It may be the dawn of 2009, a bold and new year, no doubt to be filled with gaming goodness, but I’m still living slightly in the past, playing Dead Space. Now, I have no doubt that there are many people out there that finished this game in a weekend, but for me it’s taking a little longer.
The problem is that I am a very jumpy person. Not to say that I find things scarier than other people necessarily, but I have a tendency to quite literally jump out of my chair when an unexpected loud noise occurs. I was walking back from the supermarket along the canal path less than an hour ago, mulling over what exactly I was going to write here, when a wood pigeon shot out of a tree right next to my head. I very nearly fell into the canal with surprise.
So, with that in mind, you can see the issue I have with Dead Space, right?
I’m loving the game. The graphics are great, the sound is fantastically atmospheric through my surround sound system, but it’s just such hard work to play. I’ve so far never managed to play more than a single chapter through at once. I’m exhausted after an hour of sphincter-tightening nervousness at the thought of yet another thing making me jump. Jump isn’t really the word for it, though – spasm is closer. I have this image of my fiancée coming home to find me lying on the floor, all floppy and limp where my torso has leapt right off of the top of my lower half after a particularly surprising alien attack or other random loud noise.
The worst parts are where the game breaks all the rules of similar games. After eight aliens have attacked you all at once, you relax. Then one more sneaks up and nearly causes the sort of accident that requires the brown trousers mentioned in the title. You’re upgrading a weapon at the weapons bench in your “safe zone” with the save point and the store, you finish, turn round and one of them is practically getting intimate with you. What the hell? This is the safe zone, EA! The one place I thought I could relax!
The funny thing is, although the aliens do look quite incredibly scary and unpleasant, they probably could have saved a lot on character design and had the same effect on me by making a game where every fifteen seconds to fifteen minutes, a very loud bang sounds and a flag pops up that says “Bang!”. Turns out I’m about as scared of aliens as I am of party poppers.
Let’s just hope, for my sake, that if we ever do get invaded by hordes of aliens, they’ll kill us all with nice quiet laser beams and no loud unexpected bangs.
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