While Aliens fans lick the acid from wounds inflicted by Colonial Marines, 13 minutes of gameplay from a development version of Obsidian Entertainment's cancelled squad-based RPG Aliens: Crucible have surfaced. It's clearly not finished, but if you want to squint and daydream about what could have been, please do.

At least part of the video picked up by Unseen64 shows a build dated December 22, 2008--not long before it was cancelled. A short snippet from an earlier build leaked out in 2010, but this is the longest and most recent look we've had.

The video, a composite of several sections potentially from different builds, shows character creation, skill trees, controlling a squad, dialogue options with consequences, QTEs, a variety of weapons, hacking and cutting doors, the Queen, and an awful lot of aliens being shot.

Crucible was announced alongside Colonial Marines in 2006, but while we saw a fair bit of Gearbox's FPS, Sega had little to say about the RPG. A former Obsidian employee said in February 2009 that it had been cancelled, but publisher Sega didn't officially announce that until June 2009 and offered no explanation for dropping it.

Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart commented in 2010 that Crucible "looked and felt like it was ready to ship" when Sega cancelled the game. While the leaked footage may resemble some manner of finished game, it doesn't look like a particularly good one--not to read too much into a dev build. Still, that little problem didn't stop Sega from releasing Colonial Marines.