Dead Space 3

Controls feel much better since DS2 as well. Movement is a lot more fluid. I say it's worth playing all three if you like that type of game, because it's not like there are that many decent cheesy sci-fi "horror" games. Definitely not for the story though, simply for the fun you'll have with them.
I think anyone who plays Dead Space games for the story or even horror is making a mistake. DS was always an action game with some cheesy horror background and a garbage story, kind of like Doom 3, which I also enjoyed. No, it's not "real horror" but pointing that out doesn't make one look smarter. Not everyone always needs to be really scared. Sometimes it's just fun to have some gory action with a cool atmosphere ripped off from some cool movies.
 
I wouldn't describe the Dead Space story or setting as cheesy. It's a fully realized, fleshed out universe. It has an unique feel and atmosphere, best exemplified by Dead Space 1 and Dead Space 3.

Doom 3 is cheesy by the virtue of its origins. I think that Dead Space, on the other hand, is one of the best examples of the potential lying in good sci-fi settings.
 
The magical artifact that reanimates human flesh into The Thing-like monsters, bunch of retarded people accepting said artifact into their hearts as their savior, bunch of other cliches ripped straight of countless sci-fi movies all punctuated by pretty damn awful dialogue scenes and predictable "twists" - that doesn't make for a cheesy setting to you? Ok... let's agree to disagree.
Me? I'm just in it for some gory fun.
 
Arthur C. Clarke said:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The Marker isn't any different from all the other ancient technology artifacts common in the genre. And Unitology? It's like every other religion.
 
People do need to get off their high horse about what they consider "acceptable horror", because there's more than just one way to go about it. The Thing wasn't absent of gory fright; it had plenty of it to serve up shock scares, yet it's still considered a cornerstone of sci-fi horror. Perhaps Silent Hill 2 is the pinnacle of psychological horror, but that's still just ONE way to go about achieving fear in a target audience. Tension and dread over the fear of what may be ready to pounce at you from around any corner are just as viable, and games like Doom 3 and the Dead Space franchise refined this method to perfection. It's a dimension and method of horror. Get over it.

Goodness, no need to get so defensive. Look, I find Dead Space's horror elements chessy and cannot take them seriously (and let's not even get into the utter mess that the story is). It doesn't make me some superior being with vast intellect and a ''high horse'', it's just not my cup of tea, and makes the serie throughly average in my eyes. You like it, fine. I don't.[/quote]
 
Tagaziel said:
And Unitology? It's like every other religion.

Yeah just like any other religion that worships artifacts capable of bringing horrible deaths to entire human race. No wonder Unitologists actually became a powerful organization, it's a very mass appealing family-friendly type of worship. One could hardly distinguish them from christians.
Yeah bro, I bet Arthur C. Clarke would put writing of Dead Space right up there with all time classics.
 
Multidirectional said:
Yeah just like any other religion that worships artifacts capable of bringing horrible deaths to entire human race. No wonder Unitologists actually became a powerful organization, it's a very mass appealing family-friendly type of worship. One could hardly distinguish them from christians.

Who have a particularly bloody, cutthroat history and used their artifact to bring horrible deaths to vast numbers of humans whose only sin was not sharing their faith or not sharing it strongly enough.

Yeah bro, I bet Arthur C. Clarke would put writing of Dead Space right up there with all time classics.

Straw man.
 
Yeah ok I'll keep it in mind - you can come up with any kind of nonsense as long you call it "advanced technology", then it's quality sci-fi, not magical bullshit.
Although it's my own fault for getting sucked into arguments here about story related stuff in Dead Space and DMC - games in which paying serious attention to story I considered to be a waste of time.
 
SnapSlav, you do understand that the horror of The Thing wasn't as much that the alien could take on various disturbing forms and slaughter the main characters in gruesome ways, but it's ability to mimic its host completely, making it almost impossible to tell who is human and who is not.
 
The Dutch Ghost said:
SnapSlav, you do understand that the horror of The Thing wasn't as much that the alien could take on various disturbing forms and slaughter the main characters in gruesome ways, but it's ability to mimic its host completely, making it almost impossible to tell who is human and who is not.
very well said. To often people mistake horror with just the creature or the splatter and forget the tension and characters.
 
The Dutch Ghost said:
SnapSlav, you do understand that the horror of The Thing wasn't as much that the alien could take on various disturbing forms and slaughter the main characters in gruesome ways, but it's ability to mimic its host completely, making it almost impossible to tell who is human and who is not.

Also this. There's more to The Thing than squishy monsters growling at passerbyes.
 
BUT COD SELLS MORE! SO EVERYTHING HAS TO BE ACTION!

Didnt you read the news? Survival horror is dead. DEAD they say! Just like the PC I guess.
 
Ilosar said:
People do need to get off their high horse about what they consider "acceptable horror", because there's more than just one way to go about it. The Thing wasn't absent of gory fright; it had plenty of it to serve up shock scares, yet it's still considered a cornerstone of sci-fi horror. Perhaps Silent Hill 2 is the pinnacle of psychological horror, but that's still just ONE way to go about achieving fear in a target audience. Tension and dread over the fear of what may be ready to pounce at you from around any corner are just as viable, and games like Doom 3 and the Dead Space franchise refined this method to perfection. It's a dimension and method of horror. Get over it.

Goodness, no need to get so defensive. Look, I find Dead Space's horror elements chessy and cannot take them seriously (and let's not even get into the utter mess that the story is). It doesn't make me some superior being with vast intellect and a ''high horse'', it's just not my cup of tea, and makes the serie throughly average in my eyes. You like it, fine. I don't.
[Stares long and hard at comment, raising finger in protest several times, but dropping it each time, in futility, sighing.]

Seriously, I don't know how people do this. Did I say "Ilosar needs to..."? No, I believe I said "people". Your particular criticisms about its "lack of horror" may have triggered my response, but that doesn't mean I was targeting you. Who's being defensive, here?

PEOPLE generally get uppity and elitist about such matters as "what classifies as true horror", and the comments that followed my point are no different. Horror is MORE than just psychological. There's more to fear than the unknown, because if there's never any payoff at the end, then the fear dissipates. The anticipation is IN ANTICIPATION OF SOMETHING. The opposite is also true, of course, in that repeated "payoff" will get dull, fast, but that's where really good horror strikes a balance. There's JUST enough eerie and unsettling anticipation, and JUST enough scary thing that you've been fearing to justify the scare. The Fly is a prime example of this. You spend most of the movie fearing his transformation, and his moments of losing control before finally becoming a mute and grotesque monster are what give you jolts and tide you over from the finale of him ultimately losing his humanity entirely.

In short, you guys are simply praising ONE aspect of Horror as if it's the end-all, when it's just one aspect of it, while simultaneously denouncing its other virtues as not being a facet of the same thing. I'm not saying Dead Space was perfect horror, nor am I saying that Dead Space 3 was the best horror of the series. I'm saying it HAS horror, and the horror it has is good. Yeah, it leans more heavily towards that which we're afraid of than the fear of it, and as I previously mentioned this means we become accustomed to it, thereby we stop fearing it. But this isn't inherently a flaw on the game's part; it's still good. I'm simply correcting people who say "That isn't horror", because they're wrong. It is, it's just perhaps not the best.

The Dutch Ghost said:
SnapSlav, you do understand that the horror of The Thing wasn't as much that the alien could take on various disturbing forms and slaughter the main characters in gruesome ways, but it's ability to mimic its host completely, making it almost impossible to tell who is human and who is not.
[Insert the same dumbfounded reaction of the above.]

Really? I just went and explained how horror is MORE than one single thing, and you ask me if I'm aware that there was more to The Thing's horror than one single thing? You do see the irony in that, I hope?

Yes, OF COURSE I understand that the bulk of the movie's tension was the suspicion of "who is it?" and less so the mutants that could be lurking in any of them. But that doesn't mean that the fear OF said scary mutants wasn't a part of it. Besides, what I said to begin with wasn't that the animatronic Things were what made it scary, but that the movie HAD it to accomplish that level of scaring, at times.

. . . . .

EDIT: Question to those of you who complain about it "not making any sense": WHAT is wrong with the story? WHAT is so hard to follow about it? (I'm not talking about Tagaziel's previous criticisms of "SHOOT HIM, STOP HAVING YOUR EMOTIONAL CUTSCENE AND SHOOT HIM!!!!!" because that's absolutely true. Many moments of the plot could have just been avoided if the manner in which the cutscenes depicted them simply hadn't happened. Or they would have been fine if the cutscenes had depicted them more practically. I'm talking about those who say that the story doesn't make ANY sense. Please explain.)
 
SnapSlav said:
Ilosar said:
People do need to get off their high horse about what they consider "acceptable horror", because there's more than just one way to go about it. The Thing wasn't absent of gory fright; it had plenty of it to serve up shock scares, yet it's still considered a cornerstone of sci-fi horror. Perhaps Silent Hill 2 is the pinnacle of psychological horror, but that's still just ONE way to go about achieving fear in a target audience. Tension and dread over the fear of what may be ready to pounce at you from around any corner are just as viable, and games like Doom 3 and the Dead Space franchise refined this method to perfection. It's a dimension and method of horror. Get over it.

Goodness, no need to get so defensive. Look, I find Dead Space's horror elements chessy and cannot take them seriously (and let's not even get into the utter mess that the story is). It doesn't make me some superior being with vast intellect and a ''high horse'', it's just not my cup of tea, and makes the serie throughly average in my eyes. You like it, fine. I don't.
[Stares long and hard at comment, raising finger in protest several times, but dropping it each time, in futility, sighing.]

Seriously, I don't know how people do this. Did I say "Ilosar needs to..."? No, I believe I said "people". Your particular criticisms about its "lack of horror" may have triggered my response, but that doesn't mean I was targeting you. Who's being defensive, here?

PEOPLE generally get uppity and elitist about such matters as "what classifies as true horror", and the comments that followed my point are no different. Horror is MORE than just psychological. There's more to fear than the unknown, because if there's never any payoff at the end, then the fear dissipates. The anticipation is IN ANTICIPATION OF SOMETHING. The opposite is also true, of course, in that repeated "payoff" will get dull, fast, but that's where really good horror strikes a balance. There's JUST enough eerie and unsettling anticipation, and JUST enough scary thing that you've been fearing to justify the scare. The Fly is a prime example of this. You spend most of the movie fearing his transformation, and his moments of losing control before finally becoming a mute and grotesque monster are what give you jolts and tide you over from the finale of him ultimately losing his humanity entirely.

In short, you guys are simply praising ONE aspect of Horror as if it's the end-all, when it's just one aspect of it, while simultaneously denouncing its other virtues as not being a facet of the same thing. I'm not saying Dead Space was perfect horror, nor am I saying that Dead Space 3 was the best horror of the series. I'm saying it HAS horror, and the horror it has is good. Yeah, it leans more heavily towards that which we're afraid of than the fear of it, and as I previously mentioned this means we become accustomed to it, thereby we stop fearing it. But this isn't inherently a flaw on the game's part; it's still good. I'm simply correcting people who say "That isn't horror", because they're wrong. It is, it's just perhaps not the best.

I never said it doesn't have horror. I said the horror it has is cheesy, not scary, and relies way overmuch on excessive gore and lame jump scares. The Thing stroke the proverbial balance between gory special effects and anticipation, Dead Space doesn't, there is no anticipation. You can't swing a Plasma Cutter without hitting a bunch of raving necromorphs. You can't walk down a corridor without two of them bursting out of vents, and a third spawning behind you for kicks. You know it's going to happen. It's completely and utterly formulaic and predictable, and predictability is the death of horror. Agree or not, your choice, but to me it makes it hard to take the franchise seriously as horror, and it bills itself as a horror shooter. Also stop using ALLCAPS because it doesn't make your point better at all.

As for the story, come on. It's silly. Evil religion, complete with creepy iconography and armies of faceless mooks, has overtaken mankind because everyone being turned into ravenous monsters is such an incredibly awesome prospect. ''Romance'' story nobody gives a fuck about (talking of Ellie here). Almost every single NPC that's not Isaac or the sane ally du jour is trying their best to get killed by being as stupid as humanly possible. A lone engineer scared out of his mind kills a shipload of Necromorphs, but an entire craft of trained soldiers with Stasis modules gets owned by one. basic. space. zombie. Coming to terms with your inner demons (via shooting the crap out of them)... apparently blows up the ominous all-purpose evil plot device somehow. And now,

[spoiler:309dd3efe9] A moon is a giant necromorph you kill by flinging Markers at it?? I mean, that shit makes ME2's Human-Reaper seem subtle. [/spoiler:309dd3efe9]

Seriously, it's OK in a B-movie plot to justify the action sort of way, but as a serious story? Na.
 
Somehow it all reminds me to that article. And its somewhat sad

Is Survival Horror Dead or Just Sleeping?

Last week, Resident Evil 6 producer Masachika Kawata sparked a little debate with his claim that Resident Evil 6 would not succeed as a traditional survival horror game. According to Kawata, Resident Evil needs to embrace action-oriented gameplay in order to appeal to the world, especially in the North American market. The slow pace and puzzle-focused activities seen in the original Resident Evil games have no place in Capcom’s world anymore, for Capcom wants games that sell as well as Call of Duty.

Heh, one of the worst AND best parts of Resident Evil 1 have been the clunky controls, the hard puzzles and the fact that you would constantly run out of amunition. Seriously. If you started with the female you had only a knive ... I really miss those moments where you had REALLY to fight hard with your self if you should use that shoot gun now or not as you might encounter some really hard enemy later and then you have just a few bullets left.
 
Chris starts with just a knife.

I hate call of duty and what it has done to gaming. All these developers think they can make call of duty money. Only call of duty can make call of duty money. Keep throwing money at shitty games Capcom, till you are bankrupt and gone.
 
true enough. Slowly every famous and big franchise gets bastardised and butchered for the "action". Even Metal Gear Solid was going down that route.

Now, I do not have any problem with action in well ... action games or if you think about ways how to make gameplay better feeling more smoth.

But particularly survival horror genre gets literaly killed by this idea that everything has to be made fast paced and full of actions around every corner.

I think the issue isnt that it doesnt sell, but that it is simply much easier to make action gameplay and the story to it then creating some survival horror. It requres more brain power.
 
Ilosar said:
I never said it doesn't have horror.
Do you have some sort of ineptitude that when someone tells you they aren't talking to you, that automatically triggers you to believe they're talking to you? That's twice now that you've made that mistake, and it literally leaves me speechless. It's not even like I was unclear about to whom I was addressing. I was VERY clear... <_<

That being said, you keep parroting what I say, but follow it up with accusations of the opposite. Then you went and said a bunch of gibberish about the game that was just utterly false to answer my question about what makes the story bad. So I really dunno what I can say about that, other than smile and nod, and slowly walk away.

I'd love to see some people discussing DEAD SPACE 3 in the "Dead Space 3" topic, but it looks like it's just gonna be complaints and lamentations of "the good old days" for a while...
 
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