Aliens: Colonial Marines............
The problem I'm having getting past is the 'attention to detail' stuff. For example, all the debris in the drop ship hanger on the Sulaco; that thing was vented to space for something like 45 seconds at the end of Aliens.... there should be nothing left,
Reading more of the post-mortems in the industry rags, and boy was this a mess. Sega got the interactive rights from 20th Century Fox (TCF), who was keen on reviving the franchise after effectively destroying it with two sub-par sequels and two awful cross-IP movies in AVP. Sega made a pretty bland FPS based on the AVP mixed-IP in 2010 (that I never finished playing), while focusing their main efforts on Colonial Marines. Sega hired a developer called Gearbox to make this title, and they spent about four years (!) designing and developing the game. Eventually, it was blessed by TCF as a canonical sequel to "Aliens", so impressed were they with what Sega and Gearbox were doing. (By all accounts, the guys at Gearbox are massive fans of the Alien franchise, and wanted to do right by it)
That's where things went all dicky. Gearbox, being a successful developer, had its own in-house IP to focus on, namely Duke Nukem and Borderlands, both of which were in re-boot/sequel mode. Gearbox, as is their wont, decided to put their own energy into those two IPs and outsource dev on Aliens: Colonial Marines. (Happens all the time) They chose a developer called TimeGate...... whose first order of business was to essentially throw out the four years of design and development that Gearbox had already put into the game, and which had so pleased execs at TCF, and start from scratch.
From there it descended into a mess of delays and missed deadlines and extensions and politicking. Gearbox was too lasered in on their own games (both of which turned out quite poorly, tbh) to monitor what TimeGate was doing, and when the final playable was delivered everyone at Gearbox effectively hung their heads in shame. They knew it was terrible. There were no boss battles, whole level maps had to be re-done, the graphics are two generations old, cut scenes are terrible. When they reported this to their publisher (Sega) they were granted a nine month reprieve....... the first five months of which were spent finalizing Borderlands 2 and shipping that title. So last week when I said the last extension allowed them to cast voice talent from "Aliens", those game elements hadn't even existed as of about seven months ago.
In summary: the shipped version of Aliens: Colonial Marines was effectively developed in four months, despite Sega and Gearbox working on it for six years.
boss level: looking through a window into the castle where mario and peach are having a nice quiet candlelight dinner, followed by his final boss bout with depression.