Game Review: Dead Space Mobile (Android)

I was planning on doing a full on review for Dead Space Mobile, but the more I thought about it, I felt that I was too close to this story and franchise.  If you've been reading our miniscule particle of the internet, you'll know that I love the first Dead Space game, which I came to five years after the rest of the world.  After finishing the game, I wanted to consume everything in the Dead Space universe although I was a little worried about the touch screen control scheme when I heard there was a mobile game.

Let me get this out of the way before I start gushing.  The touch screen controls work.  There were a number few times when I couldn't get Vandal (the main protagonist) to run, possibly because of the grease/sweat that found its way to the screen causing my thumb to slide or much up the contact.  I also chalk it up to the point of my thumb, as to its face only being in contact with the invisible directional pad.  It took some getting used to, but that is really my only criticism.  The point is, Dead Space Mobile is a great game.

"In Your Hands." Eh, eh!  Now that's, comedy.

Now, why I think it's a great game, but first some context.  You play as an engineer with the code name Vandal (given by a voice over the radio whom you are forced to take orders from through a series of events), is a recent convert to the Church of Unitology and is employed as an engineer on Titan Station (aka The Sprawl) prior to the events of Dead Space 2.

Being on a mobile device, I knew that the graphics were not going to be PC/console quality, but for a mobile game, the graphics looked good with smooth animations, the sound quality was crisp when it needed to be and muffled when it was supposed to be.  The only other negative thing I really have to say (aside from my sweaty palms) was a graphics/engine glitch that happened in the end of the game that I will get to later.

What I really want to talk about is how the game messed with the player in a way that I haven't felt since Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, but in a less fun but not less entertaining way.  In Eternal Darkness, you had a visible sanity meter and you immediately knew (in most cases) that the game was messing with you.  Dead Space Mobile does not have a meter and all of the sanity events are programed to happen at a specific time and place.  Some of the events happen for a specific amount of time while others are triggered by your location and last until you leave that location.

Take the above screenshot for example.  Here the character Vandal is walking through a medical wing and I notice this other person on the other side of the glass.  I see them moving when I move and I think that it's a reflection, but it doesn't line up with where I am.  And, when I move, the character/reflection moves in the opposite direction.  That is it.  That is all that happens.  You can circle the window all you want and the reflection will always be there moving in the opposite direction, but nothing will happen.  It wasn't so much scary as it was confusing, intriguing and a little unnerving.

Another event happened when I passed through a door into a "plus" shaped room.  Upon looking around with only a single bloodied corpse, I noticed that where once there was only one corpse, three others had appeared.  Additionally, the door I came through had disappeared and was replaced by another corpse with "TAKE US" scrawled in blood above the body.  After taking out a couple of necromorphs in the room (one at a time), the room went dark and I found myself standing outside of the door I thought I had just entered.  It had been all in my head.  No sound cues to let me know that the bloodied room had been an illusion.  Just a shake and a holding of the head by Vandal.

There was another instance while walking down a hallway and directly under where I had my right thumb, the one that controls the aiming and firing of your weapon, a grotesque "evil" looking face faded on/into the screen.  When I noticed this visage, I pulled my right thumb away as if there was something physical on the screen for a few seconds before remembering that it was only an image and nothing physical that could actually do me harm.  And then I thought I was about to be ambushed by one or 73 necromorphs, but no.  Nothing came for me.

There was even a Lost Woods section while trying to get to Point B.  Unless you were to follow your RIG's locater mechanism (follow the glowing line projected onto the floor), you will walk around in circles, entering the same rooms even when going in a straight line.  When this is used in The Legend of Zelda, it somehow makes sense, that the forest is keeping you from finding your way to Point B.  In Dead Space Mobile however, I got the feeling that the ship was not trying to manipulate me (a la Event Horizon) but that this was all happening in my (Vandal) head.  To an observer, I'm sure that I would be seen walking through one door, turning around then come back or just walking around in circles in the same room.  It was very unsettling.

There was another instance where I walked through a door and all of a sudden I was somewhere else, off ship.  I walked forward as far as I could, thinking that the hallucination would eventually pass, but it didn't.  So I turned around the way I came and went back through the door, only to find that I was now on the other side of the hallway that I entered, as if I had walked in a straight line the whole time.

The only other negative thing that I alluded to happened during the boss fight (of all times and places).  About a minute into the fight, something emanated from the boss towards Vandal, but it was looked more like a smear of pixels and it didn't move so much as it shimmered.

By the end of the fight, almost half of the screen was being obscured by whatever glitch this was that kept up its fleshy colored shimmering undulations.  It was very distracting and if I hadn't just spent the last 30 minutes to get there, I would have turned the game off to restart the chapter (12:12).  Thankfully the glitch left enough room for me to be able to attack the boss' obvious glowing yellow puss filled weak points.

I should note that I played the game on whatever the equivalent of "Easy" is since I wasn't sure about the control scheme before starting to play, plus I just wanted to experience the story with just a the right amount of "Oh shit I'm going to die, I'm going to die."  There were still quite a few times that thought I was going to die.

So there!  I can't recommend Dead Space Mobile enough if you are in the market for a survival horror game in the truest sense of the term.  The game is reasonably priced (I happened to buy it when it went on sale) for having 12 chapters which take anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes to complete, depending on your desire to explore.  There is no saving aside from finishing a chapter, which might be a turn off to some people, but it was nice to know that with each chapter's length being fairly consistent, I knew how much time I could invest if I wanted/needed a half hour to kill.

Speaking of killing. . .

Now it is on to Dead Space 2, for which I am eagerly awaiting the same level of craftsmanship when it comes to "sanity effects," something I felt where the first game a bit lacking.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
And Life We Joyfully Drink

Finding Time With Mobile Games

Just to warn you ahead of time, I will not be making any sweeping declarations or forcing our reader to have an epiphany of Torahic proportions.  It is just an observation.

There are a few games that I play on my phone and of those few, even fewer that I play on a regular basis.  Actually, since both lists are relatively small, let us just do some listing of the games in alphabetical order, because that is how they are organized in my phone.  Yes, I am that way.

• Angry Birds
• Blitz (Bejeweled)
• Bloons TD 5
• Clash of Clans
• Dead Space
• Desert Bus
• God of Blades
• Humble Bundle (Not a game, I know, but it is an application for games)
• Munchkin Counter (See above)
• PvZ2 (Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time)

That is it.  So of the ten listed, two of the applications are not games, so it is really eight.  Of those eight, I play two on a daily basis.  Of the remaining six, I have played, maybe two in the last month.  From those four, I still have them on my phone because I have not beaten them yet.

So as you might be able to tell, I do not spend a lot of time on my phone playing games.  Plants vs. Zombies 2 I will play once a day, usually for no more than five minutes and then it goes back into the vault.  This is because, as somewhat stated in my update from January, the game has become less fun and all I really look forward to are the Piñata parties, which now happen once every 24 hours.  I go through the single stage and if I am able to complete it, great!  If I fail the first time through, I put the game away rather than spend 1000 gold to purchase a replay.  Recently, EA/PopCap updated the game to include a variation on the Vase Breaker mini-game from the original Plants vs. Zombies, but I might go through a single stage then put the game away.  There is maybe 10 minutes tops.

In Clash of Clans, I will go into the game, collect gold and elixir from my mining sources, check to see if I have enough gold/elixir to upgrade any existing buildings, check the time remaining on any buildings which are being upgraded then exit the game.  If I had recently been attacked, I will watch the replay of the raid.  This takes all of, at most, 7-10 minutes.  Do not get me wrong though, I am fairly addicted to this game but I know there will be a point when I stop playing rather than saving up a weeks worth of gold to upgrade a single piece of the wall.

Dead Space, of which I will write an article about in the nearish future, while a fun game, has one major flaw.  The game cannot be manually saved, but instead is auto-saved when you reach a checkpoint, which happens at the end of a "chapter."  Chapters in this game last anywhere from 15-20 minutes.  This is the flaw and where the nugget for this article sprang from.  If I could manually save, as in the main games, I would not feel that I had to find and dedicate 20 minutes to playing a game on my phone.  But why would playing a game on the cellphone versus on the 3DS feel so different if they are both video games played on a 3-3 3/4" screen?

Maybe it is the already short battery life of my cellphone or the fact that it is a cellphone that I do not feel as inclined to play games on it as much as I would with my 3DS.  The primary reason for my phone existing is so that I can make/receive phone calls (when not obstructed by my apartment) and text messages; those who know me can already attest how much I already do not talk on the phone.  Playing games on my phone is only secondary and something that I do when I am out-and-about and I do not have my 3DS on me.  Although feeling publicly chastised for playing games on the 3DS vs. the cellphone is a whole other nest of flesh eating elder horrors that I might cover at a later date.

Maybe it is the fact that a lot of cellphone games are free-to-play and are designed around microtransactions in order to keep the games action flowing.  But, when someone like myself who does not spend real world money to buy gems/gold/energy to continue playing or reduce the week it takes to upgrade a mortar canon, play time is greatly reduced.  Reduced playtime on cellphone games has possibly wired my brain to not want to spend more than a couple of minutes playing games on my cellphone, which is possibly why is has taken me three months to go through the Dead Space mobile game which should have only taken me only four hours.   I am intrigued by the story told in the game and how it will connect to Dead Space 2, but it just seems that the platform is what is holding me back.

Just something to think about (or not, that is cool too) this weekend.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Never Ending Soul Ripping

Game Review: Spirit Stones (Mobile)

Spirit Stones is a mobile phone game from Korean developer Gamevil.  Salty Liver's fiance introduced this game to Conklederp and myself about a month back.  Before we get down to it, I want to say that I do not take this game seriously at all.  I find the combination of match three with a trading card game with a turn based RPG very refreshing as far as mobile phone games go, although I know there are other options our there.  The fact that the game is free too is an added bonus.  These are aspects of this game that I really like, especially the way the game mechanic is constructed, but it is how the game is executed that I would like to get into now.

Spirit Stones is a great example of all the sexist and misogynistic views that is wrong in the video game industry.  As the people at Extra Credits have said, a lot of people in the industry are awaiting the time when video games as a medium are taken, at least as seriously as the movie industry is to the rest of the world.  The games take on female sexuality is pretty bad in the fantasy adventure setting with its sadly common take on female armor.  In Spirit Stones, a card you have can be combined with another identical card to evolve into a more powerful card along the same character lines.  Often times, that evolution to a new card means that the female becomes more scantily clad.

While there are some male cards that the same effect happens to, there are clearly more female cards than there are male cards and some of those male cards depict beasts-type-creatures that appear male, but only because they have bulging muscles and no breasts.

I feel like it has taken the fantasy genre of video games a long time to get to the point where armor for women is comparable visually to that of their male counterparts.  Breastplates no longer just cover the breasts and groinal region, but all vulnerable areas as in, the entire body.  You know, like armor is supposed to do.  The visual depiction of women in this game I feel is a big step backwards.

And yet, I keep playing.  Why?

Like I mentioned earlier, the mechanics that make this game I enjoy in a mobile game.  

First off, it combines the match three aspect that sky rocketed the Candy Crush games to their current popularity.  

Secondly, there is the key aspect of the game, which is the TCG, although the "trading" part is welcomely absent.  I am unable to trade cards with Conklederp or Salty Liver if either of has a card that the other does not.  There is no way to create multiple accounts in order to overpower a single account.  Players can help out in timed mega boss battles, but rewards are in items that can be used to refill stamina or "buy cards."  

The third aspect to the game that I like is the turn based RPG battle.  Each on the continent map is made up of six individual stages which in turn have six levels.  Levels 1, 2, 3 & 5 are made up of a three round battle against a set number of monsters while levels 4 & 6 are made up of a five round battle with the last battle in the sixth stage being a boss battle.  Damage is determined by the match three puzzle and each board contains bonus "gems" that help clear out more "gems" which in turn do additional damage.  There are complications though that crop up on boards such as unmovable blocks that are unaffected by the removal of gems.  There are also objects that will hold onto and spread amongst the gems which are only removable by normal gem selection.  There are even Skull blocks that damage the players if not removed from the board in a certain amount of turns passes first.  At the end of each level, you have to fight a boss who has significantly more hit points than the previous monsters and often a reduced timer to attack (usually 2 - 3 turns).

While there are all of these positive aspects of Spirit Stones that are enjoyable, the over sexualized depiction of women overshadows the game quite a bit.  Even though I have not experienced any other overtly sexual instances in the game (innuendos and such), I cannot say that they do not exist in the game.  Maybe they were just too subtle?

During the process of writing this article I have come to the conclusion that I will be looking into other mobile games, albeit free games, to replace Spirit Stones.  Now I just have to hope that the other people I know who play this will not be too upset by my inevitable absence, but maybe I will be able to find something else for everyone else to become addicted to, because there is nothing quite like infecting your friends with video game awesomeness.


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Light That Ass On Fire