Poll: SPOILERS Dead Space 2 has gone too far.

[ParadoX5o5]

Are you serious? It's been said before, but the first game had babies trying to stab the hell out of you with tentacles, which then you subsequently punt. I found it awesome. You're not shooting babies or small children, you're shooting their reanimated mutant corpses.

To be blunt, according to the game, once people become infected and become necromorphs, they cease to be human. Hell, I think the sole fact that they want to kill you with elongated claws of doom, with the occasional explosive arm thing and vomit, is enough reason to shot em in the face with random bits of mining equipment

 

[maddawg IAJI]

.

y'know its actually a very good comment, shooting my points to pieces, (and yeah on reflection the lurkers (or whatever) were babies, and i didn't put two and two together)

but the fact my argument fails dismally, and the fact i don't care shows that its not a rational reaction. childrens nurseries, babies etc are sacred to me and walking thorugh what should be a picture perfect happy zone with a pistol in your hand killing everything that moves strikes me as wrong on every level.

hmmm... i suppose that its a good point, well made, and simply a case of my finding that there's a line here for me. this isn't acceptable to me, but i can see why you aren't bothered.

The problem is that they aren't babies anymore. Those children were long dead before turning into walking land mines, now, they're brainless monsters bent on killing everyone and everything. They're feral animals.

People do have things they hold sacred, that's understandable. I like dogs, but if a fucking dog is trying to kill me, you can bet that I'm going to try and break its neck. I don't wanna die because I put my morals in the way of my own life. Survival is a natural instinct. Put yourself in the main characters shoes right now, you don't think he hates doing all this as well? He probably does, he is most likely scared shit less and you can tell by his heavy panting, his voice when he is stomping on a Necromorph and heck, I think the fact that he is fighting his own psyche should be evidence enough. Its either them or him and if he dies, those things are just gonna keep killing.

 

[Mercsenary]

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

you have been warned.

basically, im playing thorugh Dead Space 2 now, im about 3 hours through, and i'm shooting babies. i've already shot about 60 children no older than 12, but im now walking thorugh a nursery, listening to crying children and shooting mutated babies, which explode.

fuck MW2's airport scene, fuck Medal of Honours Taliban, this strikes me as over the line. had i known in advance there was this sort of content i would probably not have bought it.

Yes because babies taken over by a virulent alien virus should left alone and not put out of their misery. Perhaps Isaac should lay down his weapons and be brutally murdered by the Necromorphs.

HELLO THERE DR. MERCER.

To paraphrase Yahtzee,

It's only evil if your choice is between that OR DIEING.

Next you're going to tell me that killing the child necromorph forms is evil too.


Cause the babies and kid forms are TOTALLY running after to give me a hug. mmmhmm.

 

[pulse2]

I don't know why horrors always leave out females, babies and children, they do mutate too yaknow. As well as a variety of dogs and other animals, not just hounds.

Zombies for one are always a majority males, like as if the virus doesnt effect females.

 

[aPod]

It's a game, and it's a game where you kill a whole bunch of shit. Too me it's just another thing to shoot while i work my way to the next area.

It's not like i'm killing cute babies... a baby tries to kill me, well, lets just say i got an itchy trigger finger. Watch it Baby! Cause i'm watching you.

*slowly walks backwards into the dark, glaring at the baby.*

 

[pulse2]

I'm not even sure how this could be put in the same vain as CoD. Its okay in dead space because thats the point, everything is already dead and what isn't dead, should be dead.

 

[AllLagNoFrag]

-discuss-

Well, lets just say, IMAGINE, that there was a zombie outbreak (childish of me right?). So you and your family run into a school for shelter from a horde of zombies outside. However, whilst running towards the hall which is reported as a "safe zone", you spot three zombie babies who have mutated to the point where they will blow up near you, spilling zombie goo all over you and infecting you unless you shoot them.

Do you:
1) Kill them for your survival (sort of like how Isaac doesnt want to die)

or

2) Go back out into the horde (of only typical adult zombies who are alright to kill)

... and no, you only get to pick out of these two.

 

[The Rookie Gamer]

"cross my heart, hope to die..."

Those who played it will know what I'm talking about (It's practically the endgame), and know that THAT scene is way worse than the exploding babies.

Oh god. I felt queasy during that scene, but I managed to not botch it up.

OT: As other people pointed out, the Necromorphs are meant to be murderous to every non-necro. I felt the baby scene was appropriate at it showcased the horror of an murderous entities, that spared nothing, not even the infants. This is a horror game, after all, and almost nothing inspires as much horror as terrible things happening to children and/or babies.

 

[kypsilon]

Keep playing...soon the sounds of your path of destruction will drown out the wailing of the damned and you'll finally get what all those Vietnam veterans have been going on about for years.

 

[Alphakirby]

"cross my heart, hope to die..."

Those who played it will know what I'm talking about (It's practically the endgame), and know that THAT scene is way worse than the exploding babies.

Spoiler

"Stick a needle in your eye..."

That shit was fucking creepy

Especially when you fucked it up! =D

 

[mattttherman3]

They are not real babies therefore I do not care. If you showed me footage of babies exploading, I would have a problem with it.

 

[BatOtaku13]

spoiler alert: they're not babies!!
they're necromorphs!!

 

[UmbrellaAssassin]

We'll the thing is you are suppose to get drawn into the game. But what it all comes down to, is it is just that: a game.
While yes you may get scared and squeamish when playing the game, just cause they made it that way, but you come down to it is just pixels and lines of code.

Paintings are art, but they are just cloth and color paint on them.

I understand that games are fictional, but to welcome feelings of wonder and immersion and call it the 'unique power of gaming', but to write off feelings of disgust and horror as it being 'just a game' strikes me as a double standard. If gaming is an art form then it can evoke all emotions without us having to try and downplay it. Horror and visceral disgust are equally valid emotions and to deny that this guy has a right to feel them is to deny gaming full status as an art form.

It's basically ham-fisted collective spin; make sure gaming is only seen to be capable of conveying positive emotions.

I don't think of games as art purely because they are incapable of rousing my base emotions often enough for me to consider the medium as art. If they can do this to people I will change my mind. Let me feel primal joy, let me feel terror like ice water down my back, light my brain with anger, bring forth tears of awe and raise my gorge in revulsion...then it's art. To say that it's this guy's fault for feeling he way he does when the designers made him feel that way on purpose invalidates all their work and the medium as a whole.

It's his right to feel horror and equally it's his right as a thinking human to run from horror. they wanted you to feel disgust, they worked hard to draw you in and to make you feel what they wanted. I ruined Schindler's List for myself when I was 16 by concentrating on the quality of the filming and the camera errors, when if I was seeing it as art rather than product I would have been aghast. I often wonder if I did that on purpose to numb the impact, but I assure you that once the OP thinks it over he'll take something of value from it.

Well what I meant while yes games are an art, it is stupid to treat it as though the things you do in a game really happened. Many people go way over board trying to say "games went to far."As the people who made the game do want you to feel that it is real to some degree, but what ticks me off is how people treat games so harshly and act as though the child you kill on the game is real and not just a succession of codes.

I understand being immersed into the game and feeling weight to the actions you take in a game, though looking at the bigger picture it really isn't real and shouldn't be taken like that.

 

[TheDarkestDerp]

Spoiler or no, this information has me more interested in the game now.

Contrary to many reviews, I love the hell out of Splatterhouse. Yes, it's juvenile or "quaint" even as one reviewer stated, but guess what, it's called "Splatterhouse". If I wanted Shakesperean level storytelling, I'd be looking elsewhere. In the game, I get loads and load of foul language, heads riiiiipping off, beating things to death with my own severed arm, tearing out intestines via anus, and impaling things on spike in fountains of blood before cooking them in a giant oven. *shrugs* And some pictures of Jen's bewbs. Finally, though, a game which EARNED it's "M" Rating. No mere gunplay and occasional grade school swearing, this game worked for it's "M". This alone made me happy as a lark to play the game.

Video games are art, and fiction. They allow us to face all manner of adversity we never can in life, from Super Mutant bad-asses to moral dilemmas involving magickal thongs. Shooting zombies is just another one of these dilemmas, and if some of the zombies are kids, well whoop-de-doo. Kids have been a taboo enemy in video games for far too long already. In Fallout3, they could rob me, road cuss me and even shoot me to death, but I couldn't fire back... Why? If I shot a kid in this post-apocalypse fictious wasteland, did this somehow mean I was going to go out and do it irl? No. It's only a game. And in this game I was "Twatwaffle", a plasma rifle toting badass hero who stood up for human life in the wastelands, but would blow away anybody who tried to shoot her first. Why I would draw the line at murderous kids over any of the other things trying to kill me I cannot fathom.

TLDNR- It's just a game. Don't get so worked up about it.

 

[rushgus]

the game is designed to create disturbing and horrific situations, and though i dont like horror games, it does that well. mutated, montrous, disgusting freaks of nature are something that goes along that line. Your fighting your way through a station where families live, living out their daily lives, if only the full grown men are seen been mutated, then the immversivness of the game falls on its head and gets brain damage. its all done to make a genuinly scary and disturbing game, mutated killer kids and explosive babies are kind of horrific, but look at The Exorcism, it featured a girl possessed by Satan, and it is remembered as one of, if not THE greatest horror film of all time,but a VIDEOGAME tries to gain interest by trying something similiar and its gone TOO far? Get over it

 

[Zayren]

What? All the kids are immune to how the Necromorphs reproduce? That doesn't make any sense. Just because they were once human children, doesn't mean they're anything less than more diabolical hellspawn now.

 

[rushgus]

the game is designed to create disturbing and horrific situations, and though i dont like horror games, it does that well. mutated, monstrous, disgusting freaks of nature are something that goes along that line. Your fighting your way through a station where families live, living out their daily lives, if only the full grown men are seen been mutated, then the immversivness of the game falls on its head and gets brain damage. its all done to make a genuinly scary and disturbing game, mutated killer kids and explosive babies are kind of horrific, but look at The Exorcism, it featured a girl possessed by Satan, and it is remembered as one of, if not THE greatest horror film of all time,but a VIDEOGAME tries to gain interest by trying something similiar and its gone TOO far? Get over it. These things arent cute children

 

[the Revenator]

Good for you.

I thought the exploding babies were hilarious.

I second that, but then again I was as scared as I was amused (I am fucking terrified of children, for some reason) but not really, plus actually -and don't call me a psycho- why is killing a fully aware adult more messed up that an infant that doesn't even know, or care, about what is going on?

 

[el_kabong]

how was that a spoiler? I haven't played either dead space and I knew you shot babies, does sound pretty funny though.it always annoyed me that thing involving death and destruction seemed to skim over the young, like your immune to death until your old enough to drink.

Agreed. I don't necessarily want to kill kids, but take the Fable series. You can murder any adult you come across. There's kids running around, but they don't even take collateral damage, running away because they have a boo boo. If you have a game that is essentially about murder, either allow kids to be killed or don't include them. It's a real immersion breaker.

OT: I'm only parroting what most have already laid claim to. The babies aren't human anymore. If I dress a badger in a bonnet and diapers, are you going to not kill that when it's attacking you because it has some characteristic of humanity?

Also, although now it's overdone, some of the best horror movies involve things happening to kids. Although I hate kids (to a point), I still recognize their vulnerability and relative defenselessness. When combined with big scary monsters, it's a good tension builder because the kids in the movie have essentially no hope of winning. We all know, realistically, what is going to happen to the kid(s) and it appears inevitable, but we still hope that it doesn't. This difference between what we want in the outcome and what is assured by reality creates dramatic tension on the audience. Watching a tyrannosaurus coming to punt a small child into the sun is way more exciting and dreadful than watching that same creature stalk adults with guns.

 

[bushwhacker2k]

Good for you.

I thought the exploding babies were hilarious.

Srsly. It's meant to annoy the nay-sayers, and anyone who says this will make people want to go out and slaughter children is wrong IMO