Considering that most of us have never actually seen an outer space alien, it seems like there should be a lot more originality and creativity involved in creating them in video games. Let's face it, an alien can be any look, size, shape, color, or texture you want, and nobody is going to question it. This is why I'm so disappointed with Half-Life 2, a game that was introduced at this year's E3.

Not that Half-Life 2 doesn't promise to be the single best first person shooter of the 21st century, it's just that when it comes to a few of its aliens, I suggest they head back to the drawing board and come up with something that hasn't been done before. But don't take my word on it, just look at the pictures above.

On one side we have aliens from the War of the Worlds, an H.G. Wells book turned controversial radio play turned cheesy movie. The aliens are portrayed as spider-like robot creatures that have a laser eyeball (or something like that).

Half-Life 2, in contrast, has a whole collection of spider-like robot creatures that have laser eyeballs. Of course, this was just one of the types of aliens shown on the Half-Life 2 demo, so maybe the flying alien shown in the 1953 movie will be represented in the final product. No matter how you look at it though, these creatures are certainly menacing, and I wouldn't want to deal with one of them, no matter how many weapons I have.

If there's any silver lining to this whole ordeal, it's that Half-Life 2 is one of the few sci-fi projects to not shamelessly rip off H.R. Giger's "Aliens". No small bodied aliens with big eyes, either. So perhaps I should just let this one knock off go unnoticed. But then, I wouldn't have an update if I did that.

(By the way, if we are ever attacked by aliens, I hope they don't look like this. There's something about those long legs and small body that makes it look like an insect, and I don't want to be taken over by a bug. So please, let it be something cool like the Blob, or that thing that says "Klaatu barada nikto", or those plant-things from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)