Susan and I finished Dead Space on the PS3 last week. All in all it’s a pretty great game. I handled the controls while Susan played copilot, mostly because of her lack of familiarity with 3d gaming. We had a lot of pretty creepy fun playing through it. The game’s a 3rd person action adventure game which seems to be inspired by the Resident Evil series of games. In many ways it’s superior to most of the games in that series. It’s also clearly been influenced by the System Shock series and it has some light RPG elements in the form of suit and weapon upgrades.

Graphically the game is beautiful – in fact it’s one of the best looking games I’ve played on the PS3. There’s great use of light and shadow, very detailed textures, excellent models and animation, and great art direction.

Audio is similarly superb – it’s one of the best sounding games I’ve played on the PS3 as well and the voice acting was great.

Gameplay is a mixed but mostly positive bag. On the downside, the game’s fairly repetitive, and while the ship is realistic and the game breaks up the corridor crawling with some great action set pieces in very large spaces, there’s still a ton of corridor crawling and it can get old. The controls are tight but the weapons are a mixed bag – some seem much more effective than others no matter how you upgrade them and it’s difficult to know where to spend your resources effectively. The difficulty seemed pretty fair on medium. There are a number of physics and logic puzzles to work out, often while under fire from multiple enemies, and these were some of the highlights of the game.

The plot was just ok – it starts out like a riff on the plot from Aliens, with you and your crew dispatched to rescue an orbital mining operation that sent out a distress signal then stopped communicating, but it morphs into a muddle of religion, government conspiracy, double crosses, alien artifacts and a mutating alien lifeform that’s has some similarities to the one in the classic John Carpenter movie The Thing. It wasn’t bad by any means but by the end Susan and I were weary of it.

The game has one other superb attribute – it’s got one of the best interfaces I’ve seen in a game. Most everything you do and interact with in the game you do via a 3d computer interface that projects out of the spacesuit you’re wearing or out of objects you encounter. It’s really well done and I hope more games mimic it.

I picked this up used for $35 but would have been just as happy paying $60 retail for it – it’s a really great game and well worth a look.

Here’s a video to give you a sense of gameplay and graphics:

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/we1oLVRobYQ&hl=en&fs=1&

This is possibly the worst game I’ve ever finished. Susan and I played through the action game Monster Madness, finishing last night after a couple of weeks of chipping away at it level by level. If you’re familiar with the old arcade game Gauntlet, or more recent action brawlers like the Xmen series of games on consoles, you have a general sense of the gameplay – top down camera, 1-4 players romping through the gameworld bashing the badguys.The best thing I can say about the game is that the concept was solid – fight your way through a modern day world overun with all the monsters from horror movies and legend colored with a satirical spin. Everything else? Terrible. The audio was apparantly downsampled or recorded at a really low bit rate, the voice acting was awful, the plot itself (4 heavily stereotyped teens out to save the world) was terrible, and the game was full of bugs – your character gets stuck on and in things, you randomly warp around the screen if the game gets bogged down, the framerate is highly variable but trending towards too low, and while it featured a ton of variety in weapons I ended up spending most of the game just whacking things with my default melee weapon because it was just overkill with the gadgets and dozens of alternate weapons.

Why we managed to finish this thing is hard to say. We like playing through coop together in games and we didn’t have any other handy options is I guess the main reason why. Anyway stay far away from this even if you find it cheap is my advice. I think I paid around $15 for it and that was too much. It’s available on PC, XBOX360 and PS3. We played on the PS3. Here’s a brief video to give you a sense of how the game plays:

http://static.zemanta.com/readside/loader.js