In Third Person

After years of completely ignoring the game and weeks of contemplating whether or not I should give Mass Effect a shot, I finally grabbed a copy of the game. I'm a few hours in and have all six potential party members on my side. I have a lot to say about this game, which I'll dole out in a number of posts in the future.

What I wanted to focus on first is the scope of Mass Effect. Without question, this is the biggest game I've ever played. In a number of ways, the Mass Effect experience is absolutely colossal to the point that it's intimidating the heck out of me.

The team at BioWare really have created an entire galaxy for players to interact with. Starting from the outside and working inward, let's start with the planets. There are a number of different planets for you to explore for missions and assignments. Even the planets that you can't explore have an entire back story for you to read should you care to learn more about it. When you're in a planet or a space station, the environments are generally big, full of variety and full of life.


Speaking of life, it's the characters that inhabit the world of Mass Effect that really take this world to the next level of scope. There are an insane number of primary, secondary and tertiary characters. The game does an amazing job of fleshing out the stories of every character you need to know through countless hours of dialogue and back story to read. All the main characters in the game feel like they've lived a full life before you started playing this game. Secondary characters have a surprising amount of dialogue and back story as well. Even bit players have enough "meat" to their characters to make them feel like real people. In an age where most games have trouble humanizing their main characters, what Mass Effect is able to do with this entire world is blowing my mind.

Where the intimidation comes in is how how I control my Shepard to interact with this world. You're constantly put in situations where your decisions affect the world. I've already encountered a few situations where I completely changed the world. While I'm happy with the decisions I have made so far, I know that this world could be very different had I approached these scenarios differently.

So far, I'm liking Mass Effect quite a bit. It's not without fault, but overall I'm glad to be playing this. You'll be able to read more of my thoughts about Mass Effect soon.

I'm officially 1/4 of the way through Dead Space, and there was something about the overall feel of the game that I thought was worth mentioning: the underlying sense of deja vu.

Normally, that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. And to Dead Space's credit, it does do a few good things to make the game stand out on its own, such as the emphasis on shooting limbs and everything that happens in space or low-gravity scenarios. But it's pretty clear to see that Dead Space is clearly built off of other influences.

The third-person shooting action and survival horror elements are directly lifted from Resident Evil 4. The story progression though big events or small collectibles such as audio logs came from Bioshock and Metroid Prime. Much of the space station aesthetic comes from Metroid Prime. Outside of games, Dead Space takes a ton of cues from the "Alien" series of movies.

To be fair, if you break down 99% of anything ever made, you can find all the elements that came before it to create the final product. In Dead Space though, the game doesn't try and hide where those influences came from. If anything, I really feel like they tried hard to at least match its influences in terms of quality, if not surpass them.


Throughout my experience so far, I always feel like I'm playing a mash-up of a bunch of other people's ideas. But damn, they're executed so well in Dead Space. The overall level of polish and detail so far is spot on with what I think this game should be. It's fun, very exciting and constantly scaring the pants off of me. There is a moment towards the end of chapter 3 where you encounter something that is 10 times more insane than anything you've encountered up to that point and I almost lost it. I was actually yelling at my TV and mashing buttons during a moment that required precision because I couldn't help myself.

All of the things it borrows from other games kind of makes Dead Space a more "comfortable" experience. Not in the sense of being less scary, but being able to quickly jump into this world and have fun. It's always in the back of my head that I'm not playing something wholly new, but as long as it stays this good, that's totally fine.

Back in 2008, I was very intrigued by Dead Space. After E3, the buzz going around was that it was like the evolution of Resident Evil 4. Since that game is one of my all-time favourites, Dead Space was very much on my radar. The reviews came out great and it eventually went on to sell at least enough to warrant a greatest hits re-release.

So why didn't I pick it up back then? I don't know, really. At the time, I know I was busy with Rock Band 2, Gears of War 2 and Left 4 Dead. After I was through with those games, I would always look at that box every time I went into a game store, but never acted on it. I even saw this game brand new for $10 and still didn't buy it. For whatever reason, I just kept passing it up.

That is, until this past Christmas break. Using a gift card I received, I picked up Dead Space...and let it sit on my shelf for two months while I played through Modern Warfare 2, Assassin's Creed 2, Lego Rock Band, The Lost and Damned, Borderlands and Silent Hill: Homecoming.


I'm only about half way through chapter 1, but dude...Dead Space is kind of rocking my socks. For the few of you who aren't familiar with this game, I'll give you a quick rundown. You are an engineer who has been assigned to fix this giant space station. You and your crew crash land on the space station, and quickly realize there are aliens on it. In terms of tone, mood and atmosphere, this game is very much like the movie Aliens.

What the game is currently lacking in innovation, it makes up for in polish. Even in 2010, Dead Space graphically is one of the best games out there. Audio wise, my goodness. It has some of the most amazing sound of any video game. The ambient sound really sets the tone of the game and does a great job of freaking you out to the point where you're not sure if those creepy noises are coming from the game, or something in the other room of your house. Leading up to the release, EA was hyping up how the game doesn't have a heads-up display in the traditional game sense. Instead, information such as your health and amount of ammo in your clip are displayed on the character himself and all menus are pulled up within an in-game floating "screen" that you can look around. This is supposed to keep you immersed in the game, but I would have been fine with a regular HUD. Nice touch nonetheless.

In terms of the horror elements of Dead Space, it's about on par at this point with Resident Evil 4. The "horror" you feel mainly comes from jump scares and the tension you feel when your character is physically threatened, which is a lot. If you're looking for a more psychological horror experience along the lines of Silent Hill though, then this isn't it.


The one thing that has me tripping up at this point are the controls. Granted, I've played this game for less than two hours at this point, but some elements of the layout and how they work are taking some time to adjust to. For instance, when you're not aiming your gun, the right stick acts as an independent camera control rather than controlling where your character is looking. What this means is, you can swing the camera around so that you're actually looking at the front of your character. It's weird when I try and look around from the perspective of my character using the stick and instead it moves the camera independent of the character. I'm also not a fan of left bumper acting as the run button. Having that handled by pushing in the left stick would work much better in my opinion.