A look back at the original, and a little at the new one.
I loved this bit about how they got the game approved at EA.
That said, Milham tells me the team employed one tactic of smoke and mirrors in order to elevate Dead Space in the minds of EA’s executives during the early stages of development. “It needed to give the impression that it had more momentum and buy-in than it actually did. We started in January, and I think we had posters, promotional material, and calendars to give away by March, when we had no software basically,” he says. “But if you were an executive walking from your office to the elevators and you looked over the top of the cubicles, it looked like a game that had already been approved. That was our goal, that there was signage and posters and all kinds of stuff, because it looked like, ‘Well, you can’t cancel that. It’s already going.’”
All of the screenshots look right to me, but I’d question why any of these changes would affect your choice to purchase the game or not.
As a big fan of Dead Space, this seems extremely faithful to the original - and it’s a testament to the audio and visual designs that I’m still a little freaked out even though the enemies haven’t presented any threat yet.
That’s certainly your prerogative, absolutely. Out of curiosity, though, what is it about the changes that you oppose? Is it a matter of artistic integrity, a feeling that the original work should stay as it was initially conceived? Some other reason?
I’m curious because unlike, say, a classic painting or sculpture, a game is more like a play or a movie or a song. As time goes by, remakes or revivals or covers tend to adapt the original work to the times. We don’t have white people in blackface playing Black characters any more, for instance. Shakespeare’s plays get performed with people of all different sorts of identities and appearances in all of the roles. We change the words in songs to adapt, too; the Beasty Boys in their later performances altered their original lyrics to remove a lot of the explicit and implicit misogynism of the earlier works. And so on.
Played the first chapter last night. It’s very much like the original, same story beats but prettier. I was hoping for a little more in the way of surprises but it’s still nice to be playing a Dead Space game again.
Did you notice that you can go to the Tram side or the other side, in either order? I don’t think they gave you a choice like that in the original, right? I think the entire first game was completely linear. It was a little weird having a choice which way to go.
But yeah, other than that, it was basically the same story beats.
I’m don’t recall that particular option but I did turn away from the critical path to do a little exploring when I could see one. Had to check out the bathrooms of course, there’s always goodies in there. And I came across a couple locked doors that seem to require high security clearance so, I guess I’ll have the option to return here at some point. Hope so at least!
The first zero gravity room where you “lift off”, I remember it being very pretty in the original, but in this one that room is so freaking gorgeous. They really did such a great job with the lighting in this game.
I was going to play last night but my two friends that asked me to stream for them weren’t able to watch, so I made no more progress. Hopefully can keep going tonight.
