In the future, there are zombies - notes on Dead Space

I just got done playing Dead Space on the PS3. Dead Space, for those of you who do not know, is a third person shooter video game from Electronic Arts that takes place, largely, on a mining ship whose crew have been turned into zombies. The main character - Isaac Clarke - goes around dismembering them with power tools. My favorite is the remote industrial saw.

First . . . Isaac Clarke? Sheesh. Neither Isaac Asimov nor Arthur Clarke wrote horror! I think a better name would have been H. P. Bradbury. Oh, well, they didn't ask me, hehe.

Second, the consistent message from video games is that the future will bring with it zombies. Be in Halo, Half-Life or Dead Space, it appears that zombies are our future. Who knew?

Third, to get to something resembling a review . . . Dead Space is Resident Evil 4 in space. No, really! If you liked RE4, you'll like Dead Space - and a lot of people liked Resident Evil 4 so I figure this game will be pretty popular. But just about everything is taken from RE4, except the setting. The character goes around at normal speed, or running, you can't fire like that - to fire, you have to get into your firing stance, raise your weapon, which all have laser sights to tell you where you're going to hit. With your weapon raised, you move and pan slowly and your field of vision narrows. So none of the run and spray tactics that most shooters have - you generally select a position, fire, and then run to a new position if you need to.

The horror in the game is . . . well, it's pretty typical. All horror shooters just really crank up the gore, they have moody music, and Dead Space isn't any different in that regard. The sound is good. All the weapons are jarring to use, loud and sudden.

The game - like I said, a clone of RE 4 in many ways - also has monsters jump out at you from all over. While it's true that startling isn't the same as horror, there's a reason so many horror movies startle their audiences. Dead Space is an almost constant series of startling events. Monsters are constantly jumping out, jumping down, popping out from behind you. Constantly.

For me, there was a little too much jumping out. The game is clearly designed for the "hard core" set.

An aside: the people with the greatest tolerance to stress out of all professions are professional video gamers. They handle stress better than air traffic controllers and trauma physicians. So, by inference, even non-professional hard core gamers are pretty inured to stress. They don't much feel it. Which is why hard core gamers will dig on the monsters jumping out at them - they aren't startled in particular.

I'm not hard core, so after a while it was a little . . . wearing. So wearing that I decided to finish the game on the easy setting because the game is quite good at making every moment feel like it might be your last. A little too good for me.

Also, like most games that are pure shooter, there gets to be a little monotony, which combined with the constant startling nature of the game, the constant need to have your character scan the environment for enemies - the fact that nowhere, not even rooms with save points in them, are really safe - can get slightly numbing. Something other than just shooting might have been nice.

Still, the game did have nice flourishes. They do have some interesting zero gravity things, jumping around from surface to surface - but even then, maybe especially then, it was an opportunity for zombies to come at you in new and interesting ways. You had even more possible places that they can come at you from. The game also offered a few puzzles, but they were a tiny fraction of the game. It's mostly a shooter.

The game also has an inventory system. You have to choose between healing resources and ammo. I wasn't thrilled with that, any more than I was thrilled with it in Resident Evil 4. I don't think detailed resource allocation is horrific. Or even interesting. Yes, it's unbelievable to be able to carry around fifteen weapons and a million rounds of ammo and a dozen health packs. But you know what else is not particular realistic? Zombies. Zombies are not realistic. Indeed, at this juncture, they're becoming a little trite.

The game is also attractive. It has a grim, blood-splattered, moodily lit sci-fi setting. The game is also claustrophobic, reminding me of Alien - which is probably what they were trying to go for.

And, lastly, and perhaps most amusingly, other than the message that in the future there will be zombies, the game also teaches that Scientology turns people into zombies. Oh, excuse me, Unitology. I was amused at the Scientology turns people into zombies angle.

All said and done, I give the game a B. It's a well-executed game, but to get a really high mark a shooter has to have more than shooting in it nowadays. Dead Space is a little too much one note, and the stress levels on the game are outrageous which might lend a horror aspect to it but makes the game draining.

Gears of War

I'm slow. Gears of War 2 comes out in a couple of days and I just finished Gears of War. I started to play it 18 months ago or so but it didn't capture me, then. It was . . . y'know, a shooter.

For me, game play is paramount and the shooter interface for Gears of War is real good. The characters move believably from cover to cover. But, in the end, it was just a shooter game. The game play was swiped almost entirely from kill.switch - a deeply mediocre game - and with all "tactical shooters" Gears of War suffers from a lack of variety. You kill something, you go to the next area and you kill s'more guys. There are a few cut scenes, but the characters are never developed and, even at the end, I wasn't sure what the hell I was doing or why I was doing it - other than, y'know, there was an ugly alien enemy whose genocide was the point of the game. I got that.

Am I the only person who finds the prevalence of genocide in these kinds of games disturbing? Just about every sci-fi shooter there is seems to incorporate genocide as the only legitimate end of the conflict! It's pretty disturbing, but that's the goal of Gears of War. Wipe out the ugly enemies.

There's one scene where you have to drive a vehicle. One. Makes me wonder why the bothered to put it in! And just when you think you might get to drive another vehicle . . . just another lame cut scene.

So, while the graphics were good, and the shooting interface was good, the game suffers - like many shooters - from monotony. Go down another corridor. Kill another horde of faceless enemies. Move on.

That kind of ethos is becoming increasingly rare, too. Most shooter games - such as the Halo and Half-Life 2 games - throw some vehicles into the mix. Halo and the Half-Life games also have something else that Gears of War almost entirely lacks: a story. Oh, sure, Halo's story is kind of de rigeur and contrived - evil aliens to destroy in an environment that's gonna blow at any second - but it's there. Half-Life 2's story is actually reasonably cool, and it has Alix and Dog and Alix and Dog are amongst the coolest video game characters ever. But who is Marcus Fenix and why should we care about him and his tiny headed friends? What is the world they're on and why are these guys coming out of the ground to kill them? Who fuckin' knows. I don't and I played the game.

Well, not all of the game. I decided that the final boss was just too annoying to beat. Maybe if I had any investment whatsoever in the characters, setting or outcome - which I read online and is deeply predictable - I would have slogged through to the end. The final boss in almost any video game is going to be annoyingly difficult, because most game designers mistake "difficult" for "interesting". Undoubtedly, many gamers, particularly those who identify as "hardcore", like hard games, much like marathoners like running 26 miles at a stretch. I'm a pretty casual gamer and I've long learned that any cut scene I want to see I can find on YouTube, so skipping the last, stupidly difficult fight that overturns any sense of verisimilitude for being "tactical" that might have been created in the previous play of the game - like, why would a cloud of bats stop machinegun fire? - is pretty easy for me.

So, all said and done, Gears of War is about a B-. It has some pretty good parts but overall it's not really a great game, and is only barely a good one.