Aliens are better than zombies when it comes to gaming

Its interesting that you should mention Halo, a game which essentially borrowed the Zombie trope through the use of "The Flood" well into its 3rd installement. A Zombie as a "villan" is a straight foward ordeal. There is no shortcut for beating them, there is no inherent jynx that makes them impotent by flipping a switch. A zombie will shuffle forward, eat brains and flesh, and cease animation when its brain is blown apart or such trauma has been inflicted on it that its no longer worth the gamer's time to spend resources on beating it into a further pulp. Zombies are relentless, Zombies are not subject to fear, terror, bad morale, thirst or hunger. Aliens, in short, are. Take for instance in the video game "Justice League Heroes". Martian Manhunter is afraid of fire, and he is for game purposes ground down to being an NPC while a partner must perform the a task as J'onn Jo'nzz is prevented from being immediately effective. Aliens, very nearly with out fail have some variety of immediately exploitable weakness designed to aid the gamer. In many alien based games, the whole point of entire levels are created just to put the player in a position to find some McGuffin that makes the exploitable weakenss even MORE exploitable. As much as I hate to to admit it, even my favorite aliens, the Xenomorphs from the "Alien" franchise are formulaic to the point of disgust: kill it with fire. As to why the Colonial Marines haven't utilizied this on a wide scale when encountering them is beyond me. If you set a zombie on fire, what happens? You now have a flaming creature, enabling fires to spread while it attempts to engage in its one purpose: eating you. Zombies don't require nearly as much exposition to be effective. The game "Left for Dead" demonstrates literally makes use of this. What exactly caused the zombies? Don't know. Is there a cure? Don't know. All of that is irrelevant to the immediate game mechanic: survive. As time in such games wear on, a better story line develops. Games like "Dead Rising" pit the player against other surviors, the military, and zombie hordes to bring in as many facets as possible to immerse the gamer in a new but familiar world. In addition to survival, an important element gets added into many FPS style games: humor. There is nothing more satisfying than hacking up the undead with a Katana, or using a power drill on the undead. Tables turn in the game "Stubz the Zombie" in which you get to CREATE the zombie horde, and make use of many amusing undead powers to ruin a future-retro colony. Taking things out of the vide game world and going to the table top realm of D20 and miniature combat style games: the undead always make for better bad guys. Zombies are more fleshed out, if you pardon the pun, but retain their unique style of "badie-ness". Aliens, on the other hand, suffer from being over powered. When Games Worskshop introduced the Necrons, there were serious game balance problems. A little bit of Necron army could sweep forces that grossly outnumbered them with no skill or strategy involved in the game. Undead, on the other hand, in general never had that problem save for one or two characters (that were not specifically zombies or undead). They were a simple army in which people understood how horde based aggression worked. It shouldn't surprise anyone that Aliens being introduce into a story just sort of screws things up. Far to much explanation needs to be given as to why an alien invasion force, like that of Halo, doesn't just consist of orbital strikes until humanity surrenders, and usually such explanation hinges on yet another McGuffin. In the opening levels of Halo 2, the convenant forces, masters of technology, for some reason require planting a time bomb on a Mac-cannon that is preventing the fleet from getting close to Earth. Let me state that again: an interstellar race making use of technology grossly outstripping humanity needed to make use of a timed detonation device that had to physically get put into a space station. This delivery of this time bomb was done physically through assault craft, and the bomb was deposited on the interior... why, exactly? This is a game in which "active camo" (invisibility) is a real and practical thing. Why was the bomb not given such technology and discreetly attached to the exterior on a fly by? Because... um... um... Simply, its not in the script. A zombie doesn't need a script to explain itself. It just is. It harkens back to the primal fears of humans, the dead, rising to consume them in the same fashion that humans consume other animals. Humans are no longer the top of the food chain, but can reasonably reclaim the throne. Such is not possible with aliens as the antagonist, loop holes need to be created for illogical circumstance or simple incompetene.But, that is one mans opinion. Pro, whatcha go?