Why I hate Dead Space 3

Anyone who knows me will be able to tell you that I am a tad partial to the horror genre no matter which medium it comes in. I have enjoyed horror books for a long time particularly Poe and Lovecraft, and have seen more than my fair share of horror films particularly the hammer horror films.

The third medium I tend to think of when thinking of horror happens to be video games (I am not discounting audio based horror either to be honest. The midwich cuckoos with Bill Nighy is an amazing radio play and terreffied me as a child) I have in my time played through most of what is usually considered 'the classics' of the form, things like the first two silent hill games and the resident evil games, and I have also tried more contemporary survival horror in it's many flavours (for anyone who didn't think pixels could be scary you need to play lone survivor) 

Having said all of this I have also played the three games in the Dead Space series and I thoroughly enjoyed most of them. To elaborate what I mean is that I own and have played extensivly the first two games in the series, and while I am the first to admit that they weren't ever really scary they did have the atmosphere of horror games for the most part and a large part of why I enjoy horror is the atmosphere that surrounds it.

You may have noticed that I left out the most recent game in the trilogy from my list of dead space games that I have played and enjoyed. This is because I recently got the chance to play Dead Space 3 for free (For anyone who doesn't already know this Playstation Plus is awesome) and found myself thoroughly hating almost every single minute of it.

So sit back and strap in as I use this blog to once more vent my frustrated rage on a game I hate...or explain why I think the games bad whichever sounds better.


1. Co-Op features

For anyone who is not familiar with Dead Space it's really been a single player experience up until now. There may have been some multi-player features involved (I actually don't know I own both the first two on XBOX360 and never pay for gold because my desire for online play is so infrequent that it doesn't warrant a £5 a month subscription) but the main campaigns were always reserved for a single player experience only. This is primarily because a feeling of isolation can create a lot of the horror that one usually feels. The feeling like you are totally alone being overwhelmed by a titanic amount of gutteral horrors is a large part of the enjoyable atmosphere that surrounded dead space in particular.

This has totally been ruined in the third game by having the inclusion of Co-Op features. Apparently the developers felt that the games where going to get stale and tired if they didn't do something to change up the style of the gameplay, so here comes the Co-Op (just so everyone knows you cannot do this crap split-screen, it's on-line only folks) 

Other than the destruction of the atmosphere, which admittedly is only  a problem if you play the co op campaign instead of the solo one, is the changes to the gameplay that effect single player even if you don't want them to. The most noticable is the inclusion of elements and missions that you cannot use if you are on your own, this just serves to make you feel like you're missing out on something when you play the game in single player.

They also waaaaaaay scaled back the power of all your weapons so that it'd be more necessary for you to have two players. In dead space the enemies of the series are already dead and can only be put down permanently by removing most of there limbs, usually you are given engineering tools (your character is an engineer) which are designed for cutting through things meaning that you can slice and dice all you like. In DS3 your weapons don't even make the bad guys flinch half the time.

The lack of power beind the weapons coupled with upgrades that are specifically only useful if you're in Co-Op even if you happen to be playing in single player just make it seem like EA and Visceral the people behind the game didn't give a crap. They slapped together a single player campaign without changing anything and it just makes the game feel like it wasn't designed to be played alone at all.

speaking of guns...

2. Micro-Transactions

If anyone is unaware of the term micro-transactions it basically means that instead of paying full price for something you have the option of buying in really small amounts for lower prices more often, that way the developers get a more steady income stream and those who don't want to pay for the micro-transaction products don't have to. These are usually in free to play games like Farmville or The Tribez so that the devs can support themselves without having to charge for the main game itself.

So why the hell does a full price game need these?

That's right despite being a game that you will have to pay full price for (unless you're me and you've got Playstation Plus) there are still micro-transactions in the game. These come in the form of 'resource packs' which you can use to help build parts to upgrade your weapons or armour, and if you don't pay for them they're usually found lying around on the ground as you play the game. So why would anyone actually pay for the resources?

Well if you remember in single player your guns have been so scaled down in power that if you don't pay for the micro-transactions you're probably going to have a hard time getting through the entire game. I mean I suppose it's arguable that I only think that because I am terrible at the game but I would ask you to remember a few things:

   . I am playing on the easiest difficulty
   . I have been playing games for nearly two decades now

Bearing this in mind shouldn't I be having an easy time of it on this difficulty setting? I mean I could be wrong and the micro-transactions having nothing to do with the scaling down of the weapons but it just smacks a little too much of bullcrap to me.

3. Cliche around every corner 

I know I shouldn't really expect too much from a video game storyline that isn't produced by Bioware but the story of the first two games was at least passable. In the first you're sent to a space ship that's gone quiet to investigate and to see if it can be fixed. I don't remember much about the second games story other than it involved the main character havign his brain probed so that the government can make copies of the evil thing that made people turn into zombie (thanks obamacare. jk) 

In the third game the 'evil' religion of Unitology (careful game devs!) has decided that they want everyone to be evil mindless undead zombies so they try to kill the protagonist because he has a history of destroying the markers. Apart from that not making much sense (1 guy has a history of destroying something meaning he is the ONLY GUY WHO CAN! so much sense) it just comes across as something a blockbuster hollywood film should be doing and not a horror film at that. The game coems across the same as any Sci-Fi action film and even has the cliched characters to match.

The guy who has stolen main characters girlfriend, who is obviously going to be a jerk so that the protagonist can get back together with his girlfriend

The big breasted Ex-Girlfriend of the main character who exists for cheap sex appeal, so she can get back together with the main man and so she can die at some point (Seriously she went from having an almost beleivable human being character design in DS2 to being pointless eye candy with clevage a mile long. For shame Dead Space 3, for shame) 

The nerdy scientist who is just likeable enough that when she dies you feel sort of bad for her

The gruff old man who's seen his fair share of adventure/space travel/engineering etc

The 'oorah' commando block who is clearly there just to be teamed up with the protagonist so they can have a disagreement at the beginning and become friends at the end. (this is made worse by the fact that if you play single player he's not there throughout the game so they've had zero time to have this change in relationship) 

Evil english dude...I shouldn't even have to mention why that's cliched

So there you have, the three main reasons that I am angry at dead space 3. Of course there are many, many MAAAAANY more reasons why this game is terrible and if I were to try and bring them all up on one blog post it would probably be about 5000 pages long and would cause several different types of coma (yes there are types) so I have restrained myself for now in reference to the slagging off of dead space 3.

See you next time I have sheathing to complain about.

Looking for info on Yogventures? So is everyone else

UPDATE: The project is now officially dead. See here


Ahh Yogscast, a UK based gaming channel that I have had an interesting relationship with over the past few years. I first discovered them when they hit the front page with one of their minecraft videos called Planetoids, and admittedly I thought that I thought Simon was a stoner which is sort of why I started watching (for the most part it was because he was funny, not just because I think he was high when he recorded that episode) 

For a few years after I discovered their videos I watched the yogscast religiously and followed everything they did from their SOI minecraft series to the Yogpod and beyond. However the happy times where not to last, and for some reason after the completion of the Shadow of Israpheal (or rather after it got stalled) I started to loose a lot of interest in the channel only occasionally returning to watch through their songs or game series.

Luckily thanks to most of my friends being fans of the Yogscast I still manage to keep up to date on their big developments and it's not like I don't occasionally get an itch to watch some of their videos, so I have kept abreast of a lot of the yogscast related news (hence my blog post about the SOI animation).

This leads me onto yogventures. Yogventures was basically a game that the yogscast announced a couple of years ago that was based around their antics, primarily their antics in minecraft, and had a lot of interesting looking mechanics. How about world building in a more graphically appealing world? it had it, dwarves, spacemen and explosives? It has it, your favorite pair of English twits (unless you like a bit of Fry and Laurie, that's the shit) the game has it.

The only problem? Well as it turns out there hasn't really been much information available about the game for a couple of months. I mean it's not surprising that it's still not been released yet, games take a long arse time to finish, but there was news last year that the game would go early access on steam soon so that people could finally try it, it's over 6 months later and it still hasn't happened.

This would not itself be an issue, hell for months at a time there can be no information about video games, I mean maybe they've been working on the same boring crap for four months and haven't had anything to tell us? The reason that it's worrying in this case is that the Dev has taken down all of the websites relating to the game, stopped posting in the forums for the game and seems to have deleted his own twitter account as well.

It does almost look like the Dev has done a runner on this game, loads of people keep commenting on the steam page asking for information on the game and haven't got any replies which has caused no small degree of concern, especially amongst people who payed to back the game on kickstarter.

If I'm honest it's more than likely that the Dev has simply removed his twitter and other sites so he doesn't have to keep getting asked inane questions while he's working on the game, having said that this could easily turn out to be something much, much worse, so let's hope we manage to gain some info soon.

 

...The yogscast pulled a George Lucas

Okay so the above video is an animated continuation of the Yogscast's famous minecraft series 'the shadow of Israphel' (at least that's what people seem to think it is, personally I wouldn't be shocked if it turned out that this was just a side thing to keep people happy until they released the proper series) 

The internet met this animation with the sort of reactions that you'd expect, most people where pissed the hell off. As it turns out the animation itself is actually pretty funny in places, the scene at the end with Israphel and his minion on the cliff is a personal favorite, but most of the people who saw it seemed to think it was utter crap, so why is that?

Well the simplest answer to that is the star wars syndrome. After 'Star Wars: return of the Jedi' was released there was a somewhat substantial gap until they released the next installment (about 15 years actually but hey who's counting?) This meant that the fans had 15 years to imagine the most awesome thing that could ever have happened to them ever in their tiny little lives.

The problem this causes is that no matter how good something is it cannot live up to 15 years of nerd induced hype. Now I am in no way saying that 'The Phantom Menace' doesn't deserve hate, I mean come on Jar-Jar Binks.....really? But it isn't all that bad if examined by itself, it's just another crummy Hollywood blockbuster.

With the release of this latest animation the Yogscast have created a similar situation for themselves by waiting so long to release something relating to the SOI series. After three years (-ish, seriously I can't exactly remember when they last did something SOI related) they have released a sort of okayish animation that seems to have very little effort put into it, at least on the part of the Yogscast.

The animation style itself is great, it looks pretty good and I'm sure the animator put a lot of time and effort into what they were doing, but Lewis and Simon's dialogue is all taken from episodes of Yoglabs and in all honesty the voice acting for Israphel leaves a lot to be desired in places (if you want to see what I mean listen to the scene where they're running away from the nyan pig cannon) but overall the quality of the animation is a 6/10 minimum.

Now if this was just another yogscast animation it would be fine and I don't think the reactions would have been anywhere near as bad, but because people have assumed it's a continuation they've all gone batshit over it and started bawling in comment sections.

You mark my words, at some point we may yet see a continuation of the SOI and I guarantee that the reaction will be the same as it was to this animation.