This blog has been in dire need of revival for quite some time now. I’ve decided that instead of allowing my anxiety over what to write about prevent me from writing here, I should instead just write—and post whatever comes out of that. Here it goes…
I have been playing so much Dead Space 2 lately. I am currently about halfway through my second play through and I suspect I will be making several more—perhaps even in the range of half a dozen or more—because it is such a fun experience and I want to play it like a completionist. I am so far from being a completionist with games. There are some that I’ll start to work on getting 100% completion on but it always gets to a point where it’s far more tedious and boring than it is fun and I end up stopping. I think God of War III is the only ps3 game I’ve gotten 100% completion on and it’s probably a lot of the same reasons I want to go platinum in Dead Space 2. They are both strictly linear in their narrative and level design but that’s part of what makes them so good; such strict linearity allows for a game to come as close to perfect as possible in creating an experience that feels whole and best represents the designer’s ideal vision.
Dead Space 2 is to me, all about atmosphere. There are parts where you get a jumpy scare or have a sudden hallucination where your environment suddenly changes into something far more disturbing but I felt the most fearful tension while slowly tiptoeing into a new area, cautiously sweeping each room with the flashlight conveniently attached to each gun completely unaware of what would come next but knowing I needed to be ready for it. It’s this tension where this game, and the last one as well, really grew on me. I am not by any means a fan of the horror genres in either games or movies. Yet something about Dead Space appealed to me and in playing the sequel over the past couple weeks I think I’ve broken down why I love it so much, despite not being a scare junkie at all: In any game, you always know that despite how scary or insanely difficult the challenges you’re faced with can be, they are always manageable. Games almost never put you up against enemies you can’t defeat, obstacles you can’t overcome; you’re always given the tools and skills to conquer each challenge you’re faced with and that’s how I looked at this game. Whenever I encountered a new enemy, part of me would freak out, get scared and instantly feel a sense of dread in facing more of them but another part of me would get excited at the prospects of exploring and experimenting with the weapons and tools I had been given to find the perfect strategy for each enemy—of which there are a few different ones based on your choice weapons and playing style. The more comfortable I would get with each enemy the more playful I would get in my methods of dispatching them—shooting off an enemy’s claw, catching it mid-air with kinesis and shooting it back into it before it got to me first, is a great example.
I could rant about that game for a while, and most likely will but I want to try to save some of that juice for reviewing it, which I’m currently working on and should be posting soon.
There’s a bit of a dry spell for gaming at the moment, at least for me as I’m less than ecstatic for most upcoming releases, but L.A. Noire is the one game I am absolutely dying to play. Especially after seeing the walkthrough at PAX I am not only excited about the groundbreaking technology being used in it but also because I’ve now seen some concrete gameplay and it is definitely appealing. I remember playing a demo, sometime in the past year, for a CSI game that was just painfully bad. Although it was the clunky and the voice acting and character models were beyond atrocious, the point-and-click-ish crime scene investigation gameplay felt like a really fun idea—even if it was very poorly executed. From what I have seen of L.A. Noire thusfar it’s looking like they’ve done a great job providing a pretty realistic sense of that experience without making it as dull and tedious as I imagine the real thing is. Expect a lot of excited ranting about that game until it’s release (May 15th) where I will inevitably disappear from the world for a couple days while I envelop myself in that game for a while.
More to come. (I’m serious this time)
-Ben
