in DEAD SPACE no one can hear you soil yourself

i QUITE METAPHORICALLY shit my pants playing it just now. can't remember last time i was this creeped out by a game, so kudos to the makers. also, top game so far. decided it warrants its own thread.

anyone else picked this up? you can't all be playing fuckin FIFA

I'm a few hours in; mentioned it somewhere else around here. Thus far it's a solid mash-up of elements from Resident Evil 4, Metroid Prime, and Bioshock.

picked it up today, haven't started it yet though

I gotta grab this. I'll probably end up borrowing it from a friend. Saving up my discretionary Xbox money for Fallout 3.

Is it scarier than condemned 2?

I played that for a few hours, it was ok, the controlls annoyed I recall

The last game that scared me was the demo for F.E.A.R.

I'm a pussy when it comes to video games.

as this is ilx, it's only a matter of time before some hero strides in to pull out their enormous testicles and mock my scaredycatness, but the average joe six pack soccer mom will get some good jumps from this and will be generally unsettled/occasionally freaked out.

the rote thing that reviewers seem to be trotting out is this "it's a crazy mix of Resi Evil + two games of your choice" line. this isn't wrong, but for every pixel junk eden there are 99 games released that are direct rip offs of other games or bolted-together amalgams of two or more, so i'm not sure why everyone has decided to jump on this game. and it's a shame because the developers have at least tried to incorporate some original ideas to raise it above that.

I'm not jumping on anything, just offering up valid comparisons. And all three games I referenced are really, really good; it's not like I said "oh it's just The Club mixed with Kirby's Air Ride and Clive Barker's Jericho".

i hear ya. like i said, i don't disagree.

one thing i forgot to mention: on the advice of one review i skipped over Normal and went straight for Hard. i'm only a couple of hours in but this is working out so far.

I just blew eighty bucks on a bunch of library material for the 360 (Ultimate Alliance, Dead Rising, Elder Scrolls and such), but the reviews and screen shots and the fact that my gal will likely be entranced and freaked out is making me wanna pick this up on the way home...

HEY COMIC NERDS: the Image mini-series tie-in / prequel wasn't all that bad (tho it ended on a duff note, and I wouldn't recommend actually paying for it unless you're a fan of Ben Templesmith's sloppy seconds).

Was going to wait a bit and (heaven forbid) maybe finish some games I've put on extended hiatus, but I might have to stop by my local gamestore franchise and pony up for the greasy gopher guts like the rest of you have / will.

Selling pretty well when I bought it at Gamestop yesterday. Two customers in front of me were both picking it up. One guy with his 8 year old - fuel for nightmares!

I'm less than an hour in, but pretty impressed so far. Beautiful environments with fantastic textures. From screenshots, thought Isaac's suit was armor, but instead it moves like fluid leather. The 3D instruction system is appealing. Plentiful gore, with a good mix of tension and jump scares.

A few event-triggered "monster bursts through the window" moments so far, but nothing as aggravating as Doom 3's constant "imp appears from hidden closet in cleared room". The doors rapidly closing thwarts my usual "hit the door and jump back to shoot" tactics. Fun to rethink strategy. Am enjoying it a lot.

In the opening cinematic, props to the writers for throwing in the line about the Ishimuru having over a thousand people on board. "That's a lot of necromorphs..."

xpost: so is that the first readable game-based comic since Atari Force?

Dude you forgot about SONIC?!?!?

"This is the thread where Daver outs himself as a 13-year-old girl."

oh poo

Speaking of Ultimate Alliance, I bought it a few days ago, and totally hate it. Complete crap.

I see on Amazon, PC users are again whining and 1 starring the game due to DRM issues.

Bought it, played it for about 30 minutes, was getting REALLY unnerved by the awesome atmosphere (and those ghostly floating menus!) and turned it off for the rest of the night. Will possibly need to drink a liter of alcohol in order to play s'more.

pre-ordered it today. hurrah for next week

wait, who was talking about Ultimate Alliance????

I was. I just bought it. Only fired it up for five minutes last night, looks fun to me.

oh sorry, totally missed that

I agree, total funcakes

Ultimate Alliance: horrible storyline, miserably repetitive, but one of the most fun games I've ever played. I kinda hope they don't get CB Cebulski to write the sequel.

Ultimate Alliance is pretty much next-gen Gauntlet. The more people you've got along with you the more fun it is. I don't think I could play through it alone.

Ultimate Alliance is pretty much next-gen Gauntlet

OTM OTM OTM OTM OTM OTM OTM

It's certainly what five minutes solo brought to mind. I like the RPG-ish elements though. Maybe we should start another thread?

how about a whole new board :p

I Love Ultimate Alliance

Please more Dead Space impressions! I'm on the fence about this game. Not enough time for it right now, but definitely considering picking it up when/if the price drops down to thirty bucks.

i will post when i'm done to give overall impressions but for now i will say that i think it really is excellent. looks great, sounds great, plays great.

OK now this game is pissing me off (tho really it's more why survival horror games piss me off, and it prob has to do w/ prolonged exposure to FPSes).

What I want:

1) Ammo
2) A character that will STOMP on the fucking thing I want STOMPED
3) A character that will SWING at the fucking thing I want SWUNG AT

What DS offers: NONE OF THE FUCKING ABOVE

NB: I think I just suck, but I'm not willing to come to grips w/ that yet.

i have had no problems with 1 through 3 so far in this game

its pretty fun

i like low-ammo games. more scary more fun.

Yeah, I got over it / got better. Now I'm back to crapping myself. :D

one great element of low-ammo survival horrors is that it actually becomes more scary when suddenly the game gives you a load of ammo because you know something fucked up is about to go down.

btw, do download the free obsidian suit from PSN (assume there is 360 equivalent) because it costs 0 credits and has the full complement of inventory spots.

haha -- thanks for the load-of-ammo comment, RS! Found a room w/ loads of cutter ammo, and I spent the time until the next encounter waiting for some behemoth to rip the hull open and eat me w/ a nice chianti.

Ah so it seems good ? I'm considering picking it up but, for instance, I didn't like bioshock at all although it's considered one of the best games on 360 (ok, I've just played like 20min before I got bored. I will give it another chance later...) but really liked res evid 4 on ps2, for instance.

This thread is making this sound cool. Will get.

I'm hoping this will be cool and something to get into, as i got sooo bored of cod4 after only a few levels in. and wipeoutHD just got too damn hard, fuck having to pixel perfect on every race.

This one sounds like something more up my alley though.

be

be!

I'm about an hour in and am enjoying it so far. I'm playing it on a pc with headphones and have jumped back in my chair a couple times.

At this point (midway through Chapter 3), I cannot handle more than 1 encounter at a time.

What kinda weapons do you guys favor? I've been hesitant to part with my plasma cutter/pulse rifle/line gun/flame thrower combo but I cant be convinced otherwise.

Ha -- I've been spending my credits on ammo & health, & only have the cutter & line gun.

line gun seems to be the best weapon in general, especially using the alternate firing mode mines (stasis+mine=1 shot death, more than 1 monster at once if you're lucky). you can't rely on having enough ammo for that so plasma cutter gets most use. pulse rifle has proven very useful situationally. i have a friend who claims the flamethrower is great vs brutes but i experimented and didn't really find that. have experimented with the others too but didn't rate them much. too much messing around.

just finished Chapter 6. for a game that is supposedly repetitive i have been impressed with the new ideas they've consistently added as each chapter progresses. the monsters get so distinct and there is so much strategy to how you go about killing them, not least to conserve ammo. i am glad i hoarded medipacks and ammo early on because it is getting brutal now.

and it's still consistently fraying my nerves. i think i'm getting a stomach ulcer.

I had no interest in this after having seen a few previews but this thread has definitely piqued my interest! is it genuinely scary? how does it get its scares, general creepiness interspersed with classic movie frights?

you wouldn't like it

I think multiplayer would be pretty good actually. A bit like the AVP games, where your team has to be well organised to survive, ie you just can't all be blasting the shite out of everything.

played through this, and yeah, from a technical standpoint, the sound design is great. but imo, the sounds they employed are fairly generic and sometimes really cheesy. the kid whispering "twinkle, twinkle, little star..." is just UGGHHHHH.

and that plays on the TITLE SCREEN if you leave it idle long enough! (which I often did.)

Maybe one mans generic is another mans classic. I kinda like how it rips from all the great sci-fi films. the "twinkle, twinkle" bit is the wrong side of obvious, but its an EA game.

I feel that multiplayer will need to open up all the corridors and stop it getting claustrophobic. and will just end up as

Haven't played this in a while, loved the atmos but the gameplay became gratingly repetitive.

Got this for cheap today (£8.85 delivered from shopto.net) - just played through the first mission and I'm pretty hooked. Such a bad shot early on though that I'm going to be crying for ammo later on. Not sure about all the stomping. Great atmosphere though. Nice touch having the menu screen not pause the game.

Need to go back to Arkham Asylum now for some relative peace and transquility...

i gave up on this very quickly so long ago. i got as far as fighting the huge greenhouse boss (big round thing)
if i loaded this up now i wouldn't have a clue what was going on

i remember the 'shooting limbs off' quite satisfying though.

i don't remember a big greenhouse so i guess i didn't even get that far. lovely atmosphere (even tho it's yer standard grey dark metallic corridors), great weapons (shooting limbs, yes!), great HUD and look and feel in general, but gameplay just became far too repetitive.

it was a hothouse sorry, with pods and things growing everywhere

you come of the gameplay but end up staying for the level design.

you owe it to yourself to finish this game as it has some amazing level design and rooms but the shooting gets old quite quickly.

the hot house boss just needs you to grab the red canisters and hurl them into his gaping mouth.

Dead Space 2 Producer:

According to Rich Briggs, a producer on the game, Isaac is going to be capable of some pretty “epic moments.”

“It was 100 percent white-knuckle tension,” Briggs told G4, “and we did a lot of research after the fact and people were coming back and saying, ‘I never even listened to the logs sometimes because I was so scared of something jumping me out of a dark corner,’ and we don’t want people to be sacrificing their understanding of the story and their enjoyment of the environment because they’re always so scared.

Making the game less scary will ruin it.... as will multi-player and design by people that think Zero G Sarlacc fighting is not epic enough..and people that don't realise you can listen to the logs later.

this is my exact impression of the process of turning a successful original title into a dismal sequel. the people with the ideas and the talent make a great game and then "producers" slither out of the darkness to get their pawprints all over it, and to justify their involvement and feed their own egos they come up with terrible ideas like "our focus groups indicate that people were having too much fun playing this game to really appreciate the second rate storyline, so i have a number of suggestions for how to avoid this pitfall in the new game". screw rich briggs and all of his kind imo.

that is so depressing

much crapness, most people i know who've played this their first comment is about how great it is because it's scary.

the quote above can be summed up as such:

Uncharted 2 sold shit loads, Resi 5 did not.

We are now going to make a copy of Uncharted2 but without frightening people with a new character.

was re5 scary? i remember it just being action movie-ish and relentless, more like proto-l4d.

Steam had this for $10, so I picked it up. Great ideas about HUDs and onscreen info, shitting camera implementation and horrible asteroid sequence so far.

I tend to have this assumption about any third-person action game but Dead Space especially is a game I can't imagine playing with a mouse and keyboard. The slow, chunky movement would just drive me absolutely bugshit, whereas it somehow feels okay with a pad.

hahahaha thx to spending a little late night time with this, i was just swinging by this thread to bitch about the stupid fucking asteroid sequence.

hated that part

just played the dead space 2 demo and my number one impression is fuck those crying little mutant babies, fuck them straight to hell

seemed idk notably easier? maybe its just me.

loved this demo once i got the hang of it (never having played the first one).

although the "hacking" mechanic is lame, worse than the one in arkham asylum. bioshock is the only game i've encountered where this is fun...maybe dead space 2 could have you jump into a donkey kong level or a nice game of solitaire?

i was home with the flu all weekend and started playing the first dead space, i love it. and i was so dreading that asteroid sequence, but it wasn't that bad! got through it on my second try, whereas other parts (like the emergency room) took way, way more.

WHAT, YOU CAN STOMP ON THOSE GREEN BOXES AND GET GOODIES?!

oh shit

anyone playing dead space 2? it's kinda the opposite of the first game in that i breezed through everything up until chapter 9, and then it started getting hard (low ammo, tough rooms).

I tried to play the demo but it was too scary for me. :(

I have been playing on Survivalist, seems the right level of difficulty where its hard enough that I can't blow through things. I am only on chapter 6 or so though. Main complaint is not enough anti-gravity stuff so far. You really got to use the telekinesis a lot to save ammo.

i always forget to do that

it kinda sucks that the stuff laying around does no damage when you tk.. just spiky limbs you tear off aliens and those spears that are laying around will kill anything.

like this game alot tho.. playing a new game plus on survival and its not that much more difficult with upgraded stuff from the first playthrough.

Agreed with the mid-stream difficulty. On Normal, spent a few tense moments in Chapters 8 & 9 replaying fights due to low ammo. Going through the container hold, kept running out to save after each kill. I don't use stasis half as much as I should, though. But it's been good for honing the TK skill.

And ramping up the weapons - it's tough spending a power node on an empty bridge spot.

yeah my progress stalled around chapter 8 I think. Don't want to turn down difficulty but have low tolerance for being frustrated outside of work, so I just stopped playing :/

this was superb i thought. level design was just great, always a new twist. and one again they clearly put a lot of thought into the design of the various necromorphs and the different weapons and fire modes, and the relationship between the two. i really enjoyed how strategic it was - often a particular area or sequence would be like a puzzle with different solutions to try to get past it with minimum ammo usage and health loss. survivalist was a well balanced difficulty level. kind of wished i had tried zealot but that might have tipped it too far. will definitely take a pass on hardcore mode tho.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqWCwcq7egk

starts getting really funny after maybe the 3rd death

never finished dead space 1, giving it another shot. i love the way this game looks and sounds. i also like at the beginning some dying crew member took the time to write "SHOOT OFF THEIR LIMBS" in blood on the wall.

not really into the enemies tho--they are so goofy and flesh-colored and all their angles make them look like 90s fps enemies. also once i realized that when you see a dude scurry past through a vent or whatever doesn't necessarily mean that dude is lying in wait for you down the line (just that there's a monster closet coming up) the game got a lot less scary.

i remember almost nothing about these two games, yet i will happily play the next one

Anyone started into Dead Space 3 yet? It's a sure buy for me, so guess I'm more curious if folks here are also getting the "less scary, more action" impressions I've seen in reviews.

its ok so far.. this isaac dude's life fuckin sucks btw.. you play the game and youre thinking every single thing this guy does turns to absolute shit every time

man i did not like this demo at all

"less scary, more action" WOOF

Listening to all the DS3 talk this week on podcasts has made me restart DS2.

visually it looks stunning, well it does when sat next to Aliens CM

Judging from the reviews now coming out, that's not all that hard to do

and 3 is already marked down 33% today thru Origin for all platforms, physical or not

theres some cool flying around in space parts that are kinda fun when I put in some time yesterday.. but yeah definitely not worth paying full price. Im glad I got the $20 amazon rebate for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvNtUzSMKeE

From Glen Schofield, co-creator of Dead Space. Lots of similarities. Set on Jupiter's moon, looking forward to some good exterior visuals at some point in the game.

The first DS is one of my 'pretty good game that I never finished but don't have any reason not to really, also stop buying new games idiot'

so I might have to jump back into that hothouse boss fight then.

Never forget the STOMP

Own DS 1-3, but haven't played the 3rd yet (have that same "stop buying new games, finish your plate" situation). Enjoyed the DS story, so would recommend finishing the first, at least. The final battle is fun. Speaking of story, reminds me I haven't finished "Bioshock: Infinite" either.

i bought DS even though it's not officially supported on my OS and i am only about 25% of the way through downloading it. i hear it's good though.