Dead Space

[Queeaqueg]

I saw on Playr at the weekend and it looks awesome.
A cross between survival horror(Resident Evil 4ish), Half-Life and borrows a lot from the Alien film.
About team of engineers called to a mining ship when they receive a distress call but when the team get their they are ambushed by a bunch of hostile aliens called Necromorphs.
The game has the third-person view like in Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War, plus you get a display but its on the weapons and armour as a hologram.
He doesn't use soldier weapons but instead uses engineer equipment which can be used as weapons.
The aliens don't die like other aliens do in other games, such as after a certain number of hits. In this to kill the aliens, you must like take out certain parts of the alien like limps or body. If just randomly shooting the alien will just lead to them getting new limps or not dying.
The game is similar to survival horror in which the player only has a certain amount of space to keep items plus there are lots of puzzles to solve.
Its all about the graphics, sound and lighting. Graphics are what you expect from the next gen game but the lighting is really good. Example; low light in a corridor but has flickering light, the light licked on and off. at the back of the wall was nothing then went dark then light came back on n use see shadow of alien n it is gone. Plus lots of jumping bits n scary breathing sounds which you look for aliens when in the room.

[Kevin164]

Looks like a Doom/Thing knock-off. But the interesting parts of this game are the holographic displays that pop up in front of the player, plus the spine lights are the player's health. Pretty innovative and will most likely appear in the next third person shooters generation games till something new comes along.

[[Syl]]

Normally would have no interest in this game, but Ben Browder and Sam Raimi were pitching it on the SciFi Channel, so I'll check it out.

[Queeaqueg]

Don't think it is going to be a classic but the game looks well worth playing plus it is meant to be scary n i haven't played any truly scary games in a while.

[Kevin164]

The last scary game for me was Alien vs. Predator for the PC. I hated playing the marine campaign. That damn motion sensor would go off and I would be like shiiitt I can't see a thing.

[AjK]

I finally saw a TV commercial for this game. Looks very slick and indeed reminiscent of the movie Alien. Gaming technology has pretty much passed me by. My kids have a PS2 and a Wii which I don't play other than to have my younger daughters destroy me at Wii tennis. (I stink despite having played NCAA level tennis in my long past younger years, LOL.) But games like this certainly are interesting. Does anyone know if there will be a PC version? Even if they do put one out I still have to get the rust off in terms of skill. I never got good at the PC controls for the newer (post Doom) 3D engines. Looks fun though!

[Holsety]

Has anyone been playing this? I'm up to chapter 7 now.

It's...better than the sum of its parts. I tend to compare it to Resident Evil 4 because I was playing the wii edition of that a short time ago, and that game stuck out as one of the most fun games I've played in my life.

Dead Space is definitely a lot scarier, thanks to the running speed of the standard slasher monsters (on you in seconds), the creepy lighting and music, and the tendency to surprise you. Guys will even ambush you when you're using the store sometimes (the first time this happened it caught me off guard, the second time I canceled out and killed him without taking damage).

That being said, it's also a hell of a lot easier. I started on medium and the guys seem to do almost no damage, and the game throws health packs at you (right now I have like 10 medium health packs in storage). The pistol-type weapon, the plasma cutter, is pretty much all I use and it's been sufficient to get me through nearly all of the game. I did try out the pulse rifle and the contact beam for fun but right now I just use the contact beam for ammo pickups (I get contact energy and sell it for 1,000 credits apiece so I can continue upping my cutter, rig and stasis).

Resident Evil 4 did a terrible job at scaring me, most of the time it felt more like action than like survival horror, yet the game itself was still damn tough. But w/ deadspace the only times I die are due to terrain effects (meteors, electricity, whatever), the zombies have proven to be harmless distractions. STILL, dead space manages to scare the shit out of me, even if its difficulty is crippled.

The story is pretty lackluster and the side characters are jerks. Mostly they seem to sit around and wait for Isaac to solve all their problems. I have NEVER heard either Kendra or Hammond tell Isaac "thank you for repowering the asteroid defense/fending off the immortal superzombie/saving us from getting poisoned while I sat here and gave you oerders." I am hoping they will both die before the game ends. All the audio codecs involve random crew members whining about how crazy shit and then getting eviscerated by some monster, instead of doing the smart thing (buying the fairly cheap plasma cutter for under 10,000 credits and killing the necromorphs themselves). As far as I can tell, everyone on the Ishimura sat around on their asses and WAITED for the necromorphs to find and kill them.

Enemies are weaksauce. 3 or 4 ganados in RE4 were actually something of a threat. Also, the fact that you can kill zombies by shooting them in the legs and arms 2 or 3 times (more for the black-scaled ones) means that you never have to go for any really difficult headshots to take them out.

[Loredoctor]

I purchased the game today - it was on sale (end of year financial sale at EB). It's fantastic.

[Earthfriend]

I agree Loremaster - it's a pretty cool game.

I finished Dead Space a couple of months ago now, which says something about the game's playability i guess, as i don't tend to actually finish many games. (It's not that i'm feckless, it's just that there is so much other stuff to do. That's my story and I'm sticking to it)

As Holsety found, after i'd upgraded my weapons and armour to a certain level, the game did become a tad easy, but the atmosphere of suspense and the pretty full-on gore/horror kept me on edge like no game since RE Nemesis.

Spoiler

Oh and by the way, your wish eventually comes true, Holsety, heh.

[Loredoctor]

As far as I can tell, everyone on the Ishimura sat around on their asses and WAITED for the necromorphs to find and kill them.

They were insane at that point, or most were. I imagine that the ones who left audio logs probably did fight back - Temple got almost to the end.

[CovenantJr]

Interesting. I've been told this game can cause genuine alarm, and that's something I seldom get from games. I was also told it's hard, but I'm not too sure of how accomplished the gamer in question is.

[Loredoctor]

Interesting. I've been told this game can cause genuine alarm, and that's something I seldom get from games. I was also told it's hard, but I'm not too sure of how accomplished the gamer in question is.

It made me jump out of my seat at times, my heart was pounding at least once every session,

Spoiler

and the last cut scene gave me a shock.

[Earthfriend]

Agreed, Loremaster. I ended most sessions jumpy as all get out.

But it's not very difficult for an OTS shooter, as long as one is not too freaked out to aim straight.

[ninjaboy]

First game I got when I got my Laptop - and it's AWESOME!!! Awesome as ALL HELL!! It's inly hard when you're trying to use the inbuilt laptopp mouse, but any peripheral controller makes it much more manageable..

I hear there may be a sequel?

[Holsety]

Yes. You can simply google deadspace 2 for images etc, but here's a little bit I know about it.

-Isaac returns as the/a main character.
-It takes place on a space station called The Sprawl during a necro infection. From what I understand Isaac starts off in a hospital.
-There's an image somewhere with a ship resembling the Ishimura in the background. It's possible it's a similarly designed planetcracker, but it's also possible that this is how the infection has spread. (derelict ship brought in or something).
-There will be multiplayer.
-Zero g controls will involve some ability to change direction while in the air, and you can fire weapons while jumping.
-In terms of enemy design, they want to take the necromorphs in a more disturbed direction or something. From what I understand, they felt that the necros were a little to straightforward, and they plan on making the transformations seem more erratic.
-Perhaps unfortunately, the developers are taking it in a more action-horror direction.

The reason for the last point (I couldn't find the article) is that the developers said player feedback included claims that the game was too scary to play for extended periods, and that people were too worried about resource conservation. As a result, they want to make the game fluctuate by having power shifts going on. As I remember them describing it, the plan is to toss you additional fire power on occasion, so that you fluctuate between being overwhelmed by enemies and overwhelming the enemies.

I figure that this might be a good idea and it might be bad. If the game goes from pretty much constant, 100% threat level (there are few "safe zones" in Dead Space) to trying to fluctuate between a feeling of safety and a feeling of danger, it might work better. However, the way they seemed inclined to do this is by giving Isaac more powerful weaponry. If the weaponry can be carried from beginning to end, I figure this will just create more of a hoarding tendency.

For my part (as evinced by my post above) I felt the game was very easy and yet very terrifying, but when I went back to it later -and it was EVEN EASIER - it got even scarier, paradoxically enough. Somehow, knowing where most of the enemies would spawn and exactly when they would attack made it much, much more frightening. To put it simply...I was somewhat critical of the game before; I now view it as truly excellent in a lot of ways (although there are still some things I felt did not work very well).

There's also a wii spinoff called deadspace extraction. I haven't had the money to buy new games (mostly playing whatever my roommate buys when I have time) but I've heard fairly good things about it. If you have the console and the time, you might wanna look into it. It's a rail shooter, ironic since resident evil: darkside chronicles came out around the same time (IIRC).

Apparently some people in extraction survive and head for the sprawl in a shuttle themselves at some point, so it's possible they'll meet up w/ Isaac.

[Holsety]

Oh, here is the post. I don't have the original GI article, just someone's commentary on it.

I think their success will depend on making sure that the "moments" of superiority are somewhat unpredictable, and that a big of well-thought conservation will not create a big imbalance in the game.

Personally, I think something like this can only be done that well by discarding resources, inventory stockpiles etc, such that a player's current situation is mostly determined by what's at hand and not what they've brought along from the last chapter.

And that is not a direction most games seem to go.

From GI Issue 201 Pg. 34: " 'What we discovered is people were - believe it or not - TOO SCARED playing Dead Space.' says executive producer Steve Papoutsis. Leveling such a complaint against a game intended to freak players out may seem silly, but it does raise the question of appropriate pacing. In Dead Space, a few things were constant: resources were scarce, enemies were plentiful, and potential danger lurked behind every door. Enduring that unwavering level of intensity can take a toll on the player. 'I've had numerous people mention to me that they could only play it for 30 minutes or an hour at a time...they were always on the edge of their seat 100% of the time,' continues Papoutsis. 'They never felt badass; they never felt like they could just walk into a room and waste guys.' "

"To address this issue Dead Space 2 features a deliberate pacing designed to to deliver both the high of combat, and the relief of breathing room - sometimes within minutes of each other. The team's goal is to vary the intensity by making the action ebb and flow; instead of always feeling like you are barely able to handle an encounter you will have moments of superiority. Maybe you just stocked up on ammo or found a new gun that decimates a particular type of enemy - during these sequences, Isaac will pose a greater threat to his foes than they do to him , blasting freely and exerting greater control over the battle."

Am I the only one that doesn't like the direction they appear to be going with this game? To me the fact that you were constantly changing underwear was one of the most redeeming qualities of the original DS. I never felt comfortable at all while playing. Is this not the goal of a survival horror title? You are trying to survive not conquer. Scarce resources, and potential danger lurking everywhere are two key staples of a survival horror game. It is scary how it appears they are going the way of Resident Evil, from a top notch survival horror to a somewhat scary action game. I am eagerly anticipating this release, but I really don't know what to expect anymore. I hope I am wrong and it is still a killer title, but with these quotes from the executive producer I am not sure what to think.

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