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Comments
I think the only good way to do a Portal movie is just Chell and GlaDOS, of course. Chell can speak, I guess, but just make it her trying to do the tests and banter between the two of them for an hour and a half. I suppose they could intercut flashes of how GlaDOS was made as Chell discovers things during the tests.
Honestly...Portal's plot would make a pretty terrible movie. It's excellent as something to listen to while you solve puzzles, but just presented as the entire work? Meh.
There is no foreseeable way a J.J. Abrams Portal movie could be anything but generic sci-fi action with a couple of dress sets for the game.
Yeah J.J. Abrams can't do Portal right. I don't know about Star Wars. But Portal? No.
There's already a Portal movie, it's called "watching a silent walkthrough of the game".
By that logic there's already an Assassin's Creed, Red Dead Redemption, and Shin Megami Tensei movie.
So, started Dead Space 2.
I think a summary of the game thus far is worth posting.
So, we get a quick recap of the first game as Isaac is interviewed by a therapist. So far so good...
Then Isaac wakes up in a ruined mental hospital. Okay, so we're jumping right into stuff happening. A guy walks up to him and...is brutally killed by a necromorph that sneaks up behind them. Okay, that was pretty startling, but startling is the only aspect of horror Dead Space has managed thus far, so let's see how it does with subtlety.
The guy then turns into a necromorph, on screen, extremely well-illuminated, taking up the entire screen. We even get to watch his eyes fall out. This was probably supposed to be terrifying. I laughed out loud.
Then Isaac somehow manages to shove the necromorph so that it stumbles slightly off-camera, at which point it either evaporates or loses interest and wanders off.
Then we take control. And...we're in an abandoned insane asylum overrun by necromorphs, unarmed and in a straightjacket. Okay, maybe that first bit wasn't indicative and the game has learned a thing or two about horror! The necromorphs are even offscreen and indicated by shadows a lot of the time! This is awesome!
But...this brief bit took me four tries. Here's why.
So...not horribly impressed, so far.
Okay, kept playing anyway.
So two soldiers shot at me, and a necromorph in the ceiling took the opportunity to kill them both. That was pretty well-handled.
Then I walked into a room and a scare chord immediately played. I had to look around the room for awhile before I figured out why it was scary, though. It was some sort of unethical experiment room, I guess.
Next room, a guy with a knife is...mumbling exposition. I only make out like half of it, but he's apparently responsible for what happened? I guess? Anyway, he cuts my straightjacket open and gives me a health pack and flashlight. Then he holds the knife up in front of his throat and drags it through the air in front. As he does this, MS Paint quality decals of blood appear on his shoulder, legs, back, and other completely unrelated parts of his body, but not, you know, his throat, hands, or chest.
This game is really pathetic so far. I mean, I liked the first because it felt like a pretty good action game, so maybe once it stops trying to be the horror game this series is bizarrely marketed as, it'll be good?
Okay, now some chick is telling me to go places over the intercom. So there's a bit of a walk in the dark with a flashlight, which starts off building tension really well, with a shadowy figure moving in another room but vanishing before you can spot it and stuff like that, but then we keep getting random pointless jump scares like a TV coming on and blasting static for a bit or a pipe dumping out some water. Also Isaac hallucinates a bit.
Then we crawl through a pipe and a necromorph almost attacks Isaac, but realizes that he has no way to defend himself and thus the game would end, so it wanders off.
The air vent collapses and Isaac lands next to a corpse being suspended by some science thing. Isaac dismantles the science thing and uses it to make...well, he has the gravity gun now, basically. Because nothing says survival horror like infinite ammo. So he takes some metal rods and uses them to knock out the glass around the room.
Some necromorphs hear the noise and they...well, the animation indicates that they're running, but I've rarely seen someone in good health even walk that slowly. Anyway, they lazily charge at Isaac, who fires more metal rods at them like spears.
...Wait. Didn't the first game make a big deal about how you had to sever all of the limbs to incapacitate a Necromorph? Because they animate all of the dead flesh and thus can't be beaten by other means? It's kind of their whole thing?
Gah.
Well, I can confirm that at least DS2 Isaac still has the leg strength necessary to sever limbs cleanly with a stomp. Probably not appropriate for a supposed horror game, but I always loved that.
Found a guy who was in the middle of an open-heart surgery when the Necromorphs showed up and is still restrained with his chest open. Okay, that's legitimately pretty horrifying. There's a plasma cutter aimed at his chest...why is there a plasma cutter aimed at his chest? Those things fire cutting beams that can easily pierce through an entire body, about a foot wide. WHY WOULD YOU USE THAT FOR SURGERY. In the first game, IIRC, it was an engineering tool -- something you'd use to sever a steel beam.
Anyway, Isaac sets about deactivating the thing and trying to recover the cutter, but a necromorph bursts in and he...keeps fiddling with the computer, instead of using the weapon he already has that has proven capable of taking out Necromorphs.
The necromorph kills surgery guy, conveniently RIGHT as Isaac gets the plasma cutter! Guess we couldn't have another character or anything; he might make it obvious how bland Isaac is. So he then goes about killing a few necromorphs with it.
Huh, apparently decapitation kills them now, while in the previous game it only made them mad because the heads of their victims are entirely useless to them. That's...:/
Radio Girl tells Isaac that he has to dismember Necromorphs to kill them...even though that wasn't true a minute ago.
This game.
Okay, apparently that decapitation thing was a fluke, because I tried it again and it had the same result as in the first game.
Anyway, spin off into liveblog thread y/n?
Maybe. Dead Space 2 is a passable game but not necessarily very interesting. Rather than stick to horror it kind of goes off on a tangent and eh... it's basically a decent game franchise that EA strongarmed into something else because no-one with money understands horror.
Wouldn't the first game have had to be a horror game for the series to stick to it?
Random question to anybody who has played either of them: Are Don't Starve and Miasmata any good?
Don't Starve: Excellent.
Miasmata: Anti-excellent.
So Dead Space 3 has microtransactions that let you obtain more resources.
It also has an infinite resources bug.
Oops.
I'm reminded of the infinite golden key glitch in Borderlands 2, although you couldn't buy those. It was patched real quickly, though.
^^Oh, I love the first game. Otherwise I wouldn't be playing the second. Damn good action series being marketed as horror for some reason.
The action has been good in the second thus far (despite some inconsistencies), but story stuff is both more prevalent and worse.
So okay I decided to pick up Strange Journey again and some fucker named Morax two hit killed me.
Fuckin' SMT games...
I still have yet to play the second Dead Space. The ads pretty much turned me off to it. Is it worth a rental?
The most I can say about Dead Space 2 is that I played the whole thing and only remember a tiny bit of it. That means that while it wasn't particularly offensive as a gameplay experience, it wasn't at all memorable, either.
I know what you mean. I've been writing up my posts about it as I play, but I tried to write one up after the fact and could only vaguely mention the best and worst bits because I'd forgotten everything else. I imagine in a year, my recollection of it will be very vague.
But for what it's worth, I am enjoying it. Though I think the first game was a lot better in pretty much every aspect.
I don't get how JJ Abrams is a bad choice for the Portal movie. He can always do a sort of prequel that follows the rise and fall of Aperture Science and the creation of GLaDOS
I don't think he's a bad choice. I think making the movie is a bad choice.
We've already seen all that information in Portal 2, and it took about ten minutes.
Yeah, Portal isn't movie material.
-obligatory lens flare comment-
Now that that's out of the way, yeah, Portal the game is definitely not movie material. There's just not enough there. Maybe something in the general Portal part of the Half Life-verse, but even that's a stretch.
>I don't get how JJ Abrams is a bad choice for the Portal movie.
Slavish devotion to the heroic journey template to a point it's like ticking off a checklist.
over-emphasis on visual slickness without much depth.
Lens Flare.
Unable to make anything that isn't incredibly derivative.
Nothing about his previous films indicate he's able to deliver the kind of comedy with slight horror undercurrents the game has.
Lens Flare.
The increasing likelihood of Glados saying something like 'You think this is a video game' with a healthy dose of winking at the camera.
LENS FLARE.
MOTHER
FUCKING
LENS
FLARE.
The movie is a bad choice in the first place, but Abrams is a particularly poor decision.
^God fucking dammit.
Dota 2 is pretty much what I spend most of my time in and its a weird relationship. I enjoy the game but I have this feeling of self consciousness while playing it, in bot games I feel fine but the whole bracket and metagame stats system makes me feel uneasy every-time I lose since it feels like I'm being marked.