Sunday 21 July 2013

Moaning about Dead Space...

Good day! You're looking healthy today, Madam. Been for a run?

Last week I finished an old game called 'Dead Space'.

In this game I was cast as some kind of invincible soldier with an antique diving suit on, walking slowly around a big dark spaceship full of jerky monsters. Every now and then a 'jump scare' would happen, but I did not jump once because my mental health is pretty much in order, and that long, dark corridor with nothing at all to do in it is kind of a give-away. Pretty dull oranges.

The jerky, awfully animated baddies included a betentacled screaming baby, a tall skinny tree thing, and a topless shouting man attached to a wall by loads of kebabs. And some other things.

The big WOW in this game is the fact you have to dismember the brainless mutants using a sort of laser cutter, which works exactly like a gun for the most part. You just pump the trigger and they obligingly fly apart, like the endless extras in any 80's homoerotic action movie starring a man in a vest.

My character was enduring all this inconvenience to find some big statue that made everyone crazy, and eventually turned everybody into a mutant. I was supposed to locate it, and then drop it into a big hole on an alien world. But SURPRISE! Someone that was guiding me through the spaceship turned out to be a double agent! So that was disappointing. Anyway, she wanted to take the statue back to Earth for some mental reason or other, I wasn't really listening during the cut scene.

So then the final boss appeared, while this woman was laughing in my face at my gullibility. And this is what ruined the whole thing for me. Here, look at this and bemoan it:

Balls. Big, glowing, vulnerable balls.

Can you believe this?? So here is the stiffest test that this alien race can offer, the top of their evolutionary ladder, the biggest boy on their beach, their tour de France. And I'm expected to believe that evolution, the all-governing force in the universe, has allowed a creature with ALL ITS VITAL ORGANS HUNG ON YELLOW BALLS IN ITS FACE to ascend to the top of the food chain??




So, I did all that walking, spent all that time doing what that traitorous bitch wanted me to do, just to shoot some big piñatas poking out of some massive alien slug thing? And to make matters worse, it didn't seem to learn or adapt after the first time I popped one of its tender spheres. It just continued holding its waistcoat open for me to leisurely blast them to hell. Ludicrous. Stupid!

I literally sighed. Sometimes gaming is crap. And this was one of those sometimes. The game did display some artistry in places, but it all gets undermined when they bolt on such a stinky finale.

To be fair though, the awful final boss did kill the treacherous bint that got me into all this, so that's a partial result.

I'm currently trying to get through the sequel, looks to be more of the same so far. Except they've added the clichéd, dog-eared staple of every rubbish horror movie ever made: SCARY KIDS.

And my character appears to have an annoyingly optimistic voice, he sounds a little too secure for my liking given the situation he finds himself in. He's just too upbeat for an amnesiac, hallucinating man trapped in a shopping centre full of kamikaze monsters. And SCARY KIDS. Look at them:

Attacked for no reason by violent, unreasonable feral children. This could be any council estate in the UK.

 So I'm not overly enthusiastic to be honest, chief.

But I suppose I should be happy that I've actually finished a game for the first time since the mid nineties. Or something. I currently have a queue of titles that I intend to see out to the bitter end:

  • Dead Space 2
  • Mark Of The Ninja
  • Tomb Raider (The one from last year)
  • The Last Of Us
  •  Dishonored DLC
I wanted to have a bash at the Gran Turismo 6 academy thing too, but I'm just too lazy. You need to commit to that sort of jazz. I just wanna play Team Fortress 2, man. Don't judge me.

I tend to look around a lot when I'm playing campaigns. I like to admire & appreciate the artistry and work that has gone in, I like to examine the walls and ceilings, open all the doors and peek inside all the drawers. So as you can imagine, all this snooping about takes time. So the little list above should last me around a year!

Well, that's enough looking into the window of my soul for one post.

See you soon, non-existent reader!

GL & HF!








1 comment:

  1. I just finished playing through this for the 2nd time. I first played it on release years ago, i was surprised how well this game still holds up. It wasn't as scary as i remembered but the game play was solid and the derelict spaceship setting was very atmospheric. Movement was very clunky but that's to be expected in a survival horror game. Come on, admit it! Dismembering enemies was a pretty cool way of killing them using less ammo. I totally agree on the final boss though, what an absolute letdown.

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