+re5/re6 are already pretty comfy to play, but this next-iteration of RE third-person shooter mechanics has really refined all the best parts of the prior entries. running is smooth (though understandably not that fast), turning around isn't a nuisance in instances where the quick-turn isn't optimal, and the handling for the guns nails the tense wobble of prior games without the same seemingly inconsistent shots.
+indeed, much of the fear in zombie confrontations comes from their erratic movements. zombies take many bullets to permanently dispatch, and lining up headshots isn't child's play. the undead will seize up, crane their noggins over lopsided, and stumble back and forth; all the while evading your fire.
+the whole police station section from the clock tower above to the dog pound below rules. perfect balance of planning your runs/routes + working out the various puzzles around the station.
+love the concept of the locker room. finding one of the blank keys lit my brain up with thoughts of what goodies I would get next. would have been interested in seeing this expanded.
+the usual resident evil cheese is much appreciated in the notes and emails and such over the course of the game. the cutscenes feel suitably more serious than the truly B-movie ones from the psx games, but the supplementary text belies the schlock under the hood.
+inventory system is cramped enough to not make smart loadout choices pointless, but also far less annoying to manage from when I played REmake. the hip pouches are also perfectly timed as you build out your weapon selection, great addition.
+best jumpscares and overall terror out of any of the REs I've played up to this point. when tyrant burst out of that wall in the east hall first floor my heart skipped a beat.
+ada...

-tyrant was honestly underused compared to what I expected from hearing others talk. he's present for a bit of the police station, but is unfortunately absent from the rest of the game other than a couple obviously scripted appearances. he's not really much of a threat either given that his punches don't deal much damage.
-the sewer and the lab arent't bad but don't have the great design web of the station. the sewer really just requires making like two loops through to get everything, and the lab has one small five-minute area + another area that just takes two loops through. puzzles are stlil fun, but it didn't quite hit the same for me.
-enemies also feel less threatening during these sections than the zombie windows and lickers of the station. the giant water monsters in the sewer are freaky but really only show up in two main locations, while the plant monsters of the lab go down quickly with the flamethrower regardless of their regeneration and their potentially to insta-kill leon.
-given the engine I actually wouldn't have minded an action focus later on in the game. missed opportunity imo, again given that the latter half is missing that je ne sais quoi of the first half.
-the section where you actually play as ada isn't that great. tracing the electrical systems made me feel like I was playing some obnoxious insomniac spider-man mission.

hit the spot as a "no thoughts" game while I recovered from marathoning so many games in the last two months. in terms of pacing I would have preferred a bit more bulk (I came in just shy of 8 hours IGT) or at the very least some way to just mow down zombies for a bit towards the end. the setpieces are good and the bosses passable for RE, but the bar is low, is it not? I absolutely could not put it down in the station though; playing this and onimusha sort of close to each other reminded me how much my brain gets tickled by RE-style puzzles.

started to see the vision once I realized the grab (your only verb outside of jumping) gives you i-frames when you bounce off of whatever you're grabbing... pretty cool wrinkle on an otherwise plain set of mechanics. a lot of the game is carried by the dense mix of geometric terrain and organic outgrowths a la sonic; it's no surprise that much of this team got rolled into sonic team for NiGHTS into dreams the year after. said team really demonstrates their technical aptitude as well, with some stunning overlapping parallax on stages such as planet automaton and swirling line scrolling in the background of the itamor lunch fight. ristar emotes fluidly, with his walking scowl morphing into a grin and twirl upon defeating hard enemies. occasionally he'll even show a penchant for childlike play, such as in this snowball fight setpiece.

a first impression yields something a little dry on the gameplay front, with single-hit enemies and slow movement compounding into something more leisurely than interesting. thankfully around the halfway point the design veers into level-unique puzzles and setpieces. the one that stuck out to me the most was a series of areas in planet 4 involving babysitting this radio(?) item across various hazards in order to give to various birds who want them blocking your way. presages a klonoa style of puzzles built from manipulating objects in the environment rather than working with pre-defined aspects of the player's toolkit. near the end the game veers into some execution challenges as well, with mixed results. ristar's grab actually has a lot more going on to meets the eye: not only does he have the aforementioned i-frames, but he also gains a bit of height off his bounce, and he can hold onto some interactables indefinitely, swinging back and forth using his arms as a tether. the former gets used for a couple climbing challenges jumping between walls and swinging poles, which makes for some pleasant execution trials in the midst of the level-specific stuff. the latter never gets expanded on quite as much, probably because ristar maintains no momentum from his swinging when he releases due to bouncing back off of the fulcrum he's attached to, so actually manipulating the technique to achieve certain bounce angles is a bit unintuitive.

bosses are neat across the board; while somewhat cycle-based, the designers trickle a couple small points for attacking them before they're obviously wide-open. some of these (I'm thinking of specifically the bird boss on planet 4 and its array of non-linear projectiles) encourage the i-frame abuse in interesting ways. by the end of the game, however, it seems like they expect you to exploit it pretty openly to get anywhere, and by that point the bosses end up becoming grab spam. definitely makes the fights fly by quicker, but I find myself preferring the more cautious approach I took during the earlier bosses, although I would imagine upon a replay some of the same techniques apply.

it has super mario 64 loosely draped over it, but in reality this is meat-and-potatoes platforming platforming: linear levels, hazards galore, and not a single NPC in sight. would be fair to say it has quite a lot of crash in its DNA, although gex completely jettisons the on-rails setup of crash in favor of more spacious locales. to try to wed its two influences, gex tends to set up its areas as narrow gauntlets at the start with forks in the road around the middle of the level so you can access each objective (red remotes that serve as this game's equivalents of mario's stars). for the majority of objectives, which slap a series of platforming challenges in front of a red remote, this is more than serviceable. it becomes more tedious when occasional objectives require you to find X number of thingamabobs strewn throughout a level; in these you get the unenviable chore of playing the same level forwards and backwards, swinging the camera around in the hope that you'll see a thingamabob tucked behind a wall. this is not to say that gex doesn't have some tricks up its sleeve: the early level Out of Toon starts off with a wide open area for its collectable jaunts (and a hidden silver remote too!) before tightening into a line for the rest of its duration, and the more experimental level Poltergex from late in the game provides a haunted mansion locale with doubly-layered rooms, giving two stacked paths that combine and loop back with a couple of branches off at key points (including a secret third and fourth layer of rooms on top). perhaps this game would be more interesting if it leaned more into these styles of level-building that took more advantage of the full 3D space.

gex's toolkit is brief and functional: he gets a tail bounce after any starting jump, and he gets a flying kick that gives a quick burst of speed while tying him to a particular direction momentarily. these are small additions to an otherwise standard run/jump/tailspin verb set, although the smooth implementation allows for seamless transitions and minor momentum conservation to those looking to speed up their gameplay. the obstacles in each level follow suit, providing a nice overview of traditional 3D platformer obstacles at this nascent point in their history. there are seven primary locales with a handful of levels each that reappear over the course of the game, and thus the gimmicks from earlier ones tend to be iterated upon for later entries. the best of these is probably the Circuit Central stages, which have a variety of manipulable platforms for the player to move across its vertically focused areas, such as a platform that rotates around a center pillar until it is struck, sending the platform off in its tangential direction. these levels also center an time-based energy power-up that allows gex to turn on other platforms and walkways when in contact with them. most other level gimmicks are cycle-based: flying table/drawer-platforms in the haunted mansion areas, rotating flat platforms suspended in air in the space areas, dripping lava in the prehistoric areas. very traditional platformer design, but at the same time it becomes hard to tell which of these were really new ideas in '98 when thinking through the slurry of platformers I've played from this period. it becomes even harder when said challenges are seemingly dropped at random throughout a level without real mechanical through-lines to grasp onto.

I went in thinking the voice lines would be trite, but they verge on nonsensical; it sort of presages a family guy-esque "look at the reference!" formula without the nicety of setting up some punchline in the process. gex rarely emotes anything relevant to the situation (outside of an eyebrow-raising chinese accent in the Kung-Fu Theater areas), instead preferring to sing bars from schoolhouse rock songs or drop random schwarznegger lines. or he just says "it's tail time!" over and over and over again. wanted to dunk on the simpsons writer who apparently penned much of this, Robert Cohen, but looked into his history and found out that his one primary simpsons episode credit was.... Flaming Moe's. very unfortunate, because that episode is a series-defining classic.

adding another feather to my cap by winning this year's monkey ball tournament at magfest after last year's typing of the dead win. a friend of mine has run lights and lasers at magfest on and off for the last decade or so, and when he told me there was a monkey ball cabinet in the arcade during a walk-through the night before it opened I was overjoyed. memories of old cons with filthy, unmaintained cabinets that one could barely roll through beginner courses on drifted away as I hoped this would finally give me the monkey ball arcade experience I had waited for. the last-minute announcement of a tournament was even more appealing; this would finally put my endless pandemic training to good use.

they had two cabinets in fact: an original stand-up cab, near flawless except for an uncomfortably dim screen, and a naomi kit and 3d-printed banana shoved into an astro city cab for those who preferred to sit down. both cabs were swarmed at open time, but I snuck in some time on the astro city cab late the first night. the setup was appreciated but god was it sensitive; imagine a joystick with the same deadzones and behavior of the gamecube analog stick, but with a porn-quality cock-sized banana attached to it, nauseating yellow from the printer filament. I resorted to two-handing the monster, using one hand to brace it while gently pressing it with the other. the original cabinet was completely stiff by comparison. even minimal motions required cranking it to either side, and certain full-length presses felt like they lacked the tilting distance of the gamecube version. definitely a learning curve, but it was to be expected. it was my first time, after all.

unlike typing of the dead, which at least had some head-to-head scoring support, monkey ball's tournament was structured as consecutive single credit runs between two players in bracket matches. begs the question of why they didn't just do a pool structure since it was all single elim anyway; a friend of mine who runs my hometown arcade organized the proceedings, so I wasn't about to crawl up his ass about it. score attack also left the crowd puzzled, as most of us ignore score in comparison to floor count. a quick google search as the competition started rolling led me to this particular guide (specifically section 2.6), which outlined the scoring system in some detail. effectively the number of seconds (including centiseconds) multiplied by 100 gives the bulk of the score, with the score doubled if it was done in less than half of the allotted time. bananas contribute another 100 points for each one obtained. however, warps contribute significantly more points, as a green warp goal will give 10000 additional points on the base value (reds give 20000) along with an additional multiplier for each stage skipped. the latter multiplier makes up for score lost on skipped levels, but the base bonus is pretty intense overall; there aren't levels that can give you anything close to 10000 points as a base, much less several in a row! when it comes to a score attack competition, warps are overly centralizing, to the extent that a player could perform worse and still secure a win by locking a warp.

so to the player I unfairly trampled first round, I'm real sorry. you breezed through beginner without dropping a single life, showing off little skips and flair in the process. I popped in after and warped through most of it and demolished your score, even tho I dropped a life and missed the extra stages. it was honestly a screwjob, and I don't blame you for running off afterwards. in the final round a similar issue happened, where two people in a match on expert each got the warp on floor 2, with one person failing at the infamous floor 7 (also known as Exam-C), and the other getting a couple floors beyond that. the former person flew through the warp and got the time bonus, doubling a 70k reward to 140k points and completely blowing the other person out of the water, floors be damned. hell, the same round I took a single credit all the way to floor 16 and I still did not get as many points as she did thanks to an overly cautious run through floor 2. it really was a bit ridiculous. however, these tournaments are about understanding the rules, not necessarily agreeing on whether they're fair. so, emboldened by my rather strong previous showing (only one other person got a run past floor 10), I threw caution to the wind on my floor 2 attempt, snagged the time bonus, and that was it, even with a total choke on floor 7.

of course, in console play I can comfortably take a 1cc all the way through expert extra, so this shouldn't have felt that impressive, but on the chunky banana the gamefeel transformed the game a fair bit. the whole tournament was on the original cabinet with the weightier controls, so nailing the precision of floors like 14 where nudges around pegs that will bounce you off ledges was as easy as just pressing the stick in the right direction; no attention to minuscule movement required. it's when it got to floors demanding quick build-ups of speed or wild tilts such as floor 18 that it began to dawn on me that perhaps the cabinet was not as in perfect of a condition as I had hoped; could have also been some early control mistuning by the developers, but I'd like to think they understood their own game well enough to design levels around the original stick. still, we got lucky that plenty of extremely challenging stages are front-loaded in expert, as we all still got a good show of some very solid east coast players taking a crack at a sega classic. maybe we would've all preferred to play on gamecube instead tho lol

[Noch im Early Access]

Ich bin gerade in einer kurzen manischen Phase in der ich Stuff spielen will der vorher nichts für mich war. Ich glaub diese Cherry hatte legit Armored Core für mich gepoppt, aber dann war da letztens so ein Video über die Wizardry Reihe, außerdem hatte ich son bisschen Kings Field und Shadow Tower Abyss gespielt, und nun bin ich hier.


Lunacid ist eine sehr sehr deutliche homage an From Software Titel bevor sie vorrangig für ihre Bosskämpfe bekannt waren. Besonders ihre Dungeon Crawler Tage, sowie zahlreichen Spiele die allesamt ebenfalls einfach nur Kings Field nochmal waren, werden hier stark referenziert. Und als erstes fand ich es daher auch son bisschen flach, da Navigation sehr einfach war, der Kampf leicht von der Hand ging, nichts wirklich gefährlich war und man mit einem affenzahn durch die einzelnen Gebiete bretterte, ohne die Chance zu haben sie kennenzulernen bevor man mit ihnen durch ist.

Und dann stieß ich auf die Crypt. Ein sehr großes Gebiet, ein sehr düsteres Gebiet, ein sehr sehr verwirrend strukturiertes Gebiet voller Monster und Gestalten denen ich keinen Schaden zufügen kann.
Meine Aufgabe ist leicht: Finde drei Öfen um das Licht erstrahlen zu lassen. Und zwei davon ließen sich auch spielend einfach finden. Bis ich den dritten haben sollte, vergingen wortwörtlich Stunden.
Stunden die ich umherirrte, ständig die selben Wege abging ohne es zu merken, Feinde mühselig mit Magie zu bekämpfen, dazwischen immer mal wieder zu leveln. Oh, ich hab ein neues Gebiet entdeckt, sehr düster, mit rötlichem Wasser und grausamen Gestalten. Oh, hier ist ein neues Gebiet, wo es aber erstmal nicht weitergeht. Aha, noch ein neues Gebiet! Aber auch hier finde ich erstmal nichts.
Oha, aber eine neue Waffe habe ich gefunden! Und damit kann ich nicht nur die Monster in den Katakomben abwehren, sondern bin durch Zufall auch darauf gestoßen, dass ich damit bestimmte Gatter öffnen kann.
Yes, jetzt gehts endlich wieder voran!!
...
...
"Death Approaches"
...

und das wars erstmal wieder mit Fortschritt.
Erst nach viel umherirren, Gegner bekämpfen und leveln, bekam ich meinen DEX Wert irgendwann so hoch, dass ich mich mit Kollisionsbugs und der furchtbaren Pillshaped Collision Box von Unity hoch in ein Loch ziehen konnte. Und hier war er endlich:
Der dritte Ofen. Es dauerte wortwörtlich Stunden bis der Skill hoch genug war um dieses Pflichtziel zu erreichen. Es sollte noch weitere 10 Stunden dauern, bis ich merkte, dass ich von Anfang an einen Spell hatte um auch so schon hier hoch zu kommen.
Endlich hatte ich Licht. Endlich konnten Monster bekämpft werden.

...nur den Tod konnte ich immer noch nicht bezwingen.

Allerdings habe ich ein Buch gefunden! Und einen Geheimraum mit einer mysteriösen und out of place wirkenden Wunderkiste! Und nun wo ich den Moonjump gemeistert hatte, wusste ich noch zwei weitere Orte zu denen ich hin konnte jeder faszinierender als der letzte.


Lunacid ist ein Spiel das sehr harmlos anfängt, dich sehr einfach ohne viele Schnörkel in diese Art Spiel führt, und dich dann mit einer Wand trifft.
Endlose Labyrinthe, zu organisch sie simpel zu zeichnen, zu gleichaussehend um sich an der Architektur zu orientieren. Items, Zauber, Ereignisse die nicht erklärt werden und ausprobiert werden müssen. Unendlich viele Orte an denen man jederzeit nach dem roten Pfaden suchen kann.
Und versteht mich nicht falsch, all das ist GROSSARTIG. Ich liebe es Geheimnisse zu finden oder Geräusche zu hören deren Sinn oder Ursprung nie ganz klar wird. An einer Stelle habe ich ein Secret gefunden von dem ich wusste wo ich es einsetzen muss weil ich schon ein anderes Secret gefunden hatte, damit mir dann gezeigt wird wie ich ein anderes Secret finde, damit mir nie erklärt wird wofür das da sein soll. Es ist super faszinierend und macht diese Welt noch so viel interessanter und das Spielerlebnis sehr einprägsam.

Was ich aber nicht so mag ist, wenn eine große Anzahl an Optionen zu einer völligen Ziellosigkeit wird. Wenn mir eine Figur sagt, dass ich eine Quest machen soll, und ich nun die gesamte Welt mehrmals abgelatscht bin um diese Quest zu suchen, weil ich eine kleine Ranke an einem Baum übersehen hab.
Oder wie gerade die Katakomben mit ihrem Labyrinth einfach maßlos übertreiben, besonders wie häufig man es ablaufen muss.
Oder wie der einzige Punkt an dem ich in die Lösung gucken musste um weiterzukommen weil ich nicht darauf kam, eine nie erklärte Mechanik an einem Tor war durch das man durchkommen MUSS um das Spiel weiterzuspielen. Und gerade letzteres ist ein Fall wo ich wirklich hart dafür bin irgendeine Art Hinweis in die Welt zu werfen, weil ich mir sicher bin da nie drauf zu kommen.

Absolut esoterische Nonsense-Rätsel für optionale Waffen? Hell Yeah. Eine Joke-Quest hinter fünf versteckten Wänden? Les go! Aber wie man ins Schloss kommt, da wär ich legit nie drauf gekommen.

Ein paar andere Dinge die ich nicht mag, uh, das Spiel hat noch recht viel von diesem Unity-1-Mann-Projekt-Jank den man in sehr vielen dieser Retro-like Spiele sieht. Gerade wie floaty es ist, wie viel Weaponsway existiert, Kolissionsprobleme und besonders die Menüführung sind ziemlich nervig und passen find ich auch so gar nicht zu diesem Wunsch als retro-styled erkannt zu werden. Ich würd sogar so weit gehen, dass die Menüführung das schwächste am ganzen Spiel ist und driiingend überarbeitet werden sollte.

Denn abseits von ein mal stuck sein (für seeeehr lange) und diese Nitpicks, mag ich das Spiel sehr - sogar noch mehr nachdem ich es soweit es aktuell geht "durch"-gespielt hatte.

Denn nun hatte ich plötzlich ein paar neue, völlig andere Gebiete entdeckt, die wieder in nur noch mehr neue Gebiete führten. Oh, eine Geheimnis, wie cool. Oh, es führt an einen völlig neuen Ort, oh hier gibts eine große Herausforderung für eine besondere Waffe. Oh, sehr nice.
Oh, noch ein Gebiet mit völlig neuen Gegnern und Fallen. Und bisher völlig optional weil hier noch nicht viel ist.
Oh, eine Tafel mit alter Schrift.
Oh, ein neuer Zauber der mir eine ganz neue Fähigkeit gibt, sowie ein alter Zauber den ich schon die ganze Zeit hatte aber erst jetzt ausprobiert hab. Zeit die ganze Welt nochmal abzulaufen, Dinge auszuprobieren und dann in Paint.net ein paar Runen zu entschlüsseln während der Soundtrack im Hintergrund läuft.
Und es gibt ja trotzdem noch einiges zu entdecken! Da ist noch mindestens eine offene Quest, ich weiß noch nicht was es mit den Pflanzen im Wald auf sich hat, ein Gebiet ist weiterhin ausgegraut und dann soll ja sogar noch irgendwann was kommen, ist ja noch nichtmal fertig das Spiel!
Aber fürs erste hab ich glaub ich genug gesehen.


Es ist schwierig das Spiel so richtig zu "bewerten" weil die Höhepunkte beim spielen gar nicht so hoch sind. Aber wie viel ich an diesen Spiel denken musste, ausprobiert hab, zuletzt mit Kumpels geknobelt habe (danke Lewis und Rig 🥰) war das schon mächtig faszinierend.

Ich wünschte nur, dass man sich etwas weniger stark auf seine Inspirationen beziehen würde. Ja, ich weiß dass man From Soft inspiriert war und ein paar Referenzen sind auch nichts schlimmes. Aber wenn du einen NPC hast der so heißt und das macht wie ein Dude in Dark Souls, ein Ort genau so nennst wie etwas aus Shadow Tower Abyss und sogar Waffen 1:1 übernimmst, frag ich mich halt ob du nicht auch irgendwie deine eigene Identität und Legacy schaffen möchtest, statt nur die von jemand anderen zu nehmen.

the jointed, scythe-like arms on the necromorphs stick out for multiple reasons, but there's a subtle trick the designers pull with it (intentionally or unintentionally) that fucked me up so many times playing through this game. with the camera in the traditional claustrophobic over-the-shoulder view, there's virtually no way to view what's behind the player without carefully swinging it around. when one of those necromorphs silently creeps up on you and dangles their arms right over isaac's head, letting them peek right into the frame... it elicits such a snap reaction from me anytime it happens. in an otherwise quiet situation there's a hope that hauling ass without looking back will put enough distance between you and them to turn around safely, but god forbid it happens when you're already firing off shots at enemies ahead of you. that heart-sinking feeling of realizing the crowd you had carefully herded together isn't the extent of the danger in the room and that you're actually completely flanked turns tense strategy into desperate flailing. rarely does isaac lack for available weapons or resources, but encounters like these reinforce that it's a constant struggle for survival regardless.

in many ways this is the bastard heir to the resident evil 4 throne, and it even attempts to be a "regular" survival horror game to boot. besides the perverse way bodies are reanimated and mutated into angular beasts, intestines dangling and writhing outside of the torso, there's some gesturing towards explorable environments and puzzle-solving. each chapter is located in a different wing of the ship, with each of these areas arranged in a spoked hub design with linear branches leading to key items towards some sort of general puzzle located in the center. no real brainteasers here -- most of it's either just picking up key items or manipulating interactables with the kinesis ability -- but I found the scenario escalation here surprisingly appealing. driven on by various talking heads over the diegetically-integrated hologram comms, the pace feels brisk, and the game rarely stumbles in regards to directing the player to their next location. it's certainly not organic, but this is the re4 model, not re1.

the first five chapters or so were novel but felt overly dependent on fetch objectives, and it was in the second half of the game where it seemed like the designers stretched their legs a bit. setpiece loaded areas such as the USS valor and its power outages, fiery engine interiors, and wide-open bridges ripe for combat arenas elevate what otherwise would have been dry encounters into a strained flow of ratcheting tension from room to room. much of this is helped by the disorienting zero gravity sections that open up some minor platforming and release the shackles on isaac's otherwise-lethargic movement. at their best they hinder typical combat and make ordinary enemies more threatening through spatially-foreign positioning that plays with one's typical mental layout of encounter locality; at worst they are perfunctory beyond the clunky fun of watching isaac bounce from wall to wall. the sections exploring the vacuum of space are less interesting... any attempt to constrain the player by tethering them to a countdown (in this case an oxygen meter) risks them struggling to execute within the limit or becoming anxious at the impending doom. the designers punt on these issues by introducing heavy guardrails into these sections along with frequent oxygen refills, which take what should be the threat of venturing beyond the limits of human existence into the void of space and reduce them to a dog leash.

these are just the bits of downtime between the combat, however, and each encounter feels like a proper challenge to optimize and strategize within. shooters generally use the general projectile model of impact: momentum (and thus kinetic energy) demonstrated by the jitter of firing of a clip and the repeated thud of the bullet meeting its mark. dead space sets itself apart by dispensing with this and introducing the slice. much like how simply unloading rounds into a zombie's torso is inefficient in resident evil, dead space heavily discourages aiming for the easiest targets in favor of severing appendages. the hooked arms and stubby legs of necromorphs come in a variety of configurations from wildly dangling to tucked in to swaying alongside a jaunty waddle, and learning how to properly dissect each orientation is key. this makes lining up shots less focused on quick reactions and more on careful placement, and no weapon handles this better than the handgun equivalent: the plasma cutter. it evicersates even late-game enemies with ease so long as the player properly places its linear crosshairs perpendicular to the extremity, which requires instinctual understanding of both its vertical and horizontal firing modes. the other weapons are equally as impressive: the line gun and the contact beam both hail from applications in excavations and provide extremely powerful severing power with a wide horizontal blast for the former and a focused vertical shot for the second. the ripper in theory was one of my favorites as well with its remote controlled sawblade that could easily trim opponents down to size, though its stopping/staggering potential is low and prevented it from keeping a permanent spot in my inventory. indeed, most of these extra weapons have excellent specific uses but lack that high reliability and versatility of the plasma cutter. if I did a second playthrough right now, I may as well just do a handgun-only run.

the typical crane-arm necromorph comprises most of the alien cast, but it's worth mentioning that many other enemies take advantage of your special abilities as well. where I fall regarding whether this is a good or bad thing is mixed... after all, the bread-and-butter of the game is severing, and when the game attempts to introduce additional factors it's hit or miss. take for example enemies that split open into reams of parasitic spawn upon death, specifically when the arms have not been severed. the little tykes are finicky to dispatch with anything other than the flamethrower, and when not getting picked off one by one they have a bad tendency to leap upon you and force you to perform a mashing QTE to remove them, something the game leans on a bit too heavily even with regular enemies. anything with projectiles is also sketchy, as isaac struggles to maneuver around them thanks to the camera angle; the damage is less the issue compared to the obnoxious hitstun. even then, much of the annoyance is combat stems from ignoring the severing gimmick, and I more or less understand the designer's intent in slapping the player's wrist for attempt to play guns ablaze, but no one is a perfect aim (esp on ps3 at ~20 fps). I could do without lethargic segments of carefully sniping single-tendril projectile minions strewn across the ground when I could be thrown into the actual fear inherent in the quickly-moving enemies of regular combat. plenty of the necromorph variants don't have the issues regardless and enrich the design no matter the apperance whether it's the occasional invincible stalker miniboss or the shuddering valor crewmembers that move at lightning speeds.

which is to say, the game is frequently great and occasionally fantastic whether wading through a sea of aliens or being a handyman around the decks of the ishimura. for perspective, I believe this game took me around nine hours, and at the same time by re4 rules it bats a lower average in terms of overall scenario/encounter creativity, regardless of the praise above. the bar is high! I'm putting it in this context because the other, possibly more intended context of tense space thriller is less appealing to me. bioshock-esque audio logs, frequent yammering from people never properly introduced, an extremely on-the-nose analogue to scientology, pointless intrigue that never affects your actual tasks around the station... how many times must I watch an NPC soliloquize from behind plexiglass before executing something supposedly shocking before I get the point. it was de rigeur to do shit like this tho in the 360 era, and the absence of traditional cutscenes makes it easier to swallow for sure. it's just odd none of the staff ever realized how goofy it is for isaac to be running around digging through receptacles for spare items while someone is solemnly shooting a random crew member. in 2022 you're not here for the story though, you're here because you want an early HD third-person shooter that doesn't lean on a cover system as a crutch. in that respect dead space is a lot more clever than it originally lets on.