Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Stealing From the Best!

Dead Space has been out for a while, but it represents some trends in gaming that are a little bit disturbing. We see a lot of retreads, re-treatments and remakes, the aspects of old games presented as something new. Dead Space does this. It does it incredibly well, actually. But there isn’t a single original idea in it.

Dead Space plays like a mix between System Shock 2 and Doom 3. It takes the best elements of both and ties them together in a shaky third person action game. It has Doom’s jump out scares and System Shock’s resource management put under the pussification ray. It has incredibly forgiving play mechanics, incredibly well design sounded, light and art and some interesting, low rent physics.

But the only original aspect of the game that really works is the zero-gravity/vacuum mechanic, and that owes as much to atmospheric design and careful use of sound which, again, is marvelously executed. The voice acting is well done but nothing amazing. And the plot... Oh god, the plot.

The story is standard fare, paced so stolidly as to telegraph the scares to a fault. You’ll almost never be attacked during exposition. The only way to find yourself in that situation is to try and run ahead of the game, which is actually pretty difficult. The arbitrary leaps from place to place certainly don’t help. The fact that they force you to face every conceivable issue that could arise on a spaceship doesn’t speak to the game’s quality so much as its derivative nature.

Some of the events are torn directly from System Shock 2 and, to some extent, Bioshock. The hydroponics mission, for example, is placed in nearly the same spot plot-wise as Bioshock’s and doesn’t really do much with the idea. You restore the status quo and engage in a boss fight you should see coming a parsec away.

And that brings up another aside – why the fuck are the Necromorphs building giant corpse monsters? All they seem to do is destroy the ships that the Necromorphs want so badly to use to annex the fucking galaxy. They’re not particularly subtle and they’re not put to particularly good use. And I really hope, for the sake of the Necromorphs, that they didn’t just build these guys so we could fight them because, as fun as it is, I can think of many ways I’d rather be spending my time, like maybe coming up with a bio-form capable of repairing or flying the fucking ship out of hell and in to populated space where, judging by their combat prowess, a handful of them could overrun the known universe in a matter of days.

Another point of frustration: the fact that you’re an engineer who can apparently fight off their invasion single handedly while a single creature picked up in an escape pod can kill an entire ship full of future-soldiers armed to the teeth and trained to deal with the very situation they presently find themselves in is retarded. What’s worse is that the game conditions us to believe it, and that the plot twist reeks of Doom 3.

It’s as if the developers sat down and said “How can we make people think of other well received commercial successes while they’re playing our game?” and someone said “What if we used the middle plot point of Doom 3 but instead of racing against the arrival of reinforcements we had them all die? That’d be edgy, right?” And then they did some blow and kept on making the game.

I’m not saying that every aspect of a game needs to make sense, but if I’m killing hordes of monsters by myself within minutes of boarding an unfamiliar ship I think there should be some actual survivors who haven’t just died seconds before I arrive. I think that the legitimate soldiers who have come to save the day or kill everyone or both should present a threat instead of offering up a fresh food source for the beasties. Your game world needs to be believable if we’re going to spend twelve hours in it. It needs to feel like a place where people live and not an environment you’ve made for us to play around in.

System Shock 2 did this wonderfully. Working under far more constrictive technical conditions it managed to make a diverse, lived in game world that seemed downright reasonable. Sure, it suffered from the same problem of constantly being one step behind the monsters and only encountering the dead or recently killed survivors, but in System Shock 2 it made a lot more sense. And those wacky kids still got away, which was a nice touch until the end credits rolled.

Dead Space reuses the same texture set in every god damn map. The only change I’ve seen came with the introduction of a new ship, and even then the textures were barely reskinned. The only noticeable difference came in the shape of the wall-mounted goodie bags liberally sprinkled about the level.

And the doo-dads populating the maps are weak, at best. Slot machines that look like a cross between claw games and pachinko that can’t be used? Credit based vending machines that sell ammo and weapons tailored to schematics your character is carrying? Save stations that are randomly placed at convenient intervals? The utility benches and power node housings are the only functioning parts of the world that seem to belong there, and even those are all too often haphazardly placed and awkwardly utilized. Each power node housing contains exactly one power node, and no one’s ever visited them or tried to use them before. And the way the utility benches permit upgrades is frustratingly slippery. It’s as if the developers are trying to occlude a system within their own game, which is never a good idea and, in a game with an upgrade system as involved as Dead Space’s, is just annoying.

Then there’s the ficticious religion, intended to lampoon Scientology with all of the subtly and grace of Andrew Dice Clay, which makes about as much sense as the social strata of a metal concert. I’d like to be surprised, but this game was made by EA Redmond and if there’s one thing those guys can be counted on for it’s technical competence and a total inability to tell a coherent, well thought out, well written story in a believable world. They’ve yet to grasp the key element in creating any work of fiction: respect for your audience.

You have to believe that your audience is smarter than you, that they can fill in the gaps that you’ve left and make your world their own. Otherwise you’re going to make a world with almost nothing to say for itself and volumes to tell about the vanity of the people who created it. It’s how you find the strength to write thoughtful plot twists and realistic dialogue. You work with, not against, your audience. Of course, this sort of writing is also anathema to the jump out scares Dead Space wants to evoke oh so badly.

But the sad thing is that after playing long enough and acquiring enough jacked up weapons and armor I don’t find myself frightened by the enemies so much as annoyed. They’re not a source of fear for me, they’re obstacles. They might as well be physics puzzles or riddles. It’s fun and satisfying to overcome them, but they fill me with all the fear and dread of a turkey sandwich. I think only of the resources they’re going to give me and the shit I’m going to make out of them. I find myself happy when an enemy shows up, because now I’m going to get some ammo or cash to help me upgrade the rest of my gear.

And that’s a problem in a horror game, when enemies return more resources than they take to defeat. It’s a lesson System Shock 2 taught well, but it’s one that Dead Space, or perhaps more accurately Doom 3, seemed to miss. Both these games threw weapons and ammo at you with wild abandon, giving you more than enough tools to take down whatever you run into and leaving you with lots of surplus ammo and health to stockpile.

At time of writing I’m 5/6 of the way through Dead Space and I’m sitting on around eighteen extra health kits and over 150 rounds of combined ammunition for the ripper and the plasma cutter, my weapons of choice. Add in around 20 banked line racks and a smidge of flamethrower fluid, all of this after selling some of my surplus so I could buy more upgrade nodes, the only resource in the game with any noteworthy scarcity, and you’ve removed all but the faintest hints of resource management from your game. The only want I ever experience comes from not having ammo on hand right that second, since a quick jaunt to the store will let me withdraw scads and scads of it from the vault.

So here’s the strange thing. Despite all of these issues I really like Dead Space. I like the way it takes the best parts of a game I love and a game I tolerated and weaves them into a really fun, playable experience. I like the way it lets me min-max my gear and make myself into an armor plated, Ripper wielding unstoppable killing machine who occasionally has to shoot at shit far away with his other toys. I like the plodding, predictable familiar story and I’m still reading it, waiting to see who’s going to double cross me next or turn up dead.

Right now the only way the story could surprise me is if I escaped the ship with another living character, or if my crazy girlfriend didn’t turn out to be dead. I’m just waiting for a boss or sub boss incorporating her corpse at this point. But, when I’m playing, the game taps my obsessive behavior brilliantly. It makes me want more and more by offering a nice, distilled resource management model I can excell at.

Its simplicity, its abundance and its action movie sensibilities all keep me locked in, and it is simultaneously infuriating and wonderful. Because games don’t always need to be art. They don’t even need to do what Dead Space does, which is comment on art simply by emulating it and not becoming it. It’s like a trashy romance novel or a bad piece of detective fiction featuring a Larry Stu protagonist. It informs us of what the champions of the genre do right by doing so many things wrong and remaining engaging enough for us to see it through to the end.

So hurrah, Dead Space. The best things you own are all stolen, but you’ve stolen them from the best. Your writing isn’t great, your characters are stock models and your controls are a little bit slippery for my taste, but I’m glad you exist because you entertain me while reminding me that junk food, while not great all the time, is just what you need every once in a while. Whether it’s there for your body or your brain.

BELOW THAR BE SPOILERS!

UPDATE: Dead Space has just given me my first real shock as Skinny-Father-Gregory, or Mercer as the game insists on calling him, simply dies and becomes a regular infected in lieu of coming up as a final boss. Next thing you know, Baby-Faced-Bretruger will nobly sacrifice himself in order to complete the final mission.

UPDATE: Woop. Guess that won’t happen.

UPDATE: Also, I’m sorry, what? The super spy didn’t figure out that the guy she just double-crossed could remotely pilot the shuttle she was trying to escape in? The super spy who is a computer expert, who hacked every arbitrarily available system on the ship? Did you even think about this shit as you were writing it, or did it just fall out?

UPDATE: When my girlfriend wasn’t the final boss you surprised me. It was the first real shock of the game. I was like "Whaaaat!" That surprise lasted all of a minute, until she leapt out at me before the end credits rolled and I had to shake my head.

I’m embarrassed for you, EA Redwood. You were so cool for nearly sixty seconds there.