Dead Space 2

[dagrox94]

That’s the thing about Dead Space 2, it relies heavily on jump scares. I prefer the psychological scares.

[Deathmonkey7]

Tell me, does the following seem familiar?

A few months into the journey, the ships respond to a distress signal from the planet Tau Ceti V. A rescue team is sent to the planet surface where they discover strange eggs. The eggs infect the rescue team and integrate them into an alien communion that calls itself the Many. The infestation eventually overtakes both ships.

The soldier awakens in a cryo-tube on the medical deck of the Von Braun with amnesia due to a computer malfunction. He is immediately contacted by another survivor, Dr. Janice Polito, who guides him to safety before the cabin depressurizes and demands he rendezvous with her on deck 4. Along the way, the soldier battles the infected crew members. The Many also telepathically communicate with him, attempting to persuade the soldier to join their collective.

That’s System Shock 2. Its pretty much exactly the same as Dead Space, just that DS doesn’t have psy powers, regen chamber thingos, hallucinations and, most importantly, SHODAN

They dont really seem similar at all. Aside from there being some sort of signal and there being infected humans there are no similarities. Did you really play Dead Space or are you just dicking with us?

Also why the fuck do you care enough to type up a giant wall of text about the mechanics of horror? Btw I played System Shock 2. It wasn’t scary at all.

[DrasarSalman]

Who thinks the giant needle tentacle thing will be modded into a penis?

[CTID]

@garthbartin

And I googled System Shock and it didn’t look scary for shit. But it was old. So you are probably just being overwhelmed by horror nostalgia.

You could not possibly make yourself sound more ignorant ever again. There was nothing scary looking about System Shock 2. It was atmosphere. That is why it was scary. That game will damn near make you piss yourself if you get into it. It has an EXTREMELY isolated, creepy atmosphere. And saying “I googled it and it didn’t look scary” just makes you look like a completely uninformed moron. Good job.

[garrthbarrttinn]

@loony636

Horror, finally, is an even more complex version of an emotion, being a state of mind. It comprises of a number of complex emotions, coming together to not only scare the pants off the player, but truly scare them. That’s a feat few films or, more topically, games has achieved. What I believe makes a strong horror game, and where Dead Space specifically fails, is below.

1) Isolation

The best way of conveying horror is to isolate the player. Helplessness is absolutely essential to truly scaring the player. While its certainly possible to still have a horror film with the audience experiencing it through a group, such as Alien, its more common for films featuring groups to focus on isolating individual characters to convey horror, like Event Horizon and Sunshine. Isolation works because, when you’re alone, you’re at your most vulnerable emotionally. You’re more susceptible to other emotions, and you are intrinsically more likely to be scared while by yourself.

Dead Space fails on this level easily by keeping you in constant contact with, well, everyone it can get its hands on. Granted, I’m only up to Chapter 7, but right now I’m constantly yelled at by pretty much everyone. System Shock 2 did this perfectly; you run through a bunch of levels at the behest of your saviour, finally get to them and find out that she killed herself after seeing what the super-evil SHODAN had planned. At that moment, where you are completely alone, you experience true horror. Or get damn close.

2) Helplessness

The feeling of helplessness is crucial to horror. Kryptonite was used to make Superman experience horror just because it meant that he was no longer able to blast his way out of threatening situations. Alien was great at doing this because nobody was able to kill the Alien, meaning that they were completely helpless against it and likely to die at any moment.

Dead Space, on the other hand, throws so much ammo at you that you absolutely don’t know what to do with it. And, if you don’t have ammo, you can just buy it with the thousands of credits you get. I have never run out of ammo in normal situations, and the game makers make it virtually impossible to do, since every single enemy drops ammo, and there are ammo pickups every ten meters. That means that all but the bosses are easy as shit to kill, meaning that the feeling of horror goes away immediately.

Ironically, Dead Space actually does this really well at the very beginning of the game. When you first get off the tram and are chased down a corridor without any guns by a couple of angry aliens, you are at your most helpless. You had no information, everyone you knew had just died (as far as you knew), and you were being chased by enemies you had no way of killing. Run like hell Clarke. Run like hell.

3) Atmosphere

Now, there are a lot of things that something in the horror genre has to do right, but the most basic of these is atmosphere. You can’t have a horror game in a sunny field with happy bunnies. Doesn’t. Work. Space ships basically write themselves in terms of atmosphere, and this is something Dead Space capitalises on well enough. There is organic stuff everywhere, lots of dead bodies, blood splatters, random humans killing themselves and lots and lots of jumping aliens. My only criticism is that it looks pretty much exactly like System Shock 2. Pretty much down to the random organic growths.

Oh, and another thing; the music is used extremely poorly, mostly because it is always used to signify danger. If the player knows exactly when danger is coming (because he hears music and always knows that that means danger), then there’s no horror, because he knows exactly when its coming. Its like someone coming on screen before a scene in Event Horizon and saying “look out! Scary scene ahead!”.

4) Misc.

There are a lot of other things games, films and books do to get given a ‘horror’ title. So much of it comes down to a ‘je ne sais quoi’ quality that it is almost indefinable what makes it so compelling as a horror title. That said, there are a few things Dead Space does that do the opposite. The bread crumbs thing is one, the shop is another. Granted, Resident Evil 4 did the shop and that was still quite a good horror game, but here it just seems horribly tacked on and doesn’t fit at all with the setting. Not only can you purchase enough ammo to fix your danger needs, it just doesn’t feel very convincing. Why would a ship have a shop selling ammunition? Would the company not simply provide all the ammunition its employees needed? Further, why have a credit system at all? Why do you need currency on a space ship? Do oil rigs have their own currency? Do submarines need vendors? It just doesn’t make sense.

I’m sure there are more things that I’ve forgotten, but there are more than enough reasons to make the basis of my point clear. Dead Space is, at times, scary, but its not a horror game. You sometimes (but only sometimes) sit on the front of your seat, and only do you sometimes feel any of the emotions I listed above. More often you feel frustrated and bored, running around corridors and killing the same zombies you’ve been killing for the last 8 hours.

I’m playing Dead Space 1 on hard, and its still ludicrously easy. Though inconsistently frustrating in parts. AKA, terrible pacing.

Wow. A wall of stupidity. First, horror/fear is pretty far from a complex emotion. It could be argued to even be the SIMPLEST of all emotions: it’s the triggering of adrenaline from a threat. That’s pretty damn simple. What you have mentioned above aren’t key components of horror, they’re just a bunch of ways of triggering it. The difficulty comes in trying to immerse the player in the environment enough that threats in the game are reacted to like threats in real life. Or to make threats in game so great that even with little immersion the player still has at least a small reaction. Dead Space aims to do both. Now lets move on to each section.

Isolation:
I’ll admit, Dead Space 2 lacks this a little. It was a necessary sacrifice; although isolation makes the game scarier lack of human interaction makes the game a little boring. Also, later on, you call RE4 a good horror game, yet in RE4 you are constantly contacted by someone telling you what to do, just like in Dead Space. Also, in a large portion of RE4 you even have a companion following you around all the time, a companion that’s just about as unscary as it gets. By your own standards RE4 is a shit horror game and Dead Space is better.

Helpless:
Eh, maybe your just really good or too cautious a player. Most people will run low on ammo. if you’re not on the highest difficulty settings, you should turn it up. Also, lowering ammo runs the risk of players getting stuck with no ammo. It’s annoying as fuck when that happens. Like in RE4. If you weren’t trying very hard and wasted some ammo, then ran out later, you were 100% fucked. Especially with the regenerators. I ran into them with nothing but a couple grenades and a couple mine gun shots. It was annoying as hell. Took me hours to beat them with my limited ammo.

Atmosphere:
Same as System Shock? Ha. Haha. Hahahaha. Bullshit. After scrolling through a bunch of system shock images I have yet to see a SINGLE one that looks that similar to Dead Space. So far all I’ve seen are bright half-life-esque scientific corridors. And random killings and organic growths are such a wide category it’s absurd to say one game is too similar to another because they both have them. It’s like saying 28 Weeks Later is a copy of Dawn of the Dead because they both have zombies in them.

There is fear in anticipation as well. If you start hearing scary music, you’ll tense up and start wildly searching for the threat. Like the regenerators in RE4. They were pretty arguably by far the scariest thing in RE4. Yet they ALWAYS announced their presence; they made an incredibly loud sniffling noise so you always knew when they were coming. Music can be used in the same way.

Misc:
Man, this is soooo idiotic I don’t know where to start. First of all, not every part of a game needs to be perfectly justifiable. Developers have to sacrifice a degree of realism in order to make things more practical. Like the shop guy in RE4. He wasn’t realistic at all. But he was necessary for the gameplay. Now, the shops themselves aren’t the slightest bit unrealistic, simply the fact that they’re selling weapons and ammunition. The Ishimura =/= an oil rig. This thing’s fucking huge. It’s not just a vessel, it’s a traveling community/colony, and as such, it will have all the functions of a colony, not just those of a mining vessel.

@CTID

You could not possibly make yourself sound more ignorant ever again. There was nothing scary looking about System Shock 2. It was atmosphere. That is why it was scary. That game will damn near make you piss yourself if you get into it. It has an EXTREMELY isolated, creepy atmosphere. And saying “I googled it and it didn’t look scary” just makes you look like a completely uninformed moron. Good job.

A MASSIVE part of atmosphere is appearance. Loony himself made that point. If something isn’t the slightest bit scary visually it really cripples it’s atmosphere. So if two games look entirely different visually, they probably won’t have very close atmospheres besides very very broad categories such as isolated.

EDIT: I’m downloading System Shock 2 now. I’ll see if it is really that good.

[BahamutBBob]

I just picked this up today. I hope I like it

I’m not expecting much from the MP, it looks like Left 4 Dead versus, and Valve already did that pretty much as well as it could be done.

[DrasarSalman]

I have today watched a live steam at livestream.com/Jojje of this. Freakin’ hilarious!

[loony636]

@Deathmonkey7

They dont really seem similar at all. Aside from there being some sort of signal and there being infected humans there are no similarities. Did you really play Dead Space or are you just dicking with us?

I’m up to about Chapter 7. If you’ve played both of them, then you’ll see that right from the atmosphere, the whole ‘fixing areas of the ship’ goal mechanic, the alien goo and the zombies, they’re quite similar.

And if this is going to turn into a “but I wasn’t scared by ‘insert scary movie/game/book here’” competition, then we might as well stop now. We’re discussing the horror genre; you might not have been scared by Psycho, but its most certainly a horror movie.

@garthbartin

Wow. A wall of stupidity.

I’d hoped for an intelligent response, but no, not here.

@garthbartin

First, horror/fear is pretty far from a complex emotion. It could be argued to even be the SIMPLEST of all emotions: it’s the triggering of adrenaline from a threat.

Ha! No, see, here’s the thing; triggering adrenaline from a zombie jumping out from a grate isn’t horror, that’s Saw’s idea of horror. The reason Saw isn’t horror is because they replace atmospheric buildup and emotional construction with, well, blood splatters and dismemberment. True horror isn’t something you just throw together by triggering some hormone releases; its a state of mind that the player experiences while playing the game.

@garthbartin

I’ll admit, Dead Space 2 lacks this a little. It was a necessary sacrifice; although isolation makes the game scarier lack of human interaction makes the game a little boring. Also, later on, you call RE4 a good horror game, yet in RE4 you are constantly contacted by someone telling you what to do, just like in Dead Space. Also, in a large portion of RE4 you even have a companion following you around all the time, a companion that’s just about as unscary as it gets. By your own standards RE4 is a shit horror game and Dead Space is better.

Actually, 90% of RE4 you spend away from what’s-her-face. And when you are near her, she’s retardedly useless. Its still isolating because you have to do every fight with her hiding in a bin. I explained this, and how you can convey horror with a group of people, but you seem to have ignored it.

@garthbartin

Eh, maybe your just really good or too cautious a player. Most people will run low on ammo. if you’re not on the highest difficulty settings, you should turn it up. Also, lowering ammo runs the risk of players getting stuck with no ammo.

I’m too good? That’s like, the opposite of most internet opinions. And yes, I am playing on the highest difficulty, and I have like 50,000 spare credits. With the best Rig at this point.

But the point I was making is that too much ammo means you lose the horror aspect immediately. If you can easily kill everything, then you can’t construct horror; you can get a microsecond of fear from a zombie jumping out of a grate, but after that they just bazooka it away.

@garthbartin

Same as System Shock? Ha. Haha. Hahahaha. Bullshit. After scrolling through a bunch of system shock images I have yet to see a SINGLE one that looks that similar to Dead Space. So far all I’ve seen are bright half-life-esque scientific corridors. And random killings and organic growths are such a wide category it’s absurd to say one game is too similar to another because they both have them. It’s like saying 28 Weeks Later is a copy of Dawn of the Dead because they both have zombies in them.

You haven’t played it. Stop making comparisons to something you haven’t played. I see you are downloading it. Do that. SHODAN is fucking terrifying.

Alien infection on the ship, biological organisms/tentacles everywhere, zombies, etc. Yes, you could say that its too broad a category, but I personally found it very similar. But I predict that you will not.

@garthbartin

Man, this is soooo idiotic I don’t know where to start. First of all, not every part of a game needs to be perfectly justifiable. Developers have to sacrifice a degree of realism in order to make things more practical. Like the shop guy in RE4. He wasn’t realistic at all. But he was necessary for the gameplay. Now, the shops themselves aren’t the slightest bit unrealistic, simply the fact that they’re selling weapons and ammunition. The Ishimura =/= an oil rig. This thing’s fucking huge. It’s not just a vessel, it’s a traveling community/colony, and as such, it will have all the functions of a colony, not just those of a mining vessel.

Yes, I know it doesn’t need to be, but it kills the horror. Its like “I’m alone and afraid and…oh, the magical blue line tells me where to go, alright”.

[Someonerandm]

Can we all just agree that Amnesia was horror done to near its fullest potential and move on?

[garrthbarrttinn]

With Amnesia, it looked like it could be pretty fun, but, as I always do with puzzles that aren’t in my face obvious, I miss a key element of the puzzle and then spend an hour fiddling with some scenery that looks like it could be a puzzle.

@Loony I do want to play System Shock, but I’m having trouble making it work. The bugs patch I tried didn’t work, do you know a patch that might work? Also, my definition still stands; horror is adrenaline released in reaction to threats. You are more focused on the adrenalin released from the fear of threats, however it is still the same thing. Also I guess I should add fear, as that is also a part of horror, but the part people are looking for is the adrenaline. All of your key methods of horror are very basic threats humans are programmed to react to. That said, what exactly horror is is kind of beside the point. Lets just leave this at a difference of opinions.

[Deathmonkey7]

@loony636

I’m up to about Chapter 7. If you’ve played both of them, then you’ll see that right from the atmosphere, the whole ‘fixing areas of the ship’ goal mechanic, the alien goo and the zombies, they’re quite similar.

And if this is going to turn into a “but I wasn’t scared by ‘insert scary movie/game/book here’” competition, then we might as well stop now. We’re discussing the horror genre; you might not have been scared by Psycho, but its most certainly a horror movie.

Not debating it. But Dead Space is also horror which is my point. And I completely disagree with them being similar at all. Especially in plot which bares no resemblance in any way. Fixing parts of the ship perhaps. But hell, most games have some sort of mechanic for fixing something. And zombies? Resident Evil has zombies. Does that make it similar?

[DrasarSalman]

The real horror would be if a mentalist made a game with inspiration from Amnesia and Silent hill: shattered memories!

[loony636]

@garthbartin

do want to play System Shock, but I’m having trouble making it work. The bugs patch I tried didn’t work, do you know a patch that might work?

You can get this version which is prepatched. I highly recommend that you also install a few mods which improve the game exponentially, which are around on the internets. I guarantee you’ll enjoy it!

@DrasarSalman

The real horror would be if a mentalist made a game with inspiration from Amnesia and Silent hill: shattered memories!

This.

[garrthbarrttinn]

@loony636

You can get this version which is prepatched. I highly recommend that you also install a few mods which improve the game exponentially, which are around on the internets. I guarantee you’ll enjoy it!

Site you linked me wants me to participate in surveys, I found a pre-patched and pre-modded Megaupload copy. DLing now.

EDIT: shit still not working, think I’m gonna give up on this.

[Eric_Fong]

I love the music.

[Ibanez]

@loony636

You can get this version which is prepatched. I highly recommend that you also install a few mods which improve the game exponentially, which are around on the internets. I guarantee you’ll enjoy it!

Can you post a link that doesn’t require registration and surveys? That’s internet stupidity right there.

[loony636]

@Ibanez

Can you post a link that doesn’t require registration and surveys? That’s internet stupidity right there.

Oops! I posted that link a while ago somewhere else and the website seems to have changed.

…And the systemshock.org website, where I got it last time, wont let me register an account and says its closed to everyone else. Blergh.

[brokenfridgehinge]

Damn, that sucks. That website was a really good mod resource for SS2, i’m sure there are still a few other places to get mods but it’s a bummer you cant get them off that site anymore.

[loony636]

@brokenfridgehinge

Damn, that sucks. That website was a really good mod resource for SS2, i’m sure there are still a few other places to get mods but it’s a bummer you cant get them off that site anymore.

Yeah; I’ve been desperately searching my backups for my SS2 install with all the mods you’d ever want, but to no avail. I can’t find any mirror for it either. sigh

I’d also like to say that, as I’ve played through more of Dead Space, its certainly improved. The more the game gets into the whole hallucination thing, the more I think its compelling, and certainly far closer to becoming the horror game its trying the be. The only issue is that, while its atmosphere is certainly improving, it seems to be taking the Halo approach to difficulty curves and just seems to be throwing enemies at me. Now it takes four goes to get through each major area rather than one or two, and that makes the game substantially more frustrating and, consequently, less horror-like.

[CTID]

I dunno why. I never found Dead Space terribly difficult. I died probably less than 5 times throughout the game. Not to say I didn’t get extremely close quite a few times, though. Especially early on when you have very limited inventory space, and consequently, fewer medkits on you.