Do you own a Wii U? Do you love terrible, half-assed first person shooters? Well then, I have some bad news for you: today Sega announced that the Wii U port of Aliens: Colonial Marines has been cancelled.
“Sega can confirm that the Wii U SKU of Aliens: Colonial Marines is no longer in development,” a company rep told Joystiq today. The Wii U version of Aliens: Colonial Marines was one of the first third party titles announced for the system, but the title disappeared from the console’s release lists a few months ago. I guess now we know why.
Aliens: Colonial Marines received unanimously bad reviews when it was released for the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC earlier this year, and while the game somehow managed to sell a decent amount of copies despite its critical lambasting, it apparently didn’t sell enough to warrant a port over to Nintendo’s latest console. The game’s troubled development has been the subject of a lot of gossip, and rumor has it that Sega is considering suing Colonial Marines’ developer Gearbox for reportedly out-sourcing development of the game to another company while Gearbox illegally used Sega’s money to fund work on Borderlands 2. Gearbox recently issued a 4 GB (!) patch for the PC version that fixes some of the game’s technical problems but did little to fix criticisms about the game’s brain dead gameplay.
Depending on your outlook, this is either good or bad news for Wii U owners: you can either interpret this news as a sign that third party support for the Wii U is continuing to decline, or you can look on the bright side and simply say that Nintendo fans are being spared the indignity of having shovelware like Colonial Marines on their system. Both explanations are equally true and embarrassing.
