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.