the alien, which is precisely what made the movie scary.
Case in point: Creative Assembly is doing their best to reverse-engineer the work of Ron Cobb, the legendary concept artist who designed the look of both Scott's Alien and Cameron's sequel, Aliens. This very analog, push-button future Cobb created looked like it could actually exist and work, and Creative Assembly has taken that to heart in building their game. But once again, all of the tech in the world, advanced or 1970s clunky, won't save you from a literal force of nature like the xenomorph. This is something Aliens: Colonial Marines missed completely, so I still have high hopes for Isolation.
