From Penny Arcade:

Tycho and I finished Dead Space 2 last week and I was really impressed with the game. Overall I didn’t feel like it was as scary as the first one but that changed this weekend. Our dryer stopped venting correctly and it fell on me to determine the problem. This meant exploring the crawl space below our house, something I had never had to do before. I removed the panel, slid into this dark space full of pipes and cables with my flashlight and immediately regretted the eight hours of survival horror I had just completed.

I started shinning my light around down there, certain that it would fall on a rotting corpse but instead I found the dryer vent hanging down and unconnected to anything. I could see where it was supposed to fit into the vent on the side of the house and it looked like a job I could actually fix. Then I heard something scurry in the dark corner of the crawl space. I sat there holding my breath for a second and heard it again. Slowly I started to swing my light in that direction and then stopped. Did I really want to see what was over there? Sure it was probably a mouse but what if it wasn’t? What if it was a dead body, reanimated by a mysterious alien artifact and hungry for flesh?

better to just back out and call a professional.

I think I’ll agree on the assessment.  DS2 did not seem as terrifying as DS1.

Partly because it was more familiar…  I’d already played through a game full of necromorphs.  I had a good idea of how they behaved and what to expect.  I’d already run into crazy Unitologists.  I knew what The Marker was.

Partly because The Sprawl seemed less fragile than the Ishimura.  Seemed like you could probably find a hole to hide in and wait for rescue.

Partly because the game seemed more action-oriented.  More running and gunning, less creeping through narrow corridors and feeling vulnerable.

But it was still creepy as hell.  And I still got some terrific scares out of it.

Now that I’ve finished Dead Space 2, I no longer have that burning need to see it through to the end.  I know how it all turns out.  I know how it ends.  So it’s been relegated to a mere distraction.

I’m playing WoW again…  And I re-installed the first Dead Space.  I’ve still got my old save games and I’ve been playing around with them.

One of the first things I noticed was the attention to detail in DS2.  Those sections aboard the Ishimura are spot-on.  Save stations, stores, architecture…  It’s all exactly where it should be.  They even made the elevator buttons look like they used to.

The only oversight is the background on the save stations…  They’ve got the right mechanisms – those on the Ishimura have the iris thing going, and those aboard The Sprawl has a few dim lights – but the background when you’re saving/loading shows The Sprawl even when you’re aboard the Ishimura.  I don’t know…  Maybe it isn’t an oversight.  Maybe they’re wired into The Sprawl’s network, so they show that screen instead?

The next thing I noticed was the controls.  The controls in DS1 are pretty horrible.  I’d forgotten just how bad they were.

If you’ve got vsync turned on, there’s horrific mouse lag.  You move the cursor and the game responds a moment later.  You stop moving, and the game responds a moment later.  Makes it very difficult to do anything even remotely precise.

If you’ve got vsync turned off, there’s no input lag…  But you get horrible tearing in areas where the lights are flickering.  Really, really horrible tearing.

And in order to get the mouse to respond even remotely like it should, you’ve got to crank the sensitivity all the way to the right.  Which makes the game more-or-less playable…  But makes the various menus impossible to navigate as the cursor whips around the screen absurdly fast.  Very, very awkward.

Was playing around with the pulse rifle and remembered just how awesome the alt-fire used to be.  You used to crouch down and unleash death in a full circle around yourself…  Now you’ve just got grenades, which simply do not compare.  I suppose they’re probably useful in more situations than the old alt-fire was…  But nowhere near as impressive.

Got grabbed by a tentacle a couple times, and had to run away from the hunter for a bit…  And I remembered how much I disliked those unkillable monsters, and how often they showed up.

In DS2 there’s just that one section at the end where you’re chased by something straight-up unkillable.

The zero-G sections of DS2 are a lot more enjoyable, too.  In the original you were always stuck to a surface.  You could jump from the floor to the wall or whatever…  But you couldn’t just float/fly around.  And there were always monsters in the zero-G areas.  Kept getting attacked and having to track down where the attack was coming from.  Just not a whole lot of fun compared to DS2.

In DS2 you don’t stick to the surfaces, you float.  You can fly around anywhere.  And that makes dealing with monsters a lot easier.  Plus, there aren’t that many monsters…  Most of the zero-G sections are more like puzzles or obstacle courses.

DS1 has a map, and DS2 does not.  I’m not sure it’s entirely necessary in either game, as the levels are fairly linear…  But it’s nice to get a feeling for the geography around you in DS1.  It gives you a better feeling for the ship as a whole.

DS2 does have an improved navigation system…  It can guide you towards the nearest store, or bench, or save station in addition to your current objective.  But, again, I don’t know how necessary that is.  The levels are pretty linear.  It’s generally just a matter of walking forward until you stumble across what you’re looking for.  The only place the guidance system really came in handy was in the Unitology church.

I’m not entirely sure why, but DS1 feels more dangerous.  More claustrophobic.  More doomed.

Sure, The Sprawl is technically larger than the Ishimura…  But you never really see that.  You’re just walking through a series of corridors in both games.  And they’re both out in space, where a hull breach or a life support failure are certain death.  But, for some reason, the Ishimura feels far more fragile.

There’s a sense that you can’t just hide in a corner and wait for it all to blow over…  That you have to get the hell off of the ship before it all falls apart, killing anything and everything aboard.  And I did not get that same feeling from The Sprawl.

On The Sprawl, it felt like I could probably find a good hiding place and just wait for rescue.

And it only makes matters stranger when you consider how many individual people you interact with on the Ishimura, compared to The Sprawl.  It seems like there are more survivors aboard the Ishimura.  And the Ishimura has been adrift for longer…  And suffered more failures along the way…  Of the two, it seems like the Ishimura should feel safer.  But it just doesn’t.  It feels fragile, and damaged, and dangerous.

DS2 definitely had a survival horror thing going on.  Resources were certainly scarce.  There was a real feeling that you couldn’t kill everything.  That you had to stop this at the source, or run away, because there just wasn’t enough ammo to go around.  But it still had more of an action-y vibe to it.  Kind of like Aliens, instead of Alien.

Ultimately, I had a great time with both games.  And I’m still having fun playing around with both of them.  They’re both very solid.

And the universe that they created is simply fantastic.  Very self-consistent.  Very creepy.  Very suspenseful.

Tycho’s comments:

We’ve got Dead Space 2 more or less in the bag, now, practically sewn up, and it’s just… solid. It’s more of a compliment than it sounds. They’ve created a very “firm” universe, studded with meaty bolts and secured by cascades of regularly spaced hermetic seals. It has intimacy and scale; along with breakneck pace, from which no neck is safe. Eventually we had to start running, altogether, just as we did years ago in games like Alone in the Dark or Resident Evil. Obviously, this would have been before the latter game became about mowing down fifty zombies at a time with a man-portable minigun.

There was a part very near the end of the game that reminded me very, very strongly of another Electronic Arts title, this time from 1989, called Project Firestart. I will give you a moment to amuse yourself at my expense – at my advanced age, and at my diminished vigor – but when this phase is complete, I will assert (as I have so many times) that more than twenty years ago Dynamix delivered the Survival Horror template in its entirety.

I like DLC generally speaking, though I rarely seem to actually purchase it. I think I like the idea more than its case-to-case execution, the more-notion it represents, and perhaps also the couch-ness of its acquisition. The last DLC I purchased was Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam, because I heard it was good (it was) and because it seemed like a way to launch a full game somewhat through the backdoor, something I wanted to blip on their quarterly report. But what they’ve got up for Dead Space – thoroughly optional armor and weapon bundles – borders on the bizarre. The game already has suits out the ass. It even unlocks more armor in another fucking game. This isn’t “must see DLC.” This is like getting a tiny fork for your fork, so that it too may have a fork.

No.

I often lament the fact that downloadable content rarely expands the story, though, and in a novel twist, an upcoming pack does exactly that: offering up some closure for the crew in Dead Space: Extraction, the lightgun shooter for the Wii and Playstation 3 which was much better than it had any right being. It is coming out… at some point, unless you’re playing it on the PC, in which case the “novel twist” is that of a knife between the fourth and fifth vertebrae.

Oh! We another comic about Dead Space.  I could’ve mentioned that farther up, maybe.

Pretty much says it all.  Very enjoyable game.  Very worthy successor to the original.  And they really have established a very solid universe.  Dead Space: Martyr was a thoroughly enjoyable read.  And, while neither Dead Space: Downfall nor Dead Space: Aftermath were cinematic masterpieces, they were still enjoyable.

I would definitely go see a movie set in the Dead Space universe.  And, at this point, there are several stories they could tell.

And, while I don’t normally purchase DLC, I’m thoroughly miffed that it won’t be available on the PC.

Just finished up Dead Space 2.  Had a great time.

Clocked-in at about 11 hours…  Which seems longer than the estimates I’ve been hearing online.  Everyone’s saying it’s about 9 hours long.  And I was playing on casual difficulty.  Wasn’t dying.  Wasn’t re-playing much.  And it still took me about 11 hours.

It felt longer than that, though.  The tension and claustrophobia of  the setting really stretched things out.  Felt like it took a lot longer than just 11 hours.

Good storyline.  Good evolution to the characters and the setting.  Very satisfying.

Didn’t much enjoy the end bit with the indestructible monster…  Didn’t like the indestructible monster in the first game either.

I’ve just started up a “New Game+”, which lets you start over with everything you had at the end of your last game.  Plus, it unlocked a riot suit.  So I’m absolutely obliterating the early bits of the game.  I’m sure things will get moderately harder as I progress…  But that jump start is going to be handy throughout the game.

I’m a little miffed that the PC version didn’t have achievements like the console versions do.  Would’ve been nice…  And could’ve integrated right into Steam.

I’m also hearing rumors that the elite suits aren’t available in the PC version.  I’m not sure if this is true or not…  As I’ve just started over again and haven’t had a chance to find much of anything yet…  But I’ll be miffed if that’s true.

I finally found a good use for the pulse rifle.

Generally, I steer away from that weapon.  I’ve kept it in my inventory because the grenades can be handy…  But for simply cutting through normal necromorphs, it’s pretty crappy.  Takes a good amount of precision to chop off a limp with a pulse rifle.  More precision than I can normally muster.

But I had an especially creepy section where I was working my way through some kind of nursery or school or something.  There were a bunch of fairly quick little necromorphs that looked an awful lot like greys.

They’re small, quick, attack in packs, and don’t really have to be dismembered.  So the pulse rifle was great for mowing them down.

Then some very creepy dead babies started crawling towards me…  They explode if they get close enough, or if you hit them right.  And again they don’t need to be dismembered.  So the pulse rifle worked well on them.

Had to do some very neat mini-game sort of things…

Had to lobotomize a computer in a sequence that was simultaneously reminiscent of 2001 and Alien.  I had to climb into the computer core and pull out various memory modules.  Then a cluster of cylinders rose from the deck, and I had to activate them to disable the computer itself.

Then I had to re-align some mirrors for the solar array…  Had to go out into space and grab them with my telekinesis to move them.  While slowly running out of air, and getting attacked by necromorphs.

Later I had to navigate through some kind of obstacle course in the bowels of the station.  There were giant valves that had to be opened…  And an assortment of rapidly spinning blades to squeeze past…  And then some pillars of fire…  It kind of makes me wonder what kind of sadistic bastard built a space station like this.

So…  Now I’m back aboard the Ishimura, and it is creepy as hell.

I came aboard through the shuttle bay, just like I did in the beginning of the first game.  Went through some of the same rooms and hallways.  Only now it’s all covered in plastic and red tape, with biohazard signs stuck up all over the place.  They’re obviously trying to clean or decontaminate the place.

It’s somehow even more creepy with the tape and plastic everywhere…  Like it’s the scene of a giant murder investigation…  Though, I guess, that’s probably pretty accurate.

Of course things couldn’t stay nice and quiet…  Had to make my way down to engineering.  There was a warning as I entered the engineering section that said cleanup and decontamination hadn’t been completed down there yet.  And then a voice log a little later that indicated the Ishimura was covered with organic goo that would reanimate in the presence of a marker signal.  So I’m going to assume that there’s something big and angry in my near future.

I’m thoroughly enjoying Dead Space 2.  It’s got pretty much everything that made the original so much fun…  But it’s been refined and perfected in a number of ways.

Stasis is back.  You can still freeze or slow down monsters to deal with them at a slower pace.  And you still find various environmental hazards that can only be navigated by hitting them with a stasis charge.

But, unlike the original Dead Space, your stasis will recharge automatically over time.

It doesn’t happen quickly…  And in areas where you’re expected to play around with stasis a lot, they’ll provide some recharging stations.  But if you can go for 5-10 minutes without freezing anything, it’ll recharge all by itself.

Zero-gravity sections are back.  You still get that eerie silence when you’re in the vacuum, too.  But you no longer have to make those awkward leaps from one platform to another.  Your suit now has some directional thrusters on it…  So you can just disengage your magnetic boots and slowly fly across the environment.

Telekinesis seems to be far more useful than it was in the first game.  Sure, there’s still puzzles where you have to yank panels off of things or move equipment around…  But it also makes a very nice offensive weapon.  You can grab spines off of dead necromorphs and use them to impale attackers.

The Church of Unitology is back…  And creepier than ever.  I just spent about an hour stomping through a big ol’ Unitology church…  Made my way through the ornate upper levels, through their indoctrination chambers, and then down into the crypts where they’re storing the dead for eventual “convergence”.

The line gun is still just as awesome as it used to be.  And the plasma cutter is still a terrific backup weapon.  And dismembering charging necromorphs is still more fun than it ought to be.

There’s some great, new stuff as well…  Like a very simple hacking mechanism.  It isn’t anything impressive.  It’s almost hard to fail a hacking attempt.  But it reinforces the idea that Isaac is an engineer.

Of course, it isn’t all perfect…  There are a few things I’m not so happy with.

There are some strange little sections where you have to crawl through maintenance ducts.  You’ve got no weapons.  You can’t even really punch or kick or anything.  Which is OK, since I have yet to actually encounter anything hostile in those tunnels…  But it’s just kind of weird and awkward, and interrupts the normal flow of gameplay.

There are some very dramatic quicktime/cinematic sequences.  They’re very cool and very impressive…  But a little annoying, too.  Suddenly control is taken out of your hands and you’re watching this awesome sequence…  Which is fine.  But then you suddenly have to mash a key or shoot a target, or you’ll instantly die.

And then there’s the javelin gun…

A good chunk of what makes Dead Space different is the combat.  The whole element of “strategic dismemberment”.  Body shots don’t generally do you much good.  You need to take off limbs.  And if you just chop off a leg, for example, they’ll drag themselves along the floor with their arms.

This means that weapons like the plasma cutter and line gun are very handy – since they project a line-shaped blast.  And you can fire them either vertically or horizontally, which can make it very easy to slice off some limbs.

This also means that weapons like the pulse rifle aren’t so handy…  Sure, it fires out a lot of bullets really quickly…  But it just kind of puts lots of little holes in things, instead of cutting off limbs.

But the javelin gun doesn’t really follow those rules.  It fires out a single javelin in a straight line.  It’ll impale a necromorph and stick it to the wall.  One shot is generally fatal – even if it’s a body shot.  You don’t have to aim for limbs.  You don’t have to cut off multiple limbs.  You don’t even need to fire more than once with most enemies.

And the alternate fire mode electrifies the javelin and fries anything nearby.

It’s certainly a nice, powerful weapon…  It was a relief to get it.  At first I was thrilled that I could kill things so easily.  It seemed like the answer to my prayers.

But after mowing down piles of necromorphs without even trying, I’m a little miffed.  It almost seems like cheating.

Dead Space 2 finally finished downloading…

It wanted me to log in to an EA account.  I didn’t realize I had an EA account, but I guess I do.  And I apparently registered the original Dead Space on that account, so I was given a Refurbished Plasma Cutter.  It’s basically supposed to be one of the same plasma cutters that I was using in the original game.

I cranked up the resolution to 1280×1024, left the quality on “medium”.  I’m kind of surprised at how well it plays on my machine…  Figured I’d have to turn things down or tweak stuff more or something like that.  But it’s actually running fine.

There’s a nice little recap movie that I watched – gives you a brief overview of what happened in the first game.  I’m actually glad that’s in there…  The original Dead Space had a fairly unique storyline going on…  I could easily see somebody picking up DS2 without playing the first one, and not having any clue what was going on.

The game starts off with a deafening bang.  Isaac Clarke is apparently crazy.  I’m in a straight jacket and some guy is trying to get me out of it…  And then all hell breaks loose.  Necromorphs everywhere.  And I’m still in a straight jacket.

Had to run through the halls of this medical facility as necromorphs leapt out and killed everyone around me.  Barely made it to safety.  Got jumped at the last minute and had to squish them in a door.

Eventually I found some doctor guy who looked like he was going to stab me…  But then he cut my arms free and killed himself instead…

Eventually I got my hands on a flashlight, and a telekinesis module, and then a plasma cutter and a stasis module, and then I replaced my tattered straight jacket with the engineer suit.

I’m thrilled to see a lot of the things that made the original game so unique are present…

You’ve still got the terrific holographic interface to everything.  Still have a simple inventory system, and the ability to upgrade various pieces of equipment.  Still gathering money to buy stuff from the store kiosks.  Still displaying your ammo right on your weapon, and your health right on your armor.

The architecture is very reminiscent of Alien…  It’s got that dark, dirty, utilitarian thing going on.  These are structures that were built for a purpose, and they’ve been used hard for years.  They are shining, new, pristine structures.

It’s all very dark, creepy, claustrophobic, and tense.  Critters popping out all over the place.  Stuff going bump in the dark.  Things rattling behind the walls.  Random groans and shrieks to put your nerves on edge.

I’m having a great time so far…  It’s got everything that made the original so good, and they’ve actually fixed some of the complaints I had with the original.  The controls, for example, are much better.

But it’s a very tense, creepy game.  I actually had to quit after an hour or so because it was getting to be too much for me.  I’ll come back to it tomorrow, when the sun is up.