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Aliens Infestation Includes Bishop’s Awesome Knife Trick

This article is over 13 years old and may contain outdated information

Aliens Infestation hopes to feature all the coolest bits from James Cameron’s 1986 sci-fi action masterpiece Aliens, including a certain cyborg’s incredible display of bladesmanship.

Haven’t seen Aliens? Allow me to paint a scene for you.

This being 1986, Lance Henriksen was contractually obligated to appear in every science fiction movie made in Hollywood. As such, he played the role of Bishop, a synthetic humanoid sent to LV-426 with a team of colonial space marines to serve as something of a general purpose scientist/doctor/engineer/pilot. The team has been tasked by the Weyland Yutani corporation (under the auspices of the government) with exploring a settlement that mysteriously stopped communicating with the home office. Given that the Weyland Yutani higher-ups secretly want to capture and study the Geiger-esque physical incarnation of forced sodomy that is the xenomorph, things go wonky in short order.

There’s a scene toward the beginning of the film where Bishop is dining with his human companions, and they entreat the faux man to do “the knife trick.” He grabs Bill Paxton’s hand, places it on top of his own, and the next few moments are the most impressive feat of knifeplay ever committed to celluloid.

While millions of kids around the country would inevitably attempt the “knife trick” and a few even managed to keep all their fingers, few actually succeeded at pulling the thing off. According to the latest issue of Official Nintendo Magazine however, those legions will get another shot at it when Aliens Infestation hits the DS on October 11.

Though the magazine doesn’t offer much detail on what it calls “one of the best movie tie-in minigame[sic] we’ve seen,” it does offer a single picture of a splayed hand with blood pooling between the middle digits. Aside from the gore, it’s a visual that should be very familiar to fans of Aliens.

As far as call-backs to the film series go, this is indeed brilliant, but I’ve still got my fingers crossed that the game includes a certain segment of Paxton’s dialogue that, thematically speaking, would fit perfectly in this new medium. If developer WayForward somehow forgets to include this bit of histrionics, I’m going to be very sad.

Source: Tiny Cartridge


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