Multimedia is a funny word. To me, its always brought forth a mental image of a work thats delivered over several mediums - advertising, graphic novels, radio, video games, movies... And it would unite a work under its diverse banner, making for a comprehensive experience that one medium alone cant deliver.
Dead Space achieved that. I'm a confessed pussy when it comes to horror games- movies I'm fine with, but when it's up to me to pull the trigger or flee, I go to pieces.
Anything I have to say on Dead Space it will be limited, since I played through on the 'Easy' difficulty setting where it generally only took one shot to take a limb off, a mechanic I sincerely hope the Resident Evil franchise clues on to, should they ever take the KKK sheets off their heads and make a game about proper zombies again.
But I'm not here to talk about racism, I'm talking about the flip side of the coin - if racial profiling is heads, then the survival intinct is tails. As a species, we've fallen into in-fighting and civil bickering because we're ridden and whipped by the driver of instinct, following the juicy carrot-on-a-stick of survival. Figuratively.
[image=http://i32.tinypic.com/wi391h.jpg]
Or literally.
That kind of spirit - killing what's obviously different, justified by intimidation and zealoutry - carries the weight of the motivations in Dead Space.
Isaac Clarke and his friends Busty Chick and Black Dude visit a large deep-space mining vessel - the USG Ishimura - that pulls the tits off of planets and then wears them as a hat until they mine to look for anything valuable inside. But they've stopped communication, and the Isaac-Busty-Black triple threat are sent to go fix whatever minor malfunction has gone wrong, probably after calling AT&T tech support. As an extra insentive, Isaac's estranged girlfriend Nicole is aboard.
All of this is covered in the opening sequence, and you already know that this is another Horror Experience (I'm loathe to call it a game, or interactive fiction, since I'm on a pilgrimage to rename these multi-media things). The greatest horror/action movies of all time have all been made possible by two things: under-staffing, and extremely poor judgement.
The poor judgement in the opening credits is two-fold. Not only do our heroes not wonder why the Ishimura didn't simply send a lifeboat or something similar to the nearest space station with a payphone and call for their services to fix their burted antennae? No, they send three douchebags with one weapon between them and some old-fashioned neighbourly helpfulness.
The second call that reaches window-licking-level retarded judgement is the fact that the Ishimura deliberately pulls apart planets to see what's inside, then wonder why the planet's inhabitants (and anything else they stir up) get indignant.
Oh, and the third doesn't really count, since it's after you've gained full control of Isaac, but what kind of retarded security system locks all of the doors to an occupied room when it senses an anomaly? I get the theory behind this, I do, but the security systems definitely need some fine-tuning before they start thinning the ranks of the entire crew.
Speaking of the crew's dwindling numbers, I won't call spoilers when I say that our heroes quickly discover that most of the personnel of the Ishimura are decorative corpses.
Things very quickly go to crap and the faceless escorts to our three plucky custodians are forced to cannibalise the ship's hardware to restore functionality, and discover an unspeakable evil - and more than a few giggles - along the way.
This mostly consists of Isaac going from one end of the ship to the other to get supplies and equipment, improvising weapons and battling unspeakable horrors along the way, while the two support characters do fuck all but remotely unlock malfunctioning doors for him - which was exactly what Isaac was brought aboard to do.
History is written by those who push fear aside and step up to the plate, and Isaac does that impeccably. The flair and dedication he shows in combat either suggest an unmentioned military background, or that he's the lovechild descendant of John McClane and Jack Bauer. He shows zero fear.
But his personal logs suggest that he really is scared - the second things start going wrong, he tweets to himself that he has to 'find somewhere safe, somewhere to hide'. So I reason that he spent his childhood playing videogames a lot like Dead Space, and when the chip are down he unleashes years of pent-up rage and starts dismembering aliens to vent some kind of kill-fantasy that was bubbling below the surface, and was bound to make him go postal back on Earth any day now.
Many, many, many, many (if not all) sci-fi horror stories start with a distress call being answered by the protagonists, and this is no different at all. I didn't mind this at all, since the game is incredibly immersive - and in this context, I mean the 'realistic' kind of immersive. The game looks great, feels great, has great acting, and all the tiny acts of attention to detail draw you right on in.
These days, the graphics and physics engines would be showing their age a bit, but what isn't? I normally don't brake for glare and couldn't give less of a shit about dynamic directional everything, but it all helps to sell Dead Space.
On the actual scare factor, it doesn't rank very highly. Their flavour is cramped steel-mesh hallways and leaving you to wonder when and where the enemy will appear and rip you a new vas defrans, but the latter falls a little flat. I had the music and sound effects turned right up, so every time the enemy appears I would know without seeing - since they announce it with a violin stab that always means 'look out'. I think for added challenge (and immersion) go into the options screen and turn the music volume right off.
[image=http://i28.tinypic.com/f1bd5i.jpg]
Attention whores.
There was one corridor in particular that heavily suggested to me that a scary monster will jump down from the roof at any second, but a dead human body flops down instead - I was so geared up for the alien that the corpse didn't scare me one bit, I just kept scanning until I reached the other end, and a small plate of disappointment. Is that irony? I can't tell.
To be perfectly honest, I can't complain about any of the gameplay mechanics whatsoever. Accessing your map, objectives and items are done through a beautifully-crafted and intuitive interface - falling perfectly between Alone In The Dark's inventory screen, which left you open to being killed and eaten while staring at your belt buckle, or most videogame inventories which pause the action entirely.
The story wraps up very well, utilising current-generation motion capture to really express the body language of a silent protagonist. I like to pretend that Isaac is actually medically mute, and his decisions in life and his attitude towards the world are formed around that. After canonically hearing that he will have plenty of spoken lines in the sequel, this hope was crushed.
Overall, it's a fantastic game.
I did play it through on easy, cos I'm a little girl with pigtails when it comes to horror games, but (like zombies) the idea of a near-unstoppable force slowly approaching you as you throw your every resource at it to lure it into a trap has always been the scariest to me. Maybe because it represents the relentless march of time's decay, or because zombies are awesome.
Either way, the 'regenerator' enemy (kindof like Resident Evil's Tyrant, only easier to put down) had me crapping my pants, even on Easy.
Hopefully the sequel won't be at all like this.
If it hadn't already been written, this would be my crack at the distress-call-to-horror kind of story.
I give it an 8.5 out of 10
Dead Space achieved that. I'm a confessed pussy when it comes to horror games- movies I'm fine with, but when it's up to me to pull the trigger or flee, I go to pieces.
Anything I have to say on Dead Space it will be limited, since I played through on the 'Easy' difficulty setting where it generally only took one shot to take a limb off, a mechanic I sincerely hope the Resident Evil franchise clues on to, should they ever take the KKK sheets off their heads and make a game about proper zombies again.
But I'm not here to talk about racism, I'm talking about the flip side of the coin - if racial profiling is heads, then the survival intinct is tails. As a species, we've fallen into in-fighting and civil bickering because we're ridden and whipped by the driver of instinct, following the juicy carrot-on-a-stick of survival. Figuratively.
[image=http://i32.tinypic.com/wi391h.jpg]
Or literally.
That kind of spirit - killing what's obviously different, justified by intimidation and zealoutry - carries the weight of the motivations in Dead Space.
Isaac Clarke and his friends Busty Chick and Black Dude visit a large deep-space mining vessel - the USG Ishimura - that pulls the tits off of planets and then wears them as a hat until they mine to look for anything valuable inside. But they've stopped communication, and the Isaac-Busty-Black triple threat are sent to go fix whatever minor malfunction has gone wrong, probably after calling AT&T tech support. As an extra insentive, Isaac's estranged girlfriend Nicole is aboard.
All of this is covered in the opening sequence, and you already know that this is another Horror Experience (I'm loathe to call it a game, or interactive fiction, since I'm on a pilgrimage to rename these multi-media things). The greatest horror/action movies of all time have all been made possible by two things: under-staffing, and extremely poor judgement.
The poor judgement in the opening credits is two-fold. Not only do our heroes not wonder why the Ishimura didn't simply send a lifeboat or something similar to the nearest space station with a payphone and call for their services to fix their burted antennae? No, they send three douchebags with one weapon between them and some old-fashioned neighbourly helpfulness.
The second call that reaches window-licking-level retarded judgement is the fact that the Ishimura deliberately pulls apart planets to see what's inside, then wonder why the planet's inhabitants (and anything else they stir up) get indignant.
Oh, and the third doesn't really count, since it's after you've gained full control of Isaac, but what kind of retarded security system locks all of the doors to an occupied room when it senses an anomaly? I get the theory behind this, I do, but the security systems definitely need some fine-tuning before they start thinning the ranks of the entire crew.
Speaking of the crew's dwindling numbers, I won't call spoilers when I say that our heroes quickly discover that most of the personnel of the Ishimura are decorative corpses.
Things very quickly go to crap and the faceless escorts to our three plucky custodians are forced to cannibalise the ship's hardware to restore functionality, and discover an unspeakable evil - and more than a few giggles - along the way.
This mostly consists of Isaac going from one end of the ship to the other to get supplies and equipment, improvising weapons and battling unspeakable horrors along the way, while the two support characters do fuck all but remotely unlock malfunctioning doors for him - which was exactly what Isaac was brought aboard to do.
History is written by those who push fear aside and step up to the plate, and Isaac does that impeccably. The flair and dedication he shows in combat either suggest an unmentioned military background, or that he's the lovechild descendant of John McClane and Jack Bauer. He shows zero fear.
But his personal logs suggest that he really is scared - the second things start going wrong, he tweets to himself that he has to 'find somewhere safe, somewhere to hide'. So I reason that he spent his childhood playing videogames a lot like Dead Space, and when the chip are down he unleashes years of pent-up rage and starts dismembering aliens to vent some kind of kill-fantasy that was bubbling below the surface, and was bound to make him go postal back on Earth any day now.
Many, many, many, many (if not all) sci-fi horror stories start with a distress call being answered by the protagonists, and this is no different at all. I didn't mind this at all, since the game is incredibly immersive - and in this context, I mean the 'realistic' kind of immersive. The game looks great, feels great, has great acting, and all the tiny acts of attention to detail draw you right on in.
These days, the graphics and physics engines would be showing their age a bit, but what isn't? I normally don't brake for glare and couldn't give less of a shit about dynamic directional everything, but it all helps to sell Dead Space.
On the actual scare factor, it doesn't rank very highly. Their flavour is cramped steel-mesh hallways and leaving you to wonder when and where the enemy will appear and rip you a new vas defrans, but the latter falls a little flat. I had the music and sound effects turned right up, so every time the enemy appears I would know without seeing - since they announce it with a violin stab that always means 'look out'. I think for added challenge (and immersion) go into the options screen and turn the music volume right off.
[image=http://i28.tinypic.com/f1bd5i.jpg]
Attention whores.
There was one corridor in particular that heavily suggested to me that a scary monster will jump down from the roof at any second, but a dead human body flops down instead - I was so geared up for the alien that the corpse didn't scare me one bit, I just kept scanning until I reached the other end, and a small plate of disappointment. Is that irony? I can't tell.
To be perfectly honest, I can't complain about any of the gameplay mechanics whatsoever. Accessing your map, objectives and items are done through a beautifully-crafted and intuitive interface - falling perfectly between Alone In The Dark's inventory screen, which left you open to being killed and eaten while staring at your belt buckle, or most videogame inventories which pause the action entirely.
The story wraps up very well, utilising current-generation motion capture to really express the body language of a silent protagonist. I like to pretend that Isaac is actually medically mute, and his decisions in life and his attitude towards the world are formed around that. After canonically hearing that he will have plenty of spoken lines in the sequel, this hope was crushed.
Overall, it's a fantastic game.
I did play it through on easy, cos I'm a little girl with pigtails when it comes to horror games, but (like zombies) the idea of a near-unstoppable force slowly approaching you as you throw your every resource at it to lure it into a trap has always been the scariest to me. Maybe because it represents the relentless march of time's decay, or because zombies are awesome.
Either way, the 'regenerator' enemy (kindof like Resident Evil's Tyrant, only easier to put down) had me crapping my pants, even on Easy.
Hopefully the sequel won't be at all like this.
If it hadn't already been written, this would be my crack at the distress-call-to-horror kind of story.
I give it an 8.5 out of 10