I’m currently suing EA Games for a new leather couch and pair of Levi’s

I believe that the Shooter genre (Both FPS and Over-the-Shoulder) has been milked to death.

Every year there’s at least ten new World War II shooters, five new zombie/horror games, and seven sci-fi themed shooters. Rarely do First Person Shooters or Third Person Shooters deviate from these three genres. It’s possible that it’s because these three genres are ‘safe’ and ‘marketable’. With current legislation against violent video games, what else is there to shoot besides Nazis and terrorists, zombies and demons, and aliens and robots? Anything else would create a shitstorm that would backlash against the game company itself.

The only thing left for a game company to create that would be ‘original’ is to make a Shooter where you kill zombie Nazis in space.

That is the game you would get if you added Hitler to Dead Space.

Anyways, let’s talk about Dead Space:

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FUCKING AWESOME!

The premise of the game is that you are a virtually anonymous engineer, Isaac Clarke (named after science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke), of a space ship crew who has intercepted a distress call from an off-world mining station. You and your crew crash land in the docking bay of the mining station USG Ishimura, a “Planet Cracker”, only to find that it is derelict, save for a swarm of a zombified, alien-like monsters, the Necromorphs. The Necromorphs themselves are probably the best-designed alien monstrosities since the original Alien design by H.R. Giger. And, like every other space shooter since Doom, it’s your job to survive long enough to find either safety, or a way off the infested outpost.

As I mentioned above, you are in control of a virtually anonymous crew member. All you have is a name, and up until the end of the game, you don’t even have a face. Apparently I’m the only person alive who has a problem with the main character being the ONLY crew member who wears a helmet, and here’s why: Having a faceless, speechless character removes any attachment I might have towards the character in question.

It’s kind of like an out of body experience, but you never gave a shit about the body you were in. So you have this DRONE, this almost robotic character with no personality that you either love or hate, and no facial expressions to convey his (or even possibly HER *”Metroid” reference*) emotion to the gamer. The result of removing any ‘humanity’ from the main character is an emotional experience equal to a bomb squad sending in one of those tank robots into a building to disarm a bomb: they don’t give a fuck about the robot being blown to hell. If a bomb sniffing dog got killed, there would be a heavy emotional impact. I guess I feel the same way about sending this shell of a man into a monster-infested space ship, which is in sharp contrast to other games like the masterpiece that is Silent Hill 2.

But honestly, I think that is my only real rant. The rest of the game is superb in almost every possible way.

In addition to the tried-and-true story of being stranded somewhere and having to slaughter your way through legions of horrific creatures, there are written and video logs of the ship’s crew detailing some of the events that led up to the current state of the space station. While eerie these accounts may be, the final conclusion is a lot weaker than what I had envisioned in my mind earlier in the game. The analogy here is that it’s like watching the movie of an extremely scary book: What you get isn’t as horrifying as what you had imagined.

Dead Space’s saving grace is that there is also a more personal story where you, the masked emotionally void automaton, are trying to find your wife/girlfriend/princess/whatever, Nicole, who is a member of the Ishimura’s crew. During your scavenging, you’ll encounter Nicole briefly, though you are unable to meet with her. There is also the insane scientist, Dr. Mercer, (*insert thunder and lighting*) who is an insane Scientologist… er, “Unitologist” who wants to bring the source of the Necromorphs, a glyphic stone called “The Marker”, to Earth because he believes the monsters are ‘divine’. This I’m not going to touch up on too much just because I don’t want to ruin any of it for anybody.

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