First Impressions: Dead Space 2 (PC)

I've started Dead Space 2 twice.  The first time, I made it 1h48m in then discovered that the Dead Space 2 game sold through Steam comes with three DLC packs pre-installed, which I did not know about, although it does not contain the Severed DLC which is a standalone prequel to Dead Space 2; Severed was apparently only released on PS3 and XBox 360 with no word as to a PC release.  The reason I restarted was because I had thought that all of the free items in the store (as a result of the DLC weapon/armor packs) were supposed to be there and I equipped myself to the teeth right before a mini-boss fight.  I would rather not play the game that way, so I started over with the intent of only buying items from the store as they become available in-game.

Always be wary when the best items for sale are free.

Dead Space 2 is fun at the present.  There are a number of jump scares with necromorphs bursting through walls or environmental elements springing to life as you walk by, minding your own business.  There are a number of modifications from the original Dead Space that I feel like I have to come to terms with in order to fully like this game.  

The first major change is that the game is no longer told in separate chapters.  In the first game, each time you boarded a tram to a different part of the USG Ishimura, you began a new chapter and you knew what your objective was.  In DS2, at least up to chapter 4, you are following the guidance of a voice on the other end of your radio as you make your way through Titan Station (built around the remnants of Saturn's moon Titan) with no clear break between chapters.  I recall seeing a "Chapter 2" pop up at one point, but I have not seen anything to denote that I had entered a chapter 3 or 4.  I personally liked the individual chapters as part of a larger whole that made up the first game as well as the mobile game.  The current less structured narrative makes me feel like I am just going from one area to another and killing hordes of necromorphs along the way, because that is what you are supposed to be doing in a video game.

"Oh hai dere!"

I do like the present variety in necromorphs compared to those in DS1.  It would make sense too (does it really!?) that not all off the mutated/transfigured humans would look like the same sprinting blood thirsty brute.  You are on a space station that is full of residential living areas as well as industrial, religious and private sectors so the population is going to be different, which is something that I appreciate.

Maybe it's just me, but so far, I am getting a very Bioshock feeling from wandering around the Titan Station residential and commercial areas.  It could be due to wandering through living quarters and that a space station with super-security-gorilla-glass would be somewhat akin to the glass used in an underwater city and the necromorphs are more perverted than the splicers, but they are still often sprinting monsters that jump out and want to annihilate you just because you have a prettier face.  The point is, I don't want to be playing Bioshock, I want to play the sequel to Dead Space and I am not getting that feeling with only four hours in.

A physical representation of a Marker that size is never a good thing to come across in this universe.

I was talking to Conklederp the other day about this and I decided that I am going to reserve my final judgement of the game until after I reach the end.  I am still enjoying the game, despite how I have sounded through half of this article and I am also interested to find out if I have been intentionally mislead and that my impressions of the game will change later on.  I am also interested to see how the previous stories from Dead Space: Aftermath, Ignition and Mobile all fit together and how they are presented, if at all, in this game that is a cumulation of all of those individual parts.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
I Awake From Madness

Dead Space: Chronicle of the Red Marker. Chapter 2

Welcome back to Chapter 2 of our short series titled "Chronicle of the Red Marker," a review, analysis and commentary about the stories leading up to and between Dead Space 1 and 2.  This is a continuation post from the article that I put up on Friday which looked at the first Dead Space self titled comic, the first animated movie, Downfall and the Wii/PS3 exclusive rail shooter, Extraction.  Today we will be looking at the stories that continue the story after the evacuation of Aegis VII and the fall of the USG Ishimura.

Dead Space: Salvage is the second comic adaptation in the Dead Space universe and in my opinion, a better read and more visually appealing than the first comic.  Although no specific date is given for the events that happen, we are told that this takes place sometime between the events in Downfall and the following film, Aftermath.

Storywise, Salvage was a much simpler story than that of the first comic.  Salvage follows a group of mercenary and freelance miners who happen to stumble upon the remains of the USG Ishimura.  There is some inner conflict as one might expect to find on board this type of vessel.  The crew boards the Ishimura, not knowing about any of the events that transpired and that is when shit hits the fan.  That is basically the entire story.  Not much meat here as far as overarching story, but the there is quite a bit of Dead Space lore that expands the feeling of the universe which I am always a fan of.  There are hints at the government underbelly; how ships travel to/from star systems at, potentially, FTL speeds; although very little, if any new information in the way of how the remnants of The Marker interact with humans and tissue.  Yeah, there are necromorphs in case you were wondering.

The art style in Salvage is one of the major points of interest here.  I am going to guess that the style is called photorealism, and is then mixed with a lot of blurry watercolor.  I would imagine that some people would find the drab color palette, consisting of mainly blues, greens and greys (with occasional splashes of red for good measure), but considering the universe that this story is taking place, it works much better than brightly lit corridors and sun soaked cargo bays.  Salvage also diverges a bit from the usual blocked formatting of comics using a mix of pages that are told in wide horizontal blocks as opposed to the typical smaller rectangles.

Honestly, I prefered this artistic style to that of the first comic.  I found it easier to follow with the characters, which I genuinely credit to the art style used by artist Christopher Shy.

The second animated movie, Dead Space: Aftermath is probably the oddest of the whole collection.  The story told in Aftermath does a decent job in connecting the events from the first game as well the four previous mentioned stories to Dead Space 2 and the stories associated with that game.  It could even be speculated that the whole reason the team depicted here is dispatched to Aegis VII is from someone within Unitology and Earth Gov. wants a shard of The Marker found and brought back.

The story follows a CEC (Concordance Extraction Corporation) team is sent to Aegis VII to check on their mining investment.  This is after the chunk of the planet that was extracted earlier in the timeline has crashed into the planet and after some farfetched tactics to keep the planet temporarily together (although it makes sense in the context of the movie).  While investigating, one of the crew members finds a shard of the Red Marker and is drawn to pick it up and hilarity (as in horrendous death fueled necromorphic nightmares ) ensues.  When the CEC crew does not make contact with their parent company, a security detail is sent after them where they are taken back to Titan Station, the location of Dead Space 2.

What makes this movie so strange is that all of the events happening in the present are told in a bizarre late 1990s style of computer animation.  They move about as fluid as the characters from the Warcraft II intro movie, but significantly less dramatic.

Now, I feel that if the entire movie were told with this type of animation, you would eventually get used to how wrong everybody moves, but there are four other animation styles that go along with each of the four above characters story about what happened to them on Aegis VII. 

The rest of the movie, the backstories, all use more traditional cell-style animation.  Some of the sequences look very nice, while others, the characters are very stylized and intentionally misproportioned, and I am not just talking about the necromorphs.  It could have been that each different animation team was given concept drawings for the overall look of the film and the universe in the Dead Space series and they took their particular story from there.

Even the design of the RIGs used by the same characters in different backstories are drawn differently.  I realize that this was a stylistic choice on the part of someone in charge, but by the time I felt that I was getting used to a particular style of animation, that story would end and we would go back to the interrogation chamber and the jarring/stilted CG.

Following Aftermath, I should be covering the mobile game simply titled Dead Space, but I had so much fun with that game that it will be receiving its own entry following todays article on Friday.

Dead Space: Ignition follows Titan Station engineer Franco, who may or may not be a Unitologist and which is not-so bluntly stated during the story.  Although the Red Marker does not make an appearance in Ignition, based on the events in Aftermath, you could say that the events happened as a direct result of the Red Marker, which fits in quite well with how Brian Evenson depicted how the various Markers react to Humankind.

I feel a bit like a hypocrite, but Ignition looked (since I was only able to watch a longplay of the game) more like a choose your own adventure comic book with interactive puzzle elements than an actual video game.  The art looked similar to the art style in the first Dead Space Comic and the two animated films, although the in-game animation was straight-up comic book style where dialogue was spoken but the mouths did not move nor did feet/legs move when characters walked.  The game lasted just over an hour and easily half of that time was spent doing puzzles that, in the later stages seemed to go on a lot longer than necessary.  Perhaps it was just to pad the game out.

In the end, I am not sad that I was unable to play Ignition and I probably would have been upset if I had found it and paid more than a couple of dollars for either my phone or PSP.  The story though is what is always important and for that fact alone, I am glad that I only had to waste an hour of my time.

On Friday, I will be putting up my review of Dead Space (Mobile), so stay tuned if you're not yet Dead Space'd out.  Now that was a fun game.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Rushing Through The Emptiness

Dead Space: Chronicle of the Red Marker. Chapter 1

No, there isn't some new Dead Space game/add-on/DLC called "Chronicle of the Red Marker," I just liked that title for what I'm going to be covering, which are materials in the Dead Space universe that deal with the finding of the Red Marker on Aegis VII and the results thereof; not including the first Dead Space game.  These all include the Dead Space (Comics),  the Dead Space: Downfall and Aftermath animated movies and the Dead Space: Extraction and Ignition games that came out on systems that I do not have access to.

As I have stated before, I'm a sucker for games in a series, specifically games that take place in the same universe that belong to a series and the universe in the Dead Space games is no exception.  After playing the first game, I fell in love with what was being shown to me as well as what could just be glimpsed upon far in the horizon.  Upon discovering that the first game takes place in the middle of the current chronology, I wanted to start in the beginning, ignoring the fact that Dead Space: Martyr, the novel by B.K. Evenson which begins with the finding of the Black Marker on earth and the origins of Unitology was published in 2010, two years after the first game that started it all came out.  The chronology for Dead Space is all over the place.  Starting in 2214 (Martyr published in 2010), another Marker "found/created" in 2295 (Catalyst published in 2012) and compiling in 2508 when the games start (released in 2008) as well as the comic (published 2008) and the animated movies (released 2005 & 2011).

These two articles look to review/analyze/mumble about the stories that revolve around the Red Marker that is omnipresent between Dead Space and Dead Space 2.  In order to not make this article as cumbersome as it first was, I have broken it up into two separate posts with this first post covering Dead Space (Comic) through the first animated film, Dead Space: Downfall.

Dead Space (Comic) takes place in the days leading up to the "outbreak" in the mining colony of Aegis VII.  The story was written by Antony Johnson and the artwork was done by Ben Templesmith.  I bring this up because while I did not find any fault with the story, it was the artwork that I ultimately found confusing.  

The story however was very well told.  Because this story is told in print, it allows the tension to build without jumping right into a necromorph outbreak.  I also enjoyed that the "corruption" that you see a lot of in Dead Space starts out as an anomalous annoyance and only once its possible connection with The Marker is made is it too late for anyone to do anything about it.

In the introduction, there are bios of the main characters along with a brief histories and thumbnail of what the character looks like.  Now I will be the first to admit that I tend to forget characters' names in a story that is chalk full of main characters (it took me a couple of hundred pages and reading the family trees to keep characters separate while reading A Game of Thrones).  There are even two sets of characters who appear similar to their respective doppelganger.  Cortez and Natalia: both are women of about the same age with shoulder length dark hair.  Sciarello and Carthusia are both slightly overweight men with short hair and glasses.  Maybe I am just a bad person, but I had a hard time keeping these people apart, especially with the artwork not being as consistent between chapters.

It basically boils down to the art style.  At times it seemed like the artists had a general image of what the characters were supposed to look like, but then given free reign as to how they wanted/could modify said characters.  I know this is something that can be pretty common in the comics industry, but I found it a bit distracting, especially when trying to keep characters straight.

Dead Space: Extraction is a Wii and ported PS3 game that I am unable to play due to my lack of a video game console post 2001.  Rather than try and find an emulated copy of the game, one designed for motion controls (although using the mouse would work just as well), I looked to youtube to find a single longplay video or one broken up into watchable segments.  Thankfully I was able to find a series of six videos of the PS3 port from World of Longplays and major kudos to them for having no talking or commentary of any kind.

I enjoyed that Dead Space Extraction took place at around the same time as both the comic and Downfall (below), but that it took the story from a different point of view with different characters.  The thing that I loved about what this game did, was that your first character is not the main character, but it plays it off like he's going to be another Isaac Clarke from the first game.  Throughout the tutorial level, you witness hallucinations from a point of view mode.  At the end of the chapter, your character is killed by C-Sec officers (police) and as your hallucination fades/breaks, you see that the necromorphs you were killing where in fact C-Sec officers.  You immediately wonder how many of the creatures you killed throughout that first level were actually civilians and if there were in fact any necromorphs at all.

The game takes you through the Ishimura up the the point when the USG Kellion (the ship Isaac Clarke is on) arrives, although contact is not made, possibly due to debris and what not.  The only problem I had with the story (as well as the parallel story in Dead Space: Downfall) is that the characters cannot be too successful in making their way through the USG Ishimura since the first game takes place in the same space, so there have to be some monsters left over and all of the items cannot have been picked clean.  But continuity aside, it was a fun game to sit back and watch someone else play for just under six hours (multiple sittings mind you)

Dead Space: Downfall takes place shortly after the events in the first Dead Space (Comic).  The animation style I think is what made it a little odd for me. If you've seen EA's animated film Dante's Inferno, the tie-in to their not-too-successful video game, then you'll know what I'm referring to.  If you haven't seen it, picture what you think of when it comes to traditional Japanese animation.  Now take that image and stretch it out a bit so all the characters look a bit lanky. Somewhat similar to Ninja Scroll, but less refined somehow.

Storywise, I enjoyed what I was presented with.  The story primarily takes place on the U.S.G. Ishimura, although the movie begins with the discovery of the Red Marker on Aegis VII (you know the place) with the events leading up to Issac and company arriving at the Ishimura right before Dead Space starts up.  There was no overlap between Downfall and Extraction which is somewhat expected since Downfall was released a year before Extraction, but I really would have liked it if there had been some mention of people, just to keep the feeling that the Ishimura was a single united ship.

This is where I shall leave you for the weekend.  Chapter 2 (on Monday 4/13) will cover three  of the four storylines that bridge the gap between Dead Space 1 and 2.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Soon I'll Be Knocking At Your Door

A Review: Dead Space (PC)

Yes, I know that Dead Space 3 came out a couple of months back, but you know what, I heard that the original Dead Space was a fun/frightening game and I had really wanted to play it for some time.  Then, Steam had a sale last December (or was it November?) so I went ahead and purchased the initial two games in the franchise.  I began playing Dead Space last year in December and only in the last couple of weeks did I pick the game back up with the intention of taking the game to the end.  So now, here it is, everything that's already out there in the intertubes about a game that came out back in 2008.

But why bother reading a review of a game that came out 5 years ago that everyone and their third cousin has already played and written about?  Because you value our opinion.  And because some people may not have played it when it first came out (like this guy right here) and want to know if the game has held up since it's release.  Yes, yes it has.

You know what.  I'm not going to give our standard "Full Review."  This game's already been reviewed into the ground and the last thing the Internet needs is another review.  I'll just talk about things that I really liked (and didn't like) about the game.

The universe.  I like the universe created for the series.  Even though my experience in the universe is only based off of one game and the information is limited to what is found on the USG Ishimura, USM Valor and the Aegis VII Colony.  There are allusions to things happening on Earth, but not many and those are mainly snippets of information about the Church of Unitology.

Actually, the Church of Unitology is something that I was only slightly disappointed in.  Upon hearing about the Church of Unitology (from in-game, not from the mock-Chick tract that I got from PAX in 2010), I was really hoping that it wouldn't be a pseudo-Scientology-type religion, which it did turn out to be, but only in the way that there are special tiers that members are able to attain within the religion.  That's really all I know about Scientology and I'm not about to assume that I know more.

Back to the game.  Another thing that I really liked and felt was a bit of a departure from other survival horror-esque games.  Your character, Isaac Clarke, isn't some bad ass super soldier sworn with protecting the world from unnameable evils.  He's a middle-aged repairman/engineer whose girlfriend is on board the USG Ishimura, which is purely a coincidence (at least it is after the first game).  And your primary weapon?  It's a Plasma Cutter, which uses plasma energy to cut rock.  Yes, eventually you're able to purchase a legit non-mining tool/weapon.  Even the other mining tools that would be used/described as "magic" in another game, are explained well enough that you don't question why a miner would have the ability to have kinesis module or the ability to slow time at a directed object.

Oh, another thing was this:

 What are you looking at?  It's a maintenance inspection card for the elevator.  We've all seen them anytime we go into an elevator and probably shrug them off.  I'd just gotten into an elevator and while hoping that a necromorph wouldn't pop through the ceiling and attack, I noticed this little thing that wasn't anything beyond set decoration.  But, for me, it helped to maintain my investment in this universe.  That, even in this fictional universe, it is good to know that elevators are still maintained on a regular basis.  It's little details like that that help me to enjoy the game for more than what it is.

I also really liked the layout of the ship.  That it seemed plausible that the layout of the ship was how it was, um, laid out.  I don't know how else to explain that.  I never questioned why something was where it was or what it was that I was doing and why.  Every mission within the ship was pretty straight forward.  Can't send out a distress signal?  Go find out what's wrong with the communications array.  Even the NPC's started getting annoyed at how many things seemed to be going wrong and how much time it took just to get something done.  I liked that.  A lot.

Oh yes, how can I forget the intro movie.  Shots of the USG Ishimura with a slightly creepy woman singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."  Each line sung sounds like it's an effort just to keep going and to finish.  And, upon hearing the song over and over, I began to wonder if the words were the actual words as they almost sounded too creepy to be from a children's song. Alas, the words are in fact the real words, which I thought was pretty cool.

Science? SCIENCE!!

Lastly, I'll talk about my time playing the game and how I went through it.  I spent 23 hours playing the game, but only 14 hours was saved, meaning that I had spent 9 hours trying to get through different areas many, many (many) times and failing.  Specifically the first time with the ADS Canon and when you run into The Hunter in the large medical bay.  Conklederp can attest to my bouts of "Fucking fix it Hammond!  I don't care about your hangups, fucking. . . fucking damn it!" and "Run, fucking unlock the goddamn door!"

In the game, there are a number of weapons that you can purchase from the ships store, although I stuck with the the Plasma Cutter and the Pulse Rifle.  I did purchase the Ripper, although not really knowing how/when to use it, I sold it back to the store, probably to purchase additional med packs or power nodes to upgrade my equipment/gear.  For the most part, I didn't feel the game was too difficult, with the exception of the two mentioned times involving the ADS Canon and The Hunter and having played through the game on Normal/Medium difficulty.  Even the final boss held to a distinct pattern that once I got over the massiveness of the thing, I was able to calmly defeat the creature.

I will add that there were some aspects of the game that I didn't actively "participate in."  Apparently using parts of the necromorphs as projectiles with the kinesis was "a thing."  I rarely used the kinesis module except when moving heavy equipment or to acquire items that were out of range.  Also the secondary function on the Pulse Rifle apparently could do a lot of damage and the only times (used twice) I was in close quarters and when it fired an energy pulse into the air, I thought it was being used to light dark areas, so I practically never used that function.

Lastly, I will say that while Dead Space was a fairly frightening game, it didn't have a lasting sense of fear and terror.  This is most likely due to the fact that the game primarily took place in outer space and the monsters were horribly 'mutated' humans.  They were nothing that I could possibly run into, in a setting that I will probably never be in.  Those elements made the fear only present in the game and not outside of it.  That's not a criticism about the game, just something I felt like pointing out.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Slaves of Fear