Winter carries a turret down a set of metal stairs to a corridor, the other player following. They set up the device over a transparent image of the turret and activate it. Pitchford notes that the sentry turret actually appeared in the Director's Cut of Aliens.

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Winter, the other player and several other Marines crowd around the auto-firing turret, firing into a crowd of aliens that start working their way down the corridor. The aliens come in spiraling paths that has them crawling along the walls and ceilings. Pitchford says none of the movement is scripted, that the AI of the aliens knows to treat the walls, the ceilings—any flat surface, it seems—as a floor.

As Winter fires into the aliens, one of the pops out from a vent on the wall and drags a Marine back into it with it.

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The position beyond saving, Winter and his pal run back upstairs where they see aliens streaming into the room through vents in the ceilings and walls. The aliens drop to the floor, jump over crates, bound toward you. The lights go out, in the silence and the black you can hear the motion tracking beeps of an approaching horde.

Red emergency lights kick back on, illuminating a room seething with alien life.

We retreat again, falling back in the face of overwhelming odds. Winter makes it through a door as the other player runs up to it and begins to wield it shut. Pitchford later tells me the ability to wield doors shut is a mechanic in the game, a choice players can make that is accomplished through a hacking minigame.

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In this final large bay, these few Marines try to reorganize and prepare for the final breach. Some of them climb into exo-suit cargo loaders. Those are controllable by players too, Pitchford says. The large doors in this big bay begin to dent and bulge inward. Finally edges begin to peel back and then come the aliens, streaming through, skittering along walls, ceilings, dropping to the floor. The room becomes a tableau of blood, red and green; death, alien and Marine.

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Winter and the other player are fighting their own battles as Marines kill and are killed all around them. Shortly into the battle one of the men in the exo-suit is overwhelmed, knocked to the floor and then covered in writhing aliens. The bay is pulled open and a massive alien steps into the room, the exo-suits look tiny next to it.> It grabs Winter and bites straight at the screen, which goes black.

"It is our duty and privilege to do what needs to be done to let people recreate the fantasies they have about Aliens," Pitchford says later.

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That includes being able to fight off a giant alien in an exosuit, using the motion tracker to witness your impending death and witness a chest burst or too.

But the game can't just be a rehash of what we all loved about the series.

"At the same time, when you play the game that's cool, but the real fun things are what we are adding to the fiction, like the new xenotypes," he said. "The equipment that we got from supplemental material, like from the film technical guide."

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Aliens: Colonial Marines hits next year on the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. It is in development, Pitchford said, for the Wii U.