Dead Space 2 Is No Resident Evil 4

[TarkXT]

Getting off the whole folding helmet thing.

Honestly I think you have something going with the generic monster screaming thing, Honestly the level that unnerved me most ever was Ravenholme in Half Life 2. You knew that the person inside the headcrab is in all likelihood dead. But the screams and moans that emit from the creatures, especially as you light them on fire...

It added a lot. It gave you the dark thoughts that maybe the headcrab was controlling the body but the mind and soul were still trapped still feeling every tiny ounce of agony that you or the crab inflicted.

That, I think should have been the direction they could have taken with the necromorphs adn made them more effective as an engine of terror. Have them call out to you in alien gibberish. Have them moan with all too human cries and grunts when isaac gives his Reb Brown man roar. Give the impression that whatever is getting to them(virus? fungus?) didn't quite remove every ounce of humanity from them.

As far as what kind of horror. Science-fiction horror, which is gory with a side of psychological. See Event Horizon, The Thing or the original Alien.

 

[Devil's Due]

I loved Dead Space 1, and I mean I really loved it. To the point that I played it through three times on different difficulties and collected every Trophy. It was scary and had just enough gore and in my opinion a good story.

Dead Space 2 on the other hand... I have yet to buy. The reviews, the comments and trailers have put me off. Games with gore are good, but games just deliberatly trying to be gory and 'Gruesome' just dont appeal to me. For instance I have never seen the appeal of the Saw films beyond the story behind them. I dont want to watch a man pull his eye out or cut his arm off or whatever.

I'll probably get the game eventually, when its cheaper probably so i can see for myself. But im already dissapointed that the series has taken this direction.

What you talking about...? You're putting comments from people on the internet above your own admiration for a video game series? Dead Space 2 is pretty good, it's not amazing and not as worrying as the first--as you already know what the enemy is now. But it's still an amazingly well done game for the most part. As for your "gore" concern, there's no more gore than what was in Dead Space 1. And you dislike Gore yet loved Dead Space 1, then I am at a loss, as Dead Space 1 was rather filled with such things. I remember because I have as well collected every achievement, suit, item, and text-log from the first.

As for the eye situation, there's only one part in the game that is even close to saw-level (even then it's rather tame, unless you screw up the sequence), and that's it. Is a few seconds of being uncomfortable more important than a possible 9 to 14 (depending on difficulty you choose) hour long game?

Just rent the game for a few bucks if you're curious, or at least buy it used, but if you loved the original then there's no way you should put off the second. Hell, the Train and Zero-Jump sections were worth the price of the game alone personally. Not to mention the rather sweet second boss battle. (Though I'll admit the first one is rather boring.)

So go try it out, Unitologist! Make Altman proud!

 

[Normandyfoxtrot]

I suppose my ultimate problems with the review assumes that the reader enjoyed RE4 and HL2 more and I didn't. I certainly found DS2 more fun than the prissy RE4 PC and no do talk to me about it a prissy pc port and it's not capcoms fault. No, it is god damn capcoms fault and so yeah, no love from me there. half-life2 frankly I find it a over hyped cookie cutter silent stoic emotionless robot in the silent unconnected protagonist like HALO with a shitty physics toy stapled to its ass and the same kind of vague uninteresting story. So, yeah I guess I'm functionally lobotomized fine and I suppose this ultimate counters no point and decays into "I think your rating it harshly because your rating shit/mediocre high." but I suppose everyone is allowed a rant time to time after all you make a living off it.

 

[Kilgengoor]

Oh jeez. Now I find myself in the very difficult position of adding my viewpoint to 120+ posts talking about more or less the same, while attempting to add new information to something that's been commented over and over again. Anyway, here I go.

Foldable helmets: yeah, they're unpractical from a design point of view, BUT yeah, they're cool as hell. I personally think in the case of Dead Space 2 they stick especially out since, in my opinion, the suit's design makes the face section of the helmet something closer to a welding mask, in that it's a rigid, one-piece part of protective clothing. I think in DS's universe it would make a LOT more sense if the front section of the helmet just slid over the character's head. It could still be automated, it could still look cool, but you know, just add a hinge around the person's ear and let it move from front to top. Simple, elegant, and credible for the even bitchier fan. When on top it would still offer protection to ANYWHERE except the face (that is, top and back of the head) if that's the user's will. Want to have all your head exposed? Then take it off. I think that'd be the best option, while still looking cool and sci-fi and being convenient and shit. But the multiple-piece animation looks way cooler and it's still the future, so yeah: it's something we'll have to accept, same as explosions/thrusters noises in space.

Now, I'd like to stand out for something I hold very dear while on the subject: Mass Effect. I don't quite remember if that happens in Mass Effect 2, but at least on 1 the helmet comes off from virtually nowhere, which would stick out as another fairly unrealistic plot device, BUT: This game revolves around mass effect fields, which is the techno-magic used to explain a lot of the unrealistic tropes in that universe. Mass Effect makes everything lighter or heavier, which would explain that disappearing helmet: it just folds and goes unnoticed (still, it doesn't explain a 150+ item space), but hey: helmets don't need to be protective because there is an energy barrier that wards off kinetic hazards, so the helmet could be perfectly made of ultra-light alloys only designed to be hermetic, so there's that. I know Yahtzee didn't even mention that, but damn I'll show my ME fanboyism if I have the opportunity to do so.

And about the lack of human-like emotions to enemies: I think that's just lazy. In my opinion if you make everything look painful, bizarre, gorey and most importantly, if you make it happen SLOWLY, that'll be hella lot more unnerving and scary. But the game seems almost absurdly focused on showing Isaac's inner turmoil, and almost all of the horror is concentrated on making us fear for the character's safety. Which is cool, I guess, but doesn't even bother on showing us much of what happens when you turn into a monster. So the game is more "don't let me die to these non-descript things" instead of "I'M FACING ONE OF THE GALAXY'S MOST TERRIBLE HORRORS -also don't let me die while doing it". But again, that would require the game to radically change its focus and turn it into something more similar to a coral documentary about the necromorphs instead of a single person's adventure against the monsters. So it's the plot's natural trajectory and is more than expected, I guess.

So there. It isn't really a surprise to me, since I kinda felt the same way after the first Dead Space, but I thought it was something that could be improved towards a second installment: we already learned to fear the creatures, now we could feast in the bigger-than-the-universe horror and how it predates on humans OR in Isaac's personal demons. It still feels like it chose the wrong path to me.

 

[snave]

I can't wait to see how many people missed the sarcasm in the last paragraph *makes popcorn*

Easier to suspend disbelief when the problem is hidden implication of the interface, or a menu. I can understand why Yahtzee singed out the helmets but not the even bigger weapon bulk storage and weight problems.

Anyhow, those probs don't tend to come in moveies so much anyway.

 

[Motakikurushi]

While Iron-Man's suit is entirely made up of hinges and joints and flappy bits, which in reality would make the suit fall apart or malfunction really easily, it still looks, visually, impressive. Although that scene where he gets hit by a tank missile and survives is ridiculous. As for RE4, I think the closest comparison I can make with Dead Space is the similarities between the monsters and the Regenerators. Both are aesthetically similar, but Regenerators move at a much slower pace and all they do is breathe heavily. Yet they're the most terrifying enemies in the game. Subtlety and suspense really works well in any horror game, and you'd be lying if you said you didn't panic whenever you heard that breathing noise.

 

[Accountfailed]

It's called a nanosuit.

 

[Levethian]

While Iron-Man's suit is entirely made up of hinges and joints and flappy bits, which in reality would make the suit fall apart or malfunction really easily, it still looks, visually, impressive...

Tony Stark's ridiculous technology is more believable because he is an octillionaire & mega-genius. Not sure grunt engineers should have comparable funding.

Still, style over substance is the mantra these days. Not much to be done. It does look nice, if you can suspend disbelief.

 

[fwlzdxil]

Honestly I think you have something going with the generic monster screaming thing, Honestly the level that unnerved me most ever was Ravenholme in Half Life 2. You knew that the person inside the headcrab is in all likelihood dead. But the screams and moans that emit from the creatures, especially as you light them on fire...

It added a lot. It gave you the dark thoughts that maybe the headcrab was controlling the body but the mind and soul were still trapped still feeling every tiny ounce of agony that you or the crab inflicted.

The Ravenholme zombies actually scream "ЕЕЕЕБАААААТЬ! БОЛЬНО!", which means "FFUUUUUCK! IT HURTS!" in Russian.

I suppose my ultimate problems with the review assumes that the reader enjoyed RE4 and HL2 more and I didn't. I certainly found DS2 more fun than the prissy RE4 PC and no do talk to me about it a prissy pc port and it's not capcoms fault. No, it is god damn capcoms fault and so yeah, no love from me there.

They released a patch (official one, not the custom so-called "HD patch", that stuff is crap), that fixes the lost graphic effects (like fog) and lighting, so if you still have it, might want to give it another go.

 

[geizr]

I'm probably reiterating someone else's point because I don't feel like reading through all the comments.

On the subject of horror: real horror is likely just unpalatable to most people in the mainstream audience(which is the target of most games cause that's where all the money is to be had). Considering that is the target of most games, movies, and some books these days, it's not surprising one doesn't get the true horror experience from these works.

Real horror is about hopelessness and one's powerlessness to alter or even mitigate one's plight. You will descend into madness and then be destroyed. You will do this bit-by-bit and be fully aware of the process the entire time, and there will be absolutely nothing you can do to stop it. To truly screw with you, a carrot of false hope might be dangled in front of you just to spur you on to the possibility of being able to find a way out. But then, just as you see the light at the end on the long dark tunnel, it's all ripped away from you at the very last moment, revealing the true inevitability of your descent into madness and then annihilation.

Let's be honest, to most people, that just would not be fun or enjoyable. Sure, there is definitely a contingent of people that would find it to be enjoyable(H. P. Lovecraft has his fans, after all), but most mainstream audiences would not. So, in order to sell the game in massive numbers, the horror has to be toned down or altered to something more whimsical. Hell, just the fact there's actually a win condition(I'm speaking in general terms here, because I haven't actually played the series) means the true horror is lost.

Regarding the folding helmets: dude, I'm a graduate physics major. Every time I go to the movies these days, I have to take off the suspenders of disbelief else they will snap and smack me in the face, really freaking hard. So, I feel your pain, but sometimes it's better to just enjoy the ride and not try to analyze things to within a gnat's ass of precision and accuracy for realism. It's just a cool-looking concept, and that's why it gets used(of course, one can argue that cool-looking is really not a sufficient aesthetic, but that's another rant). It doesn't have to actually be feasible. It's probably something borrowed from anime as you would see something primitively similar there(the space or flight helmet that would suddenly whoosh away behind the head and neck at the push of a button).

 

[ryo02]

just searched around youtube for this (not my video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbUD5t8cVuo&feature=related starts 5 seconds into the video fold up helmets are nothing new ... although this is probably even less realistic ahem.

 

[Grimrider6]

Frankly, I'm surprised a thread (partially) about good horror in games hasn't mentioned Thief: Deadly Shadows and the "Shalebridge Cradle" Level. The rest has to be spoilers, because some people might not have played it, and I don't want to ruin it for them.

Spoiler

Thief: DS nailed the horror aspect of the level really well, and did so because they understood one of the key points of horror in an interactive game is to rob the player of their sense of comfort and security. Nothing is scarier than the unknown, and your own imagination can scare you better than anything on screen will. It helped that Thief was always about avoiding conflict, so you never feel like a badass with a thousand weapons, but it was still a game about making the player feel powerful. You spend every level being the hunter, stalking the guards from the shadows like an elite ninja. You watch them jump at your noises, you toy with them before sneaking up behind them, and taking them out. Darkness was safety and security, because it kept you hidden from noisy, overt enemies.

Then, when you're called to break into an abandoned, supposedly haunted, insane asylum, you find yourself robbed of your former position of power. For half the level, you're alone in a creepy, pitch black environment. The shadows that used to be your friends now suddenly seem like they could be concealing goddamn anything. And you have to listen to this all the while:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md0FLVpdPnw

And when you finally get to the generator, put in the new fuse, and get the lights going to let you see what the hell might be hiding in the dark, the sound of it powering up is so loud, so obvious, that you know that anything in the building knows exactly where you are, and you realize there are no more shadows to hide in.

To be honest, the terror of the entire level almost made me stop playing the game. To my mind, it's the best example of horror applied to a video game.

 

[thegreatkenji]

I just recently started playing the original Dead Space, and literally four days ago i tweeted the following. "plays like RE4 in space but the tension of having to stop to fire your gun is gone" Without the tension of having to stop to fire fighting the big impressive necromorphs becomes nothing more than a kite fest. the game has yet to challenge me and the more i play it the more i think having to stop to shoot in RE4 was less lazyness and more a design master stroke.

 

[Anthan]

When he mentioned the possibility of the necromorphs having retained a human voice, my stomach churned and I was instantly reminded of the Zombies from half life.
The ones which instead of shouts of agression yell lines of human speech "Oh god help me!" and the like.
I went on a hunting trip once and found it easier to pull the trigger than I did when I first saw the zombies.

 

[Normandyfoxtrot]

I just recently started playing the original Dead Space, and literally four days ago i tweeted the following. "plays like RE4 in space but the tension of having to stop to fire your gun is gone" Without the tension of having to stop to fire fighting the big impressive necromorphs becomes nothing more than a kite fest. the game has yet to challenge me and the more i play it the more i think having to stop to shoot in RE4 was less lazyness and more a design master stroke.

No, it was design laziness after all it's fucking capcom and well their pretty much a shit sandwich with cheese made of shit and bread shit loaf.

 

[Aurini]

Ex-military here, who rides a motorcycles; I understand defensive technology.

So, here is my response to people who complain about certain elements of Ironman being 'unrealistic' when the whole premise of his superman suit is unrealistic from the get go.

Armor, and helmets specifically, serve two functions. The first is to distribute the force of a projectile over a larger area - this is what kevlar and ceramic plates do. While a bullet has a great deal of kinetic energy for its mass, it generally won't contain a *lethal* amount of energy - when fragmentation strikes a combat helmet it is spread out over the entire area of the helmet, and through that into the strap-system wrapped around your head. Unpleasant as hell, but not lethal. The same principle goes for hard-hats - rather than the sharp edge of an I-Beam cracking your skull open, the energy is transferred to a series of straps.

Also, the curved nature of helmets helps deflect things.

Hard-shell helmets, then, are useful for energies which are lethal over a small surface, but survivable when spread out over the body. Your body still absorbs the total energy of the projectile, but it is dissipated over a larger area.

Now let's take motorcycle helmets: they're a completely different story.

In your typical motorcycle accident it's not the energy of the impact that you have to worry about - it's the sudden change in velocity. A military helmet might resist the hardness of the curb, and the strap-system might not break your skull - but when your brain slams into the bone going at 80 km/h the integrity of your body won't matter. The neurons turn to mush.

That's why motorcycle helmets are so bulky - the shell is soft, not hard, and it contains a crumpling material to decrease the rate of deceleration. If your brain goes from 80 to 0 in 0.01 seconds you're dead; but if the deceleration takes 0.1 seconds you'll live.

So how does this relate to Ironman? Well, think of the scene where he gets hit by the F15 and his velocity changes from 100 km/h to -300 km/h. Even if you posit a perfect crumpling material, he'd still need a suit that made him look like the Michellin Man to survive that change in delta-V. It doesn't matter how hard the shell of the Ironman suit is - inside it there'd be nothing but mush.

In Ironman I'm willing to overlook all of this because it's a comic book movie. It does a good job of giving me suspension of disbelief, so I'm willing to accept that he can build a particle accelerator in his house. But if the latter bothers you as being 'unrealistic' then you should also be complaining about the unrealism of his armor (not to mention that with the accleration his jet boots use, he should be blacking out regularly).

That all said, however, I agree with Yahtzee's critique of the magical gear helmets that appear everywhere. In Ironman it's acceptable, because that movie's largely style over substance. But in something like Dead Space, the game would benefit from realistically limited and crappy gear - make Isaac the underdog, not the superhero space marine. Maybe then I could relate to him and give a shit.

 

[Labcoat Samurai]

When I apply the intentional fallacy I mean in the way people leap to the defence of a game by dismissing any criticism that can be generated through comparison to another game. People who say 'It's not trying to be Resident Evil 4' are missing the point: in the minds of enough audience members, the game is similar enough in tone to Resident Evil 4 to warrant comparison. Whatever ambition the developers may have had in mind is not enough to warrant ignoring anyone's opinion about how they reacted to the game.

Yeah, when I watch an interesting film or read an interesting book, I try to avoid reading anything else the author might have said about it. I quite liked Donnie Darko, for example, but I dislike Richard Kelly's own very mechanical and, consequently, artless (ok, maybe a slight exaggeration), interpretation of his own work. Or take The Fountain. I've never read or listened to a single thing Aronofsky has said about it, and I'm not sure I want to. I'm quite fond of my own take on it. At the very least, I think it's important to form your own interpretation *before* you go looking for what the author thinks about it.

In the case of these people, I think they're just apologists. If you like Dead Space 2 (which incidentally, so far I do), how much did the authors' intent really have to do with it? I can reverse engineer their intent from the game, but it ultimately doesn't matter what they were trying to do unless I'm evaluating *them*.

On the other hand, I imagine a lot of people giving the "intent" argument are really just meaning to say that the work shouldn't be judged by an inappropriate standard. Again, I don't think we should judge the absurdities in Airplane and The Matrix by the same standard. One way to phrase that is to say that Airplane wasn't intended to be serious, but one might unintentionally run afoul of your pet peeve without really meaning to. The key is not what the authors intended so much as how well they communicated that intention within the context of the work.

 

[Radu Iscu]

As far as I can remember the whole folding helmet craze started with Stargate (the original, not the "so campy it's bad series"). The funny thing is it actually had a point there: make the characters look like they're doing magic, you know, what technology is to the dim witted. They were not meant for protection but for freaking people out.

The unintended side effect is that it was cool to have switchblade-like stuff, and this has lead to the "effect" being used solely for the "cool". Ever since the late nineties it's been mostly "cool" fiction instead of science fiction. If anyone objects that person is being pedantic.

As for the whole "youdontunderstandthem" argument, it doesn't hold water. Let's face it. You knew what Half-Life was all about. You knew what Starcraft was all about, even the second one. I didn't play the game and I don't intend to. I've seen others do it and the jack in the box scare mechanic doesn't really cut it in my book. I've only seen it used effectively once, and that was to create a false sense of security in the audience, "oh, it's that kind of a scary movie". Kudos to those guys for using a cliché in such a manner.

The problem with most of the games these days is that they are done by dorks that are trying way to hard to copy-paste stuff that they like together, without realizing that peacing a fine monster takes more than just the body parts. In Frankenstein the doctor never tells the exact way in which he reanimates the body, and various adaptations have always substituted this uncertainty with the scare of the day (electricity, genetic engineering), thus removing one of the most important elements out of the story.

The dorks that make these games have the same problems as those film makers had. They all want to use someone else's story to convey their fears, while missing the point that a true artist makes. Uncertainty is king. If you don't spell it out people will want answers. They'll start thinking, they'll read it again, watch it again, or play it again. How many games have you seen that have this built in.

How many games do you know that end with a shot of a spinning top that doesn't show if it's falling or not? How many games end with the storyteller walking off his limp and you asking yourself if there were any giveaways to him deceiving you for the whole time. What if Max Paine had ended with him shown in an asylum recovering from a Valkyr addiction, the doctors commenting on the fact that he can't tell the difference between his high induced hallucinations and the real murders he committed, maybe even implying that he may have been the one killing his own family. Wouldn't that have made a better game?

 

[Nifarious]

Yahtzee: "What is the issue is the fact that people can argue over the game's "intention," which implies flat out that the game has failed to bring across a consistent tone, another example of the lack of discipline that now seems to universally affect triple-A games."

Sorry, but you are off base there. "Intention" arguments are the stupidest plight to all discussions purporting to be intelligent. They can be applied to anything, and will always be done so with ineptitude. The made thing--book, game, movie--bears no intention or consciousness of its own. Its life is the connection it makes with its audience. There is nothing more than that movement, that communication, between a reader and her text. The author is severed from the work. You can write blatant propaganda fiction, but putting rhetoric in cultured clothing neither cultures sophistry nor bastardizes storytelling. The author is in the story only as a severed remnant, discarded packaging. What matters is the story and its immersed reader. You criticize immersion for the wrong reasons, and what's lacking here isn't so much the game as it is the player.

Basically, you criticize the game for not being human enough. But it most definitely is, only not in the way you're asking it to be. There are no persons to the game's necromorphs and corpses. They are instead bodies--physical, organic. This is more akin to Alien, with the carnal turning against you, invoking a much more penetrating dread and disgust than other types of horror can provide. (Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject is useful here.)

The violence isn't ham-fisted or excessively over the top just to cheaply force a thrill out of its audience. Consider this difference. Guillermo Del Toro's a perfect example of this sort of hackery. His visceral violence penetrates the audience so that they suffer the violence themselves. It brings the violence onto the audience rather than before them, invoking pain rather than horror, which is the one impermissible use of violence in media. Dead Space 2 instead uses the visceral to turn the audience's own bodies against them. Similar to the rather prolific zombie genre, necromorphs are transformations of the common and familiar human, which we approach with the everyday attachments that body=person, and it violently rips these associations from us. This is why I am so thrilled that Dead Space 2 brings in children and even infants, which I haven't had to kill since the original Silent Hill. Children are not only people, but meant to be cherished and protected, which is why them swarming and slashing at you--and yes, you curb stomping them to pieces--is so delightfully disturbing.

The body turns against the person. This person isn't Isaac the character, but rather Isaac the player (which is where the promise of horror video games lies). Perhaps he would be better off silent, but that's a separate matter.

In any case, I'll refrain from arguing for Dead Space any further. But it is my rather Pyrrhic hope that you consider these points before dismissing such a superb game.