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"If it bleeds, we can kill it," mutters Arnie in the first Predator movie. Part of me wishes I could find a better line from the extensive canon of these sci-fi titans to bring you into this Aliens versus Predator retrospective. Something more intellectual, more profound. But to do so would be dishonest to the 12-year-old me who first played AVP in 1999. First and foremost and above all else, Aliens versus Predator is a game about blood.Evidence for this is easily come by. There are four types of blood liberally spilled in Rebellion's 1999 offering of this most-rebooted of franchises. There's the acidic drippings of the Xenomorph, the fluorescent green life-fluid of the Predator, the strange white liquid that gives life to Weyland Yutani's synthetics, which I've always enjoyed pretending is milk. And of course, the familiar crimson that flows through our own veins and arteries.
Rebellion has always demonstrated a peculiar talent for portraying violence in an almost hypnotic fashion, more recently witnessed in its Sniper Elite games. But AVP's sanguinity has more about it than simple shock factor. It's also practical, systemic, symbolic. Kill a Xenomorph and it'll burst like a grenade, spraying deadly acid in all directions. It makes them a hazard to be avoided as well as a threat to be battled. Tag a Predator with a pulse rifle round and the bright green trail it trickles behind will lead you right to it, useful when fighting an enemy who is often invisible. Human blood, meanwhile, is little more than an aside, while flesh and bone serve as sustenance for the Xenomorph, or a prize for a Predator.
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