Dead Space - A 10 Year Retrospective

Dead Space hails from 2008 as a bit of a cross between System Shock 2 and Resident Evil 4, if you were to take the slow-paced over-the-shoulder combat system from RE4 and put it in a space horror setting reminiscent of SS2. According to interviews with the development team, Visceral Games, Dead Space was originally being designed with the hope that it could become System Shock 3, but after playing Resident Evil 4, their eyes were opened to new possibilities, and thus the game shifted from more of an RPG focus to an action-horror focus.

This was around the time that horror games started shifting from more traditional survival-horror games where players controlled a feeble survivor with limited resources, to controlling badass killing machines with a full arsenal of weapons, when the focus shifted more from making the player feel so scared and vulnerable that you might prefer to avoid combat whenever possible, to glorifying the combat and making the thrill of killing these terrifying enemies the main reward. Resident Evil 4 ushered in this new era of action-centric horror games, and Dead Space was one of many subsequent games to pick up that torch and carry the trend onward.

I played Dead Space for the first time in 2010, but that was so long ago that I don't remember much about it. I know that I liked the game, generally speaking, but wished that it could've focused a little more on its horror side of the equation, instead of leaning so heavily on action and jumpscares. With my newsfeed recently filling up with articles celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the original Dead Space, I figured it was time to refresh my memory and see how much my opinion on it has changed, if at all, and to see how well the game holds up a decade later.

Impressions of the Resident Evil 2 Remake: One Shot Demo

The Resident Evil 2 remake is right around the corner, and so Capcom have launched a 30-minute demo featuring a slice of gameplay from the full game, in which you control Leon Kennedy exploring the Raccoon City Police Department fighting zombies and solving puzzles to find a way to advance. As the "One Shot" title implies, you have one shot to play this 30-minute scenario; a timer starts counting down once you launch into the game, and once your 30 minutes are up you get booted out to the menu with a "Thanks for playing" message. You cannot start over for a new 30 minutes, unless you launch the demo on a new account.

I'm not a big fan of the 30-minute time limit, because I usually like to play these games pretty slowly, making sure I'm taking in all the details, exploring everywhere possible, and trying all of the outcomes. The side-effect of the timer is that I played the game a little differently than I would have a normal demo, since I was essentially rushing to get through as much of it as I could, and so my mind was less focused on the game itself and more on my playing of the demo. There's potential with a time limit in a survival-horror game to enhance the stress and tension, and to force more interesting decisions when it comes to risk-versus-reward, but I never really felt that in this demo, so it feels more like a marketing gimmick to stir up hype and get people more interested in the game.

The remake seems to have been done in the engine used for Resident Evil 7, so it has the sleek and smooth feel of RE7, but in a third-person over-the-shoulder perspective (a bit like Resident Evil 4) with Resident Evil 2-style puzzles and exploration. Resident Evil 7 already felt like a return to form for the series, with the Baker estate feeling reminiscent of the mansion from RE1, but RE2 seems to be taking it one step further in going back to the roots, which would make sense since it is a remake of RE2, after all, arguably the best game in the original series. So on first impressions, it seems like the remake will blend a bunch of different elements from three of the best games in the series.

Introducing Live Streaming on Twitch, YouTube

I'm pleased to announce that as of yesterday, The Nocturnal Rambler is now also on Twitch and YouTube, where I'm currently live streaming a playthrough of Gothic, one of my all-time favorite games. Video content had never really interested me in the past, but I've decided to give it a shot as a way to hopefully grow and expand, while also just having some extra fun. Right now I'm basically just doing a live "let's play" format where I talk to myself and give commentary about the game as I play, and I'll be doing that for a full playthrough of Gothic, and for most or all the PC games that I play in the future.

Last night I played Gothic for about four hours while live streaming on Twitch, and am also in the process of uploading those videos to YouTube, so if you're interested in watching me play and hearing me talk, you can follow me on Twitch to be notified when I go live or subscribe on YouTube if you'd rather watch at your own leisure. I'll be playing most nights and some random afternoons (I'm on the east coast of the US, GMT-5), so be on the lookout because there'll be new videos on a pretty regular basis. And who knows, maybe with this new recorded footage I can start doing video reviews to supplement my written ones.