More Dead Space

You'd think, by all the posts about it, that I'm like, OMG so in lurve with the Dead Space series. That's not really the case. But since it's an EA property, they have the $ to put it on every platform out there. Anyway, I've really enjoyed 1 & 2, thinking they're some of the tightest, most polished games to come out on consoles in recent years. The concept of strategic dismemberment adds a new wrinkle to the tired "always aim for the head" strategy of most first person shooters. The weaponry is usually interesting and more inventive than "machine gun" and "bigger machine gun."

But outside of the core game series, there have been a few missteps with respect to control scheme. I mentioned that I played through the iOS version, and fought the touch screen the whole way.

Now I'm doing the same thing with Dead Space Extraction. This is a light-gun game, pure and simple. You have no control of where your character looks or goes. You just need to shoot and pick up powerups. Picking these up can be really frustrating because I'm used to being able to take my time and make sure I pick up every single bit of ammo. Often, the guy jerks his head (and your perspective along with it) around so much that you have a fraction of a second to pick up stuff. I'm not doing myself any favors by playing it without a light gun too. Oh, let me explain. This game just happened to be on the disc when I bought the PS3 version of Dead Space 2. It's a port of the Wii version of the same name. You're supposed to use it with the Playstation Move controller, which is pretty much like a Wii-mote, I guess. But I'm not gonna buy that thing just to play an essentially free game. So I mainly get by with a mixture of playing it on the easiest difficulty setting and cursing a lot.

Since it's on rails, I've run into a couple of spots where it got confused about whether I should continue on the path or not. Normally you don't move on to the next area and set of monsters until you kill all the ones in the area. But I've seen it get messed up where it tries to continue on but there's still a monster around that will kill you slowly from off screen. Since you're no longerlooking at it, you have to use area attacks like a flamethrower or similar that do damage to the area all around you. So there are a few bugs. Thankfully, the invisible checkpointing scheme is pretty good. When you get killed by stupidity like this you don't start very far back from where you died.

I was playing this a lot for a while, but lately I've been distracted by a couple of XBLA releases (Outland and Bastion) that I'll talk about in a future post.

Looking forward, not back

Usually how it works on here is that I play a game, gather my impressions, then write a bit about it on here. Since I haven't been playing nearly as much I can't really do that. Plus, since we're sort of in the dead period of game releases (seriously, no sports I care about and no games coming out?) I start to think about what I'm going to play next when it finally comes out.

Tops on that list is Skyrim. The fifth in the series and I only started at four. But that one was Oblivion and it sort of blew me away when I first played it. Coming from a Zelda background where you had a ton of freedom to go wherever you wanted in whatever order you wanted, this game took that and brought it to a whole new level. You could interact with just about anything in the world. I quickly found that I could pick up any of the items I found laying around. I held on to the rusty dagger or wooden spoon I found in a cave because I may just need that! Anyway, the game had some issues, but it was lovable all the same. Some of the videos for Skyrim look like a huge graphical leap, which is sort of impressive considering it's running on the same Xbox 360 as the previous.

Speaking of Zelda, Skyward Sword is coming at some point and I'm excited because it's more Zelda, and it will be something to play on the dust-covered Wii. Looking at those trailers for the first time just now I'm pleased with the art style. Looks like they took the semi-realistic look from Twilight Princess and threw in the bright color palette from Wind Waker. But nothing in there makes me salivate or anything. It will be more Zelda I suppose, no more, no less.

Rounding out the list are the 3DS versions of Mario Kart and Super Mario. But Dave, you say, you don't even have a 3DS and have been calling them "stupid expensive wastes of tech" or something like that. That may be true, but this blog is called DS Lunch for a reason and I'm pretty much obligated to get the next portable Mario Kart based on the hours and hours I've gotten out of the last one. Surely I'll be able to find some kind of a system/game bundle or something for cheaper by the time that comes out, right?