Saturday Morning Gaming: Replaying Dead Space
Halloween came and went and, to celebrate, I said “I should play a spooky game!”
But not too spooky. I have to sleep. Well, GOG had a sale on spooky games and I picked up Dead Space for $5. (It’s an absolute STEAL at $5. I’d say that you probably shouldn’t pay more than $10 for it, though.)
It came out in 2008 and, at first glance, it’s trying to ride on the coattails of games like Resident Evil 4. A nice little claustrophobic over-the-shoulder zombie shooter. IN SPACE. But, holy cow, looks can be deceiving. It’s so much better than that.
The basic idea is that you’re an engineer that has been sent out to do some repair work on a space mining ship. You’re not a soldier. You have no specialized training. You’re just doing a job, man. You got a letter from your girlfriend telling you how crappy things are on the ship and how she wants to see you again and you are flying out there to not only fix the ship but hook up with your main squeeze again.
And, of course, there are space zombies.
The wrinkle is that the majority of the stuff you use to fight the space zombies aren’t weapons, per se. They’re tools. I mean, sure. There is a gun that the soldiers have (and you have access to it) but you start out with a Plasma Cutter instead of a gun. It’s one of your tools. You also can get a hydrogen torch (flamethrower), a hand circular saw, a handheld graviton accelerator (powerful jackhammer), and an ore cutter.
On top of that, you get told multiple times that the best way to kill the space zombies is not to hit them center mass, but to cut their limbs off… which pretty much means that the soldiers’ guns wouldn’t be as useful to you anyway. (So you get the additional psychic distress of shooting for dismemberment. Dunno about you, but that’s icky as heck for me.)
As for the story itself, the game starts off with the repair mission going pear-shaped. The ship you use to get there gets disabled pretty dang quick and then you get separated from your team (who call you all the dang time and tell you what to do next). There are a bunch of simple and discrete chapters. Chapter 1 involves repairing the tram on the ship that will let you move around. Chapter 2 involves finding the ship’s captain (he’s in the morgue) and then taking his code key so you can figure out exactly what happened to create this horror scenario. Chapter 3 involves turning the engines back on. And so on and so forth.
As the game progresses, you use your engineering skills to fix the things that are broken and use your engineering tools to dismember the zombies who are coming after you. And, as you learn more and more, you learn about where the zombies came from and why. There are religious cultists, shady conspiracies, and, spoilers!, your girlfriend eventually shows up to offer encouragement. Mechanics include spaces where there is zero-gravity and you (and the zombies) jump around from floor to wall to ceiling, zero-oxygen (better get from here to there in 60 seconds!), and scenes where you are expected to use your various tools against your enemies even though you’re being dragged on the ground (and this, seriously, messes with your aim).
It’s got minor RPG elements (upgrade your suit! upgrade your tools!), physics games (use kinesis tools to pick up boxes to throw them at monsters!), and a slow-down technology that you can shoot at things that are moving way too fast and slow them down enough for you to get past a puzzle or just dismember zombies a little more efficiently.
It’s got everything you want: Gross-out stuff and jump scares for the kid in you, horror elements for the teen in you, and some nice little existential horror in there for the splat fan with the discerning palate. On top of that, it’s got amazing sound design (a lot of sub-sonics and devil’s thirds) and a color palette that is mostly the bad colors associated with biology (the colors you generally do NOT want to see). Wishlist it and get it when it’s on sale and you’ll be surprised at how well this game from more than a decade ago holds up.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is “Star Trek Zombies 2” by badlyricpolice and is licensed under CC BY 2.0)
Disco Elysium. It has been a while since I last played a video game, I’m trying to get myself into the habit of saving and reloading to ensure that I pass these checks. It feels like cheating. I don’t know why I feel this way, but I do and I’m still playing the game. Maybe it’s just low-rent cheating rather than getting an outright trainer.Report
I think that they did that sort of thing to make the replay value higher?
I played the first game as a psychic, now I want to play as a bruiser! And stuff that was easy becomes hard and vice-versa.
But I don’t like how they do dice rolls instead of automatic successes/fails if you have a sufficient stat. Chance rewards save-scumming.Report
Of course, for some rolls failure isn’t always failure as such, especially for red checks.Report
So I took the plunge into Genshin Impact, which is basically anime-BOTW with a really predatory business model. Setting aside the latter, the game is really fun. The map is pretty huge, with major expansions on the near horizon. It’s gorgeous. The exploration is pretty immersive. The game system itself is actually pretty deep, at least a fair bit. You can field four characters at a time, each with different strengths and weaknesses. The magic is all elemental based, and you can combine your elemental attack for some pretty interesting interactions. So in whole, a pretty good game.
The downsides are the story itself. The quests feel pretty cliche to me — although given I’ve been playing Nier:Automata for the past month, I think any game is going to feel pretty shallow.
All that said, the business model is wildly predatory. You can play the game for free, although I sunk $5 into it, which is fine. But I’ve seen videos of people sinking literally a thousand dollars into the game, trying to get a lucky random draw of some rare character. Honestly, it’s kinda nuts. There are a bunch of little quirks in the way the game works that clearly are built to suck people in. It’s sad, actually. They have a really cool game, but combined with a really predatory model.Report
The evolution of gaming into GaaS is really disheartening. I’ve made a handful of jokes about Cyberpunk 2077 being “the last video game”… and I wonder if, to some extent, it is. The last AAA one, anyway.
(The good news, I guess, is that the Avengers game appears to have clanked *HARD*. Made by committee in order to print money. They forgot that games are supposed to be fun.)Report
I guess I don’t mind GaaS for certain kinds of games. Like, for a big open-world game, the service model will encourage devs to keep expanding the map and adding quests, which is nice. Likewise, there is a difference between a “monthly subscription” model and the gacha schemes that GI is using. The former is fine. The latter is downright predatory.Report
Speaking of Avengers:
The optimist in me says “maybe they’ll see risk in this model now!”
The pessimist in me says “oh, they’ll just say ‘we should have gone full gacha’.”Report
The game was sunk as soon as they didn’t pay the licensing for the actual actors. I don’t know what it would have cost, but it was less than $48 million, and it was worth whatever it was to not take that kind of hit on it.Report
I also understand that the gameplay is seriously underwhelming. Like, The Hulk plays the same way as Black Widow.
Run up to enemy. Press X. Press X again. Press X again. Press X again. Run up to next enemy. Etc.
I know that it’s difficult (if not impossible) to avoid the whole “press X to attack” issue but, say, Street Fighter II made playing Chun Li feel different than playing Ryu (even though all you were doing was kicking, punching, and blocking).
They coulda done that for the heroes.Report
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THINKING ABOUT THIS SOME MORE!
How would I have done it? Well, give all the heroes a mix of blocking and attacking (and dodging).
Hulk sucks at blocking and dodging. He *CAN*, he’s just not good at it and he’s got a low ceiling. But you’re not playing him to dodge. He’s got a jab, like everybody else, that comes from pressing X. But he’s got a ton more attacks that come from pressing two buttons at once. Press X and O to SLAM! Press O and Triangle to CRUSH! Press Triangle and Square to STOMP! And so on. Maybe give him a power-up attack that involves pressing all of the buttons at once. HULK SMASH!
Black Widow? Amazing at dodge (best defense: no be there). Her attacks don’t do a whole lot of damage but her combos are great. X then O then O then X then X then Triangle? Devastating.
Captain America! Amazing block skills, best in the game, generic fighter otherwise, perfect for the tutorial level.
Hawkeye is the long-range guy.
So on and so forth. THIS AIN’T HARD.Report
Dammit I hope the market has diminishing returns on the gacha model, because it’s awful. Honestly, it should be regulated the same way gambling is — which of course the debate over how or if gambling should be regulated belongs in a different thread, but I hope we can agree that the psychological effects of loot boxes and gacha are hitting the same way that a gambling addiction does.
Myself, I’ve never had the gambling bug, so I can limit myself to $5 a month in my current game. I won’t get all the S-rank characters, but the game is still fun with the second tier. However, a lot of people just cannot stop themselves.Report
I don’t know how gacha-adjacent Star Wars Battlefront II counts as being, but if it’s in the ballpark, that one inspired government investigations (in Belgium, sure, but the Belgian government guy said that if he found that it counts as gambling, he’ll get the EU to do something about it).
So I’m guessing that Genshin Impact can get away with it because it’s under the radar.
But the second that a AAA company says “let’s do this like Genshin Impact did!”, they’ll find themselves investigated and Genshin Impact will wake up to a knock on the door too.Report
I’ve been playing too many games, so not really focused on any one. I recently got a HOTAS, so I have been dabbling in Star Wars Squadrons, Elite Dangerous, and MS Flight Simulator. I’m pretty much crap at all of them right now.
Other than that, I have also been dipping into Hades, which is a lot of fun. Fight through the underworld, die, spend currencies to improve things, rinse, repeat. I have not gotten all that far into it yet; I’ve only beaten the first boss, but it’s a lot of fun dying.Report