why play the last of us remastered or dead space remastered or metroid prime remastered when the definitive videogame remaster came out last year?
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Both kinda suck, but Iām pathologically opposed to naughty dog as an entity. The last of us is aping signifiers of substance with no actual substance. As least dead space has more ghoulies and you cat cut them with a cool laser saw.
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For some reason I thought Dead Space had a contingent of fans here, but it sounds like nobody particularly champions it. Well, that saves me $70!
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I thought the first one was all right back in the day. $70 now would be a big stretch I suppose.
Okay looking back at my notes, some parts like low-g and so forth were super cool. I liked the sawblade gun thingy. Other parts were dull and irritating. Overall I enjoyed the first play-through but not nearly enough to want to touch the game+ that unlocked afterwards.
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I mean I had a great time with the first game and then severely diminishing returns afterward. Iāll probably pick up this remaster for cheap someday.
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I did not like the game at all even worse when I started walking into each room backwards so I could watch the enemies spawn.
Like each room in the game was the same jump scare at the same time. There was never a room without fucked up next evolution of humanity with limbs to shoot.
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Iāve never understood Dead Spaceās popularity. All I remember about it was how there was a dedicated button to show you which direction you needed to walk in to continue playing.
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http://twitter.com/TheHorrorMaster/status/1619855538589937665
Canāt embed a tweet in a quote i guess but looks like honorary select button poster John Carpenter likes it!
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I donāt see why Dead Space should get disregarded for having navigation aids or aggressively undisguised scripting in its encounter design, these seem like simple things to forgive when we also consider other aspects of the experienceā¦ like sound design, the friction of the upgrade progression, the aggression of its enemies and those times the tight control youāve claimed over your kiting patterns slips away from you and the game turns into a chase cartoon with you running around the arenas getting cut off left and right. You also have to admire the variety of its monsters (which just improves in Dead Space 2), especially when at its highest highs the whole roster comes out to play during a single encounter and things feel like a horrible puzzle without playing out like the dumb ass fights in the new god of war games.
Plus the game is very tactile feeling, the weight of the player character, the rhythm of the weapons. And, yes, you have a button that shows a waypoint to the right locationā¦ but there is also a button purely dedicated to stomping: so what exactly is the issue.
Dead Space is good.
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This was my favorite thing about Dead Space, ultimately. I think they did a great job creating a soundscape.
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the navigation aids reveal the low quality of the level design, thatās why I bring them up. You wouldnāt need a breadcrumb trail for a linear horror game if there was thoughtful design in place.
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I think thatās fair. But honestly I canāt say you really do need them, the levels are mostly linear except for a few parts where the theme is that youāre at a junction between several different important parts of the ship; I want to say partly the nav thing is due to the setting (a convoluted industrial space ship, which you are walking through the guts of) and also that it was 2008 which was the beginning of an era of mainstream design that made everything insultingly hand-holdy. But I will also concede that the level design is not one of the gameās strengths.
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Having watched idiots play video games the navigation is a good choice.
Itās also a scary/tense game, and Iām sure that thing helped a lot of people get through (or further in) it than they would have otherwise!
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I think getting lost can be a scary experience in a game, scarier than anything in dead space at least
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like, I dunno, dead space might be the most linear game to rely on breadcrumbs as its primary means of communicating where the player should go. I gotta think that thereās (dead) space between āconvoluted Quake-ian death labyrinthā and āhand holding down a straight tunnelā
There are plenty of 3rd person shooters and horror games that had successful level design without resorting to that. Even Dead Spaceās most immediate antecedent, RE4, was full of good stages (at least early on) and it had some help for the player in the form of maps, but it wasnāt full-on handholding.
This is a silly hill for me to die on, Iāll grant that Dead Space did a lot of things right, it just came out a time where I was starting to find the condescension of AAA design really sickening and I havenāt revisited the game since to see if I still feel the same about it.
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Itās funny because I absolutely agree with all praise for the game and critique of it
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Itās weird. I know now that Dead Space and Mirrorās Edge and I think a third game (Dragon Age Origins?) which EA put out around the same time felt almost like a Capcom 5 kind of event. A refreshing break from things, but I canāt seem to remember what things they were breaking with. I donāt know if this is a retrospective thing, because I feel like I can remember thinking of these games in this way back in 2008 too. So itās interesting to hear how you feel, and understand it too, while for me Dead Space and Mirrorās Edge are contextualized by things like endless Medal of Honor sequels, movie adaptations, and some of the worst examples from the big horror franchises of the time. I was also really young at the time.
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The Dead Space guy did have a cool helmet
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Flipping between horizontal/vertical shooting modes on that starter pistol was very compulsively satisfying like spinning a key ring around on your finger while making your rounds. If a person has one of those in real life I bet theyād do it all the time.
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