Game Review : Dead Space Part II

I have just completed the game yesterday and felt that I need to give another review. But instead of spoiling the story for you, I am going to talk more about the game details that amazes me.

As most of you know by now that the game graphics are really good and creepy, also you know about how scary sounding the game is. But did you know that when you enter certain areas, you can hear whispering, places like toilets and certain hall ways. It makes you wonder if you are going crazy or if the ship is haunted.

Another thing is the music score that accompanies the game. At more times than less, the music has saved me tonnes, due to the fact that when it changes you to dramatic/scary music, you know that one of those necromorphs are nearby, thus keeping you alert and ready for it.

The game does not make you do mundane tasks throughout, in fact most of the task you do on the ship, needs to be done. For example, in the first part of the game you run from nercomorphs and end up in a different area than the rest of your crew. In order for them to get to the bridge to find out what happened to the ship, you needed to repair the tram system that was blocked by a damaged tram.

Then there is the time that you find out that the ship is in a decaying orbit and was on a course to crash into the planet below. Needless to say that you had to somehow restart the engines. In fact all the tasks that I have done, was well thought out by the developers. No find key A to open door A here, rinse and repeat, you get the drift.

Now comes part where I talk about the Ishimura, this ship is big, HUGE as a matter of fact. but as big as it is, the layout of the ship looks believable that you are infact on a huge mining ship in the middle of space. Each level or part of the ship has its own unique feel and look to it. The medical sections look sterile, well at least it used to, the mining deck is dirty and gritty and even the executive rooms in the crew deck looks clean with carpets and spacious rooms.

Another thing to note is how well they thought out of the physics ingame. Especially when you went from normal gravity to Zero gravity and back. Things that will stay in motion in zero G uptill it is stopped by something like a wall or fan blade. How in zero G air currents will move things away. It may not be perfect physics, but to laymen like me, its good enough. The only thing that did not make sense to me is that at one point, you will be on the planet and there is this section of zero G on the planet. How does one get zero G on a planet?

Lastly I would like to talk about a mini game in the game. 2 if you count the shooting gallery. There is this place where you play some sort of zero G basket ball and you have to jump from panel to panel and then shoot the ball with your kinetic module into a scoring hole. you can then unlock certain lockers in the room before the zero G basketball court for items. I only played it once but I read that if you played the game and went to level 6 you get a trophy in the achievements for the game itself.

Achievements? Oh I forgot, you get trophy achievements for playing the whole game. For the ps3 version, you get a bronze achievement for completeing each level and different achievements for doing something in game, like killing a certain number of enemies with a certain weapon or doing a certain action for a set number of times. These achievements can be seen on the XMB of the PS3 under trophies.

To end this, I think the developers did a great job with the game, even with all the small details that made this game such a big hit. The marketing of this game is very good too. They even got a 6 chapter downloadable videos in a graphic novel style to give you a picture of what happened on the planet when they 1st found the marker and a feature length animation that shows what happens onboard the Ishimura before you were sent in. It gives you a complete picture of what happened and it furthers expands on the dead space universe. Not sure if a sequel will come out for this game, but I do hope that they will do one.

Game Review : Dead Space Part I

Its been awhile since I played any horror survivor, namely cause most of the games in this genre usually dwelve in the super natural. The only ones i usually touch are games in the resident evil series and parasite eve series (too bad there were only 2 squels to this series)

Then there are the space survivor horrors like 'Run like Hell' and 'Doom 3' which I only touched a bit. Now comes this new game called 'Dead Space' and it pique my interest. I read some reviews that stated that this game has the 'feel' of aliens and event horizon and that was enough for me to fork out the 65 bucks for it.

I got home around the night and thought that it was a good idea to run the game. Boy was I wrong. Before I started on the game, I looked into the extras to see what bonuses are there inside. They had a concept art section that instead of just giving you a myriad of pictures, they were played in a slide show manner, even with some music to accompany the screenshots, which in my book was very cool.

Just the concept art itself made me reluctant on starting the actual game. Not that it was bad, but it was good, so good that it made me frightened to start it. But alas, I bought a game and I am damn well going to play it.

The game started with not much intro or game movie as many other games have, instead you start out in the bridge of a small repair ship. The starting feels like a movie sequence but you can pan and rotate the camera as the start credits begin to appear. You play Issac, an engineer sent to a mining ship that has not been in contact for the last 7 days. Also your character watches a vidlog sent from his girlfriend whom is aborad this ship, the Ishimura.

Thinking that this is just a routine repair run and that most likely that the ship's antenna has been knocked out and the crew on board might have trouble repairing it, things take a turn for the worse when your repair ship is forced to crash land into the hanger of the Ishimura. In the 1st 5 minutes of the game, it instructs you to follow the rest of the crew onboard the rescue ship into the flight lounge.

You are then instructed to go to a security post in a hallway seperated by a glass wall. As you are determining the status of the Ishimura, all hell breaks loose. You witness a mutated human/spider thing skewer one of the guys and then you are told to run. Without weapons on hand, you better run. Soon another one of those things breaks into the passageway you are in and starts to chase you. As the door that led you to the passageway is locked, you only run deeper into the ship.

I won't spoil it anymore for you people out there, but this 1st 5 minutes of the game will definitely get your heart pumping. This game's visuals are really dark and creepy, most of the ship is dimly lit, and at times the light will even go out. Saving grace is that the 1st weapon you pick up, the plasma cutter has a light attached to it. So when you aim the weapon a spot infront of the gun will be lit. That does not do much when the ship's lights go out from time to time and all you see is the bright spot.

Another component of the game that enhances its fear factor is the sound effects. From details like footsteps to stuff shuffling about when you walk into them, even some random metal pipe sound falling and hitting something when you walk on some catwalk will make you jump in your seat. The other thing about the audio is that it is loud and scary, even when you go into a vaccum, you can hear Issac breathing and it starts to get laboured when he runs out of air.

I am currently only in chapter 3 of the game and so far it has all been good reviews from my end. Its not as epic as GTA IV is and it does not have the story telling of MGS 4, but it sure score high on its own merits, which is the scare department. Lastly before anyone gets the game due to this review, I must warn you that the game is very gory as the most efficient way of killing these monsters are to cut off their limbs. This will result in a very bloody kill, if you get what I mean.

I think I will give this game 4.5 of 5 consoles falling short on the story as it seems very similar to 'Run like Hell', aside from that I think anyone whom loves a good horror survivor should get this. By the way, its out for PS3, Xbox360 and the PC, but I heard the controls on the PC version is horrid.

Superdog

Last night we wentto superdog at vivo as I was having hotdog cravings......

All I can say it was well worth it.

Their chill cheese fries, every heart clogging bite of it was delish....

Their dogs, can't even begin to describe them.....

All I know is, I am going to have alot more of it in future.

http://www.superdog.com.sg/