Dead Space (no spoliarz)

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.

Not that it matters much; your money, your call.

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.

Just watched a video, they fuked up the ending and Kendra.
And lol seriously? They really had to push the message.

You hate the remake. Great. Nobody cares, or is interested in you whinging about it endlessly.

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.

It’s pretty astonishing how bad some people are at reading the room.

It’s fun that someone sees a restroom sign as “pushing a message”.

I often “push a message” in a restroom. But then I flush.

Another video coming tomorrow comparing platforms apparently.

I had a hilarious bug yesterday where Isaac and the enemy I was fighting disappeared after I got killed and automatically reloaded an auto-save. I soon found out this means that I have no inventory either, no gun. I can still open doors without Isaac, just driving the camera around as if I was Isaac.

Anyway, when I got a store and discovered that I’d lost my weapons and suit and all my credits too, it stopped being funny and I deleted my save game with that bug, just to make sure I didn’t reload it by mistake.

Good grief, that’s a bad bug. Hopefully you weren’t too far into the game.

Everything was fine once I went back to an older save. So it’s all good.

I am finding ammo a lot more scarce in this version of the game compared to the original. I usually sell health packs I find so I can afford more ammo.

I don’t hate the remake? I think it is OK 5/10.
Original was much better though.

Ooof, I’m sorry you had to deal with that. But as someone who isn’t willing to put up with that sort of guff myself, good for you for decisively quitting! I hope you can get your money back, but more importantly, I hope you find another game that treats you and your time better. (EDIT: Ah, I misunderstood when you mentioned “deleting your save”!)

I played through the early bits of this and just couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to stick with it. Oddly enough, one of the things that bothered me is so trivial that I hesitate to even bring it up, but I also noticed it when I tried to re-play Dead Space 3 last year, and it’s the signs above doors. A game like Control takes pains to make the space feel real, to label everything as it would be in the real world so you can find your way around. It puts a lot of effort into where it puts its signs and what they say, because it wants you to be able to use them to literally navigate the world.

I love that kind of attention to detail and it’s one of the many reasons I’ve played through Control three times: it’s a fascinating place to move through, to experience, to navigate.

So I was hoping for some of the same in Dead Space, but it’s such a contrived and linear “thrill ride” instead of a believable space, and one of the places the illusion breaks is when you look at how doors and rooms are labeled: with scrolling LED displays, like chirons on a TV screen. Because the developers couldn’t figure out how to make the words fit, while also being large enough to be readable. So rather than cram tiny words on signs, they make them scrolling electronic signs. So to read the name of the hall or room or whatever, you have to stand there and wait for the words to scroll by, because the developers couldn’t figure out the right combination of sign space, font size, and words. So they just scroll the words and I have to stand there and hang fire a second if I want to read the sign.

So minor, but to me, it’s classic EA: all-in on the big noisy stuff and don’t sweat the details.

That remark strikes me as funny, because one of the things I really dug about Control is that the building doesn’t feel real. It’s got all these weird twisty passages and rooms that are out of reach to anyone without the special director powers. But I liked that, because the Bureau was almost its own character - like some eldritch god that is playing the part of a government building because it suits its inscrutable purpose to do so.

I do think the Ishimura, and really all the locations in the Dead Space games, seem to come from the Star Wars or Event Horizon mold, in that they seem to exist to try to kill or maim the people who have the bad luck to live and work there rather than being a place you’d want to spend any time in. In the case of Dead Space, that kind of feeds into its story, that its this cold, uncaring corporate environment and people working there just kind of expect things to be that way.

That’s funny to me, because the reason I stopped playing Control is that I couldn’t figure out where to go next really early in the game, and I hated that in shooters back in the 90s and I thought we’d gotten past that kind of level design.

I’ve never had trouble on figuring out where to go in Dead Space, but that’s mostly because they draw a line on the floor for you if you ever get lost.

Well, you’re responding to a fragment of the remark, taken out of context. Here’s what I wrote:

Bolding mine because it’s the point I was making. But, yes, The Oldest House is a weird place.