Volitions Advocate on 17/12/2008 at 23:46
Oh, they also are more effective at playing dead on Impossible.
You'll shoot them till they go down (when its obvious they're just a ragdoll) and then focus on the 3 other guys attacking you. then you'll back yourself into the corner where the guy was dead and he'll start chomping on you.
Volca on 18/12/2008 at 08:14
Quote Posted by dethtoll
The contact beam is awful, the ripper is even worse. I used the flamethrower quite a bit, though, it works wonders on those really little bastards that come out of the fatties. Only downside is it's worthless in zero air.
So to put it simply: Cutter for general work, plasma rifle for suppression, flamethrower for smaller, more annoying creatures, and line gun for tougher creatures and as a main weapon in the later chapters.
Interesting differences - i found flamethrower to be good but slow, useless for vacuum, and thanks to the smart ammo distribution system I got most of the ammo for it. The ripper is horrible, I agree. It's hard to use and the secondary attack is pretty useless.
There are three immediate effect long range weapons in the game if I'm not mistaken (Plasma cutter, plasma riffle, and contact beam). I found the long range battles much more effective. Letting the necromorphs get close to me was always the last option.
Surprisingly, contact beam and force seemed good weapons for me. Force is not bad if more than one enemy comes from one direction, and the grenade secondary attack is something I wish I discovered sooner.
Also, the strategy I found useful is to put power nodes on the weakest weapon you have. That forces the game to give you more ammo for the more interesting/useful weapons. Or getting rid of the weak weapon altogether sometimes (but the flamethrower is really good against the smallest).
sh0ck3r on 21/12/2008 at 19:14
played the game for half an hour. taking a bit to get used to 3rd person and the game seems of course that it would be better in 1st. mouse control was floaty until I turned off v-sync. graphics are rather disappointing (a 2008 game that looks worse than half life 2, a 2004 game). my biggest gripe is the mouse control -- it takes way too long to do a 180 degree turn. I'm getting used to these things though. I could picture the game turning out to be pretty good.
june gloom on 21/12/2008 at 19:54
Yeah the game looks like a third person Doom 3. It's not all bad, though- Chapters 2 through 11 are aces. 1 and 12 less so.
Volitions Advocate on 21/12/2008 at 22:45
I enjoyed chapter 12 quite a bit. Everythign except for the boss fight and the ending cinematic. I think I liked it because it took me back to the animated comic. When I picked up the audio log in the flight control area and it played a clip from the comic I was completely immersed. Might be because I think the Comics are my favorite part of the entire experience. I really really wanted to go to the colony the entire time i was playing, and even though you didn't really get to see anything cool like the common areas and such, it still gave me just a taste.
Also. i'm going to say it again. on Impossible difficulty this game is HARD. I've been scraping by. I just finished chapter 6 (hydroponics) and i'm finally doing alright because I managed to kill the big mofo in food storage without getting hit once (died 12 times in the process) which means everything that was in that big cyndrilical room I managed to collect and save. So i'm finally doing great. But once I've all stocked up on ammo. I find that I play for 10 minutes and suddenly im short again.
blaydes99 on 23/12/2008 at 09:04
Just finished Dead Space. I'm listing everything that I can think of that it stole from System Shock 2 here:
-Spaceship taken over by alien "virus", turning crew into mindless killing machines
-Virus is contracted through alien artifact recovered from remote planet
-Some areas of the ship are covered by fleshy masses
-Some decks of the ship are exactly the same (medical, hydroponics)
-Has a "basketball" court
-Hero is equipped with a an upgradable "rig"
-Rig and weapons by upgrade modules
-Player can purchase items at vending machines
-Player is guided by remote helpers through audio transmissions
-Some audio logs talk about a man and woman who want to escape from the crisis together (Tommy/Rebecca)
-Blood and bodies everywhere throughout the ship
-Similar messages in blood on the walls of ship
-Crazy doctor messing with crew members
-Audio logs tell some of the story (details of some audio logs are almost exact copies of logs in SS2)
-Logs and NPCs tell of a mutiny among the crew
-Later in the game, the player enters a military ship that is "attached" to the main ship
-The ending is SS2's ending, with a minor twist. I knew what would happen before I saw it. First, the player is shown standing in front of a window messing with some controls (same in both games). Then the whole shuttle scene...
Frankly, I can admire a game that has a few nods to SS2, but this seems to be more a case of "let's re-do SS2, but add a little new content, lots more gore, and plenty of cheap scares".
Guess it is worth playing once, but Dead Space really didn't do anything better than SS2 at all. Meh.
Any other things that were blatant copies that I missed?
june gloom on 23/12/2008 at 09:16
I think "stole" is too strong a word here. Inspired, sure.
Though let's be fucking honest. Half of what you listed are standard sci-horror cliches that SS2 does not have a monopoly on. Either that or they're common tropes found in games of all sorts- such as purchasing items at vending machines and being guided by remote helpers.
Others like the military ship are spot on. Though I fail to see how SS2's ending and DS' ending are at all similar.
blaydes99 on 23/12/2008 at 19:40
Quote Posted by dethtoll
I think "stole" is too strong a word here. Inspired, sure.
Though let's be fucking honest. Half of what you listed are standard sci-horror cliches that SS2 does not have a monopoly on. Either that or they're common tropes found in games of all sorts- such as purchasing items at vending machines and being guided by remote helpers.
Others like the military ship are spot on. Though I fail to see how SS2's ending and DS' ending are at all similar.
Yes, it is true, most sci-fi/horror/survival games must have some of those elements.
As for ending: in SS2, the last thing you see is Tommy in the shuttle, then Rebecca is coming out as Shodan for one last ominous appearance. We get a simliar thing in Dead Space, showing the player this time (slightly different than Tommy, yes), and as he thinks of his girl, she pops out all zombified and screams.
Not exactly the same, no, but simliar enough that it seemed to be directly inspired from SS2's ending in the shuttle.
june gloom on 23/12/2008 at 20:28
How about no, because that sort of thing is pretty much directly drawn from a legion of horror movies.
Malleus on 24/12/2008 at 00:03
Quote Posted by blaydes99
Frankly, I can admire a game that has a few nods to SS2, but this seems to be more a case of "let's re-do SS2, but add a little new content, lots more gore, and plenty of cheap scares".
I didn't see that as problem, mostly because the game was just good IMO. And I felt that it not being advertised as something 'System Shock' and still being something similar is a lot better that the other way around.
Anyway, there's a certain event in the game I don't understand -
a log on the military ship implies that they already knew that the marker is on the planet, they knew about the necromorphs. So then why did they still pick up and open the escape pod?