Must Go Faster: Dead Space 2 (360)

I am halfway through and had to make myself stop playing because the tension in my body was becoming painful. My elbows had drawn in and up as I held the controller and unconsciously I was pulling myself tighter and tighter into a ball.

This is no small feat as I am no small man.

After a startling, thrilling spectacle of an opener, Dead Space 2 throws the player in deep and never ever lets up. Even in slow moments (there are no quiet moments as even near silence is punctuated by distant screams, labored breathing, or metal groaning against metal; the audio design is best of class) relentless tension is never completely released. Death is always a corner or a heartbeat away.

Dead Space 2 tweaks or eliminates all of the issues that plagued the first game, including a sly nod to one of the main criticisms turned on its head at or near the mid-point.

I can’t wait to finish this game. So far it is the most complete horror experience on the 360 ever.

State of my PC nation

Given that I often have the same games installed on my PC over multiple hardware changes I thought it would be cool to capture some screenshots of the games I am playing with it iteration of hardware.

It is also striking the level of detail even older games have when running at resolutions far beyond what is capable on current console generations. The vegetation in the Just Cause shot is a good example of this.

Running with the following specs I captured the below using FRAPS at 1680 x 1050 unless noted:

1.8 Ghz Intel E2160 Dual Core CPU
6 gigs DDR 2 RAM, running dual channel 400 FSB
Radeon HD 3850 graphics
Creative Audigy SB 5.1
Gigabyte P35 motherboard

Antialiasing and v-sync disabled with usually 4x Anisotropic enabled

Age Of Conan 1280 x 768 Graphics set to Low/Medium (click to enlarge)


Borderlands Graphics set to High(click to enlarge)


Dragon Age: Origins details set to High


Fallout 3 Details set to High


Dead Space Details set to High


Ghostbusters 1440 x 900 details set to medium (brutally buggy port)


JUST CAUSE Details set to High


Metro 2033 Comparison shots details set to high vs some details off



Titan Quest Details set to High


S.T.A.L.K.E.R details set to High

Expansion of IP: Halo 3: ODST, Halo Wars & Dead Space: Extraction

Original Intellectual Properties are the holy grail of any media endeavor. At their best, they allow the IP holders the opportunity to continue to expand on the concepts originally presented while hopefully growing the value of the franchise. At their worst, they are annually exploited revenue streams that devalue the brand and eventually saturate the market, leading to diminishing returns.

As a launch title for the original Xbox, Halo immediately established itself as the hardware’s killer application, with tight (for a console) FPS controls, a compelling and enigmatic main character and an epic battle to be fought. Two sequels would follow, pulling the franchise across into the new console generation with Halo 3 on the Xbox 360 and driving massive revenue. Halo has truly become Microsoft’s golden goose for their hardware, and though developer Bungie would eventually buy back their independence, more Halo games appear to inevitable, with or without them.

Halo Wars is the first non-Bungie developed title in the franchise expansion. No tentative first step, the game takes the iconography and back story of the original trilogy of games to flesh out a solid Real Time Strategy experience. Sporting the best RTS controls for a console ever, the game leverages the mythology to great effect, pushing the narrative forward while maintaining enough RTS gameplay staples to comfort the non-Halo player. Technical issues amount to unit pathfinding problems at best, which is negligible given the terrific presentation and unending polish.

Set five years before the original Halo, the war with the Covenant is fresh, and armies of Spartans still populate the galaxy. The proliferation of the Spartans leads to some memorable cinematics and allows for their use as “hero” units in the game but it also serves to dilute to power of the first three games. As the last of his genetically engineered kind, the Master Chief was the stoic bad-ass main character that has long been the staple of action games. However his relationship to the A.I. Cortana provides a human vulnerability that lends the character some depth and sympathy usually lost in FPS games. This prototypical dynamic relationship is also explored cinematically in the story moments of Halo Wars but to lesser effect. The wise-cracking ass-kicking Forge is a reject from the cast of Predator as is his hard-bitten but soft on the inside lady scientist side-kick. To add insult to injury, the Spartans are presented in a late game cinematic as a group of unstoppable fighting machines, executing maneuvers one could only dream of doing while playing as the Master Chief. Not only does the game make him one of a crowd, he is no longer even the best, he is now just the one who survived.

Halo 3: ODST sidesteps the issue entirely. By removing the Spartans and the Master Chief from the game it attempts to create a new look at a familiar setting. Unfolding during the events of Halo 2, a group of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers are flung into the battle for New Mombasa, an African city devastated by Covenant attack. Separated during the insertion drop into the city the shockwave generated from a Covenant warship jumping into slip-space (don’t ask), the game opens with the player taking on the role of the Rookie. Waking hours after impact, the player must navigate the ostensibly open-world of the city, searching the night for his team. No longer playing as the Master Chief, the player quickly becomes accustomed to being an under-powered under-protected soldier facing the same enemies fought in previously games. As each team-mate is located, playable chapters unlock, allowing each character to be played in turn through daylight missions. Essentially a well-meaning attempt to expand the franchise, Halo: ODST is an experiment gone wrong. The single biggest flaw is also its initial selling point: this is a Halo game, so much so that is looks and feels like dropped levels from previous releases circling the noir-ish core. With only the patina of the new splattered on the game, it feels like Halo Lite and that is just not satisfying.

Halo Wars is a far more compelling and evolutionary step for the franchise, taking the concepts in the new and different directions while staying true to the mythology, much as Dead Space: Extraction does with this nascent IP.

Unlike its progenitor which debuted on Ps3 and XB360, Extraction is Wii-exclusive prequel to the events of the first game, Dead Space. A third-person action horror game set on a massive planet cracking spaceship ravaged by monster creating infection, Dead Space tread new ground in its visuals, but had a hoary and tired story. To crack the nut of emulating the spectacular visuals of the next-gen consoles on the under-powered Wii, Extraction is a first-person “rail shooter”. Like a light-gun game, the player uses the Wii-mote to controls the aim and firing of weapons, while all else is scripted in the game engine. This was a bold and wise move on the part of developer Visceral, as this is the easily the best looking Wii game in a long time, if not since launch. The only graphical flaw I found was the lack of anti-aliasing, something not as noticeable in standard def but grossly irritating on an HD display.

Telling the story of the infection overtaking the planet’s colony as well as the ship itself, the narrative plays like an interactive movie, filling in the pieces left out of the first film. The gameplay is tightly paced, the writing sharp, and the narrative supremely executed.

Gory and violent, Extraction is a text-book example of expanding an IP without diluting the original concept.

Game-a-day-ish:Premature Endings

Finished both Dead Space and Fallout 3 within 48 hours of one another-both games represent in the own way the best and worst of the artform.
Dead Space left me (after a ginormous boss battle and an ending stolen from FEAR and a gazillion japanese horror films)with more questions than answers and feeling empty. Either purposefully or as an accident of omission the game never digs deeper than the surface regarding the plot and the character's relationships therein. Character setup early are eventually killed off arbitrarily, while the fates of other characters are foreshadowed so blatantly that the final reveal is more of a "meh" than a "doh!".
Having created such a beautifully rendered world as well as innovated in terms of the user interface it feels as if the story was left behind, where it had the potential to be something extraordinary as well. Worth renting.

Fallout 3 is entirely a game made of the journey not the destination. The final mission and the lead up to it is so abrupt you don't realize the game is about to end until it does. This is hampered by a late game character that is introduced as a deus-ex-machina solution to an earlier problem but then unable to be used in the same situation within the endgame. The emotional commitment made to building this character as it travels through the wasteland encountering some remarkably creative and unique situations is given short shrift in the resolution. While the mechanics of the plot ends, the emotional payoff is absent and there is no satisfying resolution to your character's story. Fallout 3 is in essence all foreplay and no climax.

Started and quit World of Warcraft last night after about 20 minutes of killing little fluffy animals. Don't get it, the essence of the game appears to be grinding. Was that ever fun?

Game a Day: Dead Space

In the hopes of getting a lot of the nonsense rattling around my head out into some kind of record I am starting what I hope can be a daily blog about one of the bunch of games I always have running.

Dead Space first hit my radar over a year ago in the pages of Game Informer (the single best overall gaming mag out there). The graphic design of the game leapt off the screen shot loaded pages and I knew this was a game I needed to play.

The setup for the game is nothing new, a rescue team is sent out to investigate radio silence from a massive "planet cracking" spaceship and havoc ensues, seperating the player character Issac (the engineer) from his shipmates. Borrowing heavily from the influences of Alien, The Thing and Resident Evil 4, Dead Space improves on some of its sources in areas while taking two steps back in others. In the holy trinity of gameplay, visuals, and plot, Dead Space manages a 1 1/2 out of 3.
Visually it has moments of stunning dreadful beauty, where the claustrophobic linear progress of bland metal-grated corridors will suddenly open up on a massive chasm in the ships bowels, or force the player into the vacuum of space on the ship's exterior.
The gameplay is RE4 sped up, with the same tank controls but a slightly more nimble protagonist and a camera butted up tight to the leads shoulder. Dominating the frame with the main character forces tension in the player mechanically making it harder to see what threats may lurk just off screen. The "dismemberment" aspect of the gameplay creates a diversionary method of playing, forcing the player to avoid the normal aim-for-the-head approach and rather cut the limbs off the enemies in order to stop them. While this forces a different method of play initially, again it is a mechanical method of creating tension, relying on hampering the player's abilities rather than innovating. In between skirmishes with varying creatures, the player is sent on seemingly endless "errand" quests of the "go there find this fix that" variety. while the gameplay is passable and the visuals often gorgeous, the story is laughably bad.

Cut off from the survivors of his crew, Issac meanders about the monolithic planet cracking ship, following directions from holo-projected crew-mates as they shock/horror! discover various technical issues plaguing the ship beside the mutant killers running around. Strangely enough this issues are only discovered one at a time, further reinforcing the heavily linear aspect of the game. At one point, one of the support characters even states how ridiculous it is for these things to keep happening, a moment guaranteed to break any immersion.

While Dead Space does a have a few genuine "scare's",it loses any emotional cohesion with its by the numbers plot. In terms of pure visual design the game is a triumph, something apparent from those first screenshots so long ago, but this is truly a game made of style over substance.