Of the perils one encounters when writing about games, the most painful is arguably following the games that almost were; games that were canceled just shy of release. Some are simply vaporware, announced one day and then were never heard from again, and others are in the spotlight for years, before being banished to a dusty hard drive in a closet somewhere. Duke Nukem Forever will stand ... well, forever as the most prominent example of the latter, but the Obsidian-developed Aliens RPG that Sega canceled could very well hold the second-place trophy.

At a press event last week, we asked Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart some followup questions about the axed title, which he'd previously asked us to do; however, it still hasn't been the required year since we first talked to him, so we're still missing the details as to why the title got the guillotine. But we did learn that the game looked and felt nearly complete before its cancellation. "Oh, if you had come in and played any of the last builds we were working on, you would have said it was a finished game," Urquhart told Joystiq. "That's how close we were. It looked and felt like it was ready to ship."

He went on to explain that you only played as the Colonial Marines in the game (not to be confused with these Colonial Marines), and that missions would have involved tasks like protecting the robot sentry guns that were featured in a deleted scene in Aliens. One of the biggest challenges, Urquhart said, was, "How do you make a 15-foot long Alien turn around at the end of a hallway?" Besides terrifying turn-based hallway combat, there also would have been multiple types of Marines, lots of gear to play with and ... wait. This is just like pouring salt in a freshly reopened wound. Thanks, Feargus!