encounters and resources required for the NPC." Ultimately, NPC characters were scripted to change into Things at specific points, irrespective of the player's actions. This led to a much criticized aspect of the game; the player can test an NPC to find he is human only for him to change into a Thing mere seconds later. Programmer Diarmid Campbell explains; Similarly, Latham states "We had to scale it back. There were a few cheats to make it entertaining. We tried to mimic human behavior, but at the end of the day it didn't matter too much how you treated your teammates." The Thing also features a vocal ending theme "After Me", performed by Memphis-based Nu metal band Saliva, from its second studio album Every Six Seconds. In August 2002, Vivendi Universal formed a new publishing division called Black Label Games; a label which Ken Cron (Vivendi Universal Games CEO) stated "will focus on delivering innovative, high-quality titles to satisfy the growing consumer appetite for increasingly sophisticated content." The game transitioned from Universal Interactive over to the new label. The console versions are co-published with Konami, with Vivendi Universal handling distribution. Reception The Thing received "generally favorable reviews" on all three platforms; the PlayStation 2 version holds an aggregate score of 78 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on twenty-seven reviews; the Xbox version a 78 out of 100, based on twenty-one reviews; and the PC version a 77 out of 100, based on nineteen reviews. Eurogamer's Kristan Reed scored the PlayStation 2 version a 5 out of 10, arguing of the trust/fear system "It is nowhere near as much of a neat gameplay innovation as the hype had some people believe [...] As a squad based game it would work far better if you ever had to care a great deal for anyone's survival. As it is, most of the team seem to split off once a level's over (or turn into aliens at pre-determined moments during it), so you're left merely using each NPC as a means of progression." He was also critical of the graphics, which he argued "look old school, with bad texturing, uninteresting particle effects, and vanilla architecture." He concluded, "If you can pick up The Thing cheap you won't be too disappointed; it's by no means a bad game, but it's all the more disappointing thanks to the fact that it could and should have