So I’m hopping onto this next-gen bandwagon after being a little discouraged by the lack of decent games coming out on the Wii as of late. Don’t misconstrue me here, the penguin-accessible Let’s Tap seems like a real gem (not sarcastic!) but man I didn’t buy a system solely for the use of minigame collections. I don’t have a group of consistently drunk enough friends to make that a lifestyle choice, got it? That also said, I will probably spend exorbitant amounts of money to pick up Capcom vs Tatsunoko: CROSS GENERATION OF HEROES (add in all the copyright symbols after every other word for the full impact of that title there). The thought of playing it with my completely Sanwa-modded Hori Real Arcade Pro (I’ve got an awesome PS2 to Gamecube controller converter, you see) fills my every cockle with delight.
But the heart of the matter, I’ve got this Playstation 3 Computer Entertainment System sitting in the living room of the Seabeck house. It looks rather regal (large) sitting there all shiny gathering a thin film of dust underneath the DVD player and cable tuner. That’s not to say I’m not using it! Dust just gets there, you see. But yes, fat, happy, regal, shiny looking thing. I named it Cornelius, but only after deliberating for ages if I should go with the too-obvious “Winston”. Men like to name their electronics like they would name their genitals. It just sort of goes with the territory. My sister in the other room named her PS3 (won after a heartbreaking BF/GF divorce trial) “short stack,” which is adorable and familiar. Mine had to be somewhat intimidating and yet subservient. See? Just like genitals.
So this thing is shiny, but it needs some HDMI cable-styles going on. The Circuit-City chums claim that there are these different bandwidth of cables that will be better for such and so TVs and such and so hertz frequency refresh rates to which I say PSHAW. I probably went to high school with you, good sir, and you are no expert on things electronic DESPITE what your badge may proclaim. A cable’s a cable’s a cable! I pick up the cheapest thing at Best Buy (still a soul-crushing $40) for the dignity of playing the PS3 in its highest native form of output.
So as I have mentioned several times, it is very very shiny. There are these blu-ray (TM SONY) discs which contain feature-films on them. Very delightful. Oh Wall-E, you’re more human than the people in this movie! There’s something for all of us to learn, I guess.
As for games: I don’t have much. Uncharted is pretty delightful. It’s been said before: but it’s kind of bold for anyone to tout one of their next-gen flagship titles as being just a game about a dude in T-shirt and jeans. No superpowers, no pact with the devil, no mutant symbiote growing out of him. Just a guy who jumps clumsily (no vaulting frome ledge to ledge without using his legs and/or torso) and appears to look scared whenever there’s gunfire on him. For me this is all a very new experience, I don’t play games with dual-analog controls very often, so I kind of look like an A-Team villain as I’m trying to shoot out dudes. Headshots are entirely by accident let me assure you! The game is pretty forgiving, though, and I can always magically regain health behind some well-placed cover instead of being shot to death. It is sort of freaky seeing all these characters and their plastic-y smooth faces in hi-def. I try not to think about just how awkward it all looks and go back to firing off an AK-47 like an idiot. Like I say, it’s not too bad, and it’s got only a couple madness-inducing Quick Time Events by the half-way point that I’m at. There’s plenty of room to mess up, but so far so good.
I’ve also rented Dead Space, which has been a bit of an adventure all in itself. It would be a gross simplification to call it Resident Evil 4 In Space (now with dual-analog controls!) but that is the comparison that I come back to. There’s a couple pointed (even successful!) attempts at creating a spooky haunted-house-in-space atmosphere, complete with loud clanging and objects rolling on the floor Just To Unnerve You, but it’s so wrapped up in videogame convention that it feels a bit condescending! I mean, I do not need to be told on six different occasions to SHOOT THE LIMBS, and while the inclusion of a holographic UI is a nice replacement for the typical jarring menu screens, it’s more of a placeholder than a solution (why not just never give me a reason to organize my inventory? That’s not the point of the game obviously!) That, and I’m still not sure why every enemy is dropping credits that I can spend at a magical store that can replicate anything I want. Yes, I know we’ve been discussing “Why do X drop Y” since Bread and Slimes in Dragon Quest I, but it still applies. And in this era of increasingly powerful technology and genuine stabs at realism (people can say “FUCK” in videogames now!) it’s all the more jarring. Someone, somewhere on the Dead Space team probably wanted the game to be even more Metroid-like, less segmented (they call the levels Chapters for crissakes) and remove the need for buying things altogether by littering the environment with even more rooms full of goodies. Or at least, that’s my hope.
Pretty marvelous sound design though. Let me just get that out of the way. Some things actually sound like they’re coming from out of nowhere (because they are! Dang thin-air enemy spawns). The sound effects get a little corny sometimes. A few aliens clearly sound like over-processed water garglings and spits. There’s a recurring metallic scratch noise in the Bridge section of the ship that, I swear to God, sounds like someone playing with their zipper with an echo and chorus and delay knob turned all the way to “SPOOOOOOKY”.
The point is: Dead Space is one of those games where you’re more surprised, more spooked out, if something ISN’T trying to jump out and eat your neck, and yet when that thing does jump out, it’s usually not a big enough threat to really sustain fear for too long. I mean, so far in the first third of the game the biggest challenge has come from the unexpected appearance of tiny swarming bug-aliens (“Oh hey I can shake them off WHOOPS TOO MANY ON YOU AT ONCE DEAD”) and the inexplicable and inexcusable inclusion of an asteroid-shooting minigame. This segment is, without a doubt, the most infuriatingly stupid thing the developers could have added to the game. It feels like Goddamn Atari Star Wars in the middle of the game. Imagine if in a film, let’s be specific here, imagine if in the middle of Dark Knight commissioner Gordon calls up Batman and tells him that he has to (MUST) punch this guy in the crotch for four straight minutes as an interrogation technique, and then imagine if the film had the audacity to show us that? We might say that it weakens the characters, that it ruins the integrity of the plot, and we would be damn right.
That’s roughly the problem with all of Dead Space’s levels. It’s a fun house, it’s the game giving a thinly-veiled excuse (the power is out on X level, we need to activate this such and so generator, unclog this blah blah) to make you walk through hallways and watch spooky things happen behind bullet-proof glass (an aside: If you’re going to do seamless Half-Life style narrative where there are no breaks for cutscenes, don’t give me something to look at behind an unbreakable glass screen five times in two hours).
Here’s a thought: throw off the pretenses of being a well-structured action game. Don’t worry about about linear point A to point B travel. Remove the two other support characters entirely. I mean the token black guy is (surprise!) some sort of villain and the token girl is only there to reveal the TBG’s evil scheme. Fuck that. Don’t fake the pretense for a plot if you don’t need one. The protagonist is an engineer right? Shouldn’t he be able to run around and fix things for himself? Good, do that. He already has the magical objective-finding radar system to tell him where to go, so ditch the other characters. Now we’re all alone in (tee-hee!)…. DEAD SPACE. So, we’ve removed those nuisances. Now take out all the enemies. No aliens, no zombies. Keep the atmosphere and basic aesthetic of all the levels. Now make the entire ship you’re trying to repair a seamless well-integrated world (Like I dunno, System Shock 2 or goddamn Metroid Prime, a game that Dead Space should steal from more outright). Next, remove all the in-game stores and upgrades and just stick with maybe six guns and a few very precious health powerups. Alright, now put the enemies back in. But maybe add, tops, two to three enemies in every major zone. Preferably one enemy. One very intelligent, constantly-stalking, very powerful enemy. The player could run around and repair this ship (so they can get home, see) any way they want. They could try and kill the aliens, or not. But make these fuckers SCARY AS HELL, powerful, terrible monsters. It really doesn’t make any sense in the Dead Space we see here for a typical marine-looking guy to go down after one standard-issue Alien Zombie attack whereas the main player can take four or five hits easy without breaking a sweat. Make all the enemies super-deadly, and make each one of them unique. They each require different tactics to kill, some based on weapon-combat, others can be killed with environmental traps or classic Ridley Scott Alien-style “eject into space” nonsense. And cut down the ammo content by about nine-tenths of what we currently have.
So what’s the end result? Something genuinely nerve-racking (one powerful dude is way scarier than a thousand pussy zombie-aliens (see: Metroid Fusion’s other Samus)) with an interesting environment and well-done sound design in a seamless and logically sound game world where the player has a clear objective and the ability to clear it. Right now, Dead Space is a bit of a shambling half-good half-boring and typical mess. With the right amount of game-design balls it could be the next best thing.
