The Playoff! Dead Space 1 vs Dead Space 2!

I'm a massive fan of Dead Space! I genuinely miss the series and every now and again I get teased with hints of an elusive fourth title. It's been over four years since Dead Space 3 was released and with the horror genre regaining it's former popularity, surely it won't be long before we get to grasp that plasma cutter and dismember some more Necromorphs?

But I digress, I want to spar off Dead Space 1 with it's direct sequel Dead Space 2 and decide which is the superior game of the two? Will it be a case of getting stronger or just a reskinning of the original? Let's find out!

I'm going to choose three categories I feel are relevant to the two Dead Space games. I will be omitting plot as DS1 is actually quite light on having it's own unique plot and is more a sort of amalgamation of homages to other sci-fi and horror titles.

It's only from DS2 that the series begins to develop it's own story and brings the Unitology organisation into the forefront.
DS1 is tentative with it's story and gives little in the way of plot other than Isaac needs to get off the Ishimura. So without further ado I will start with perhaps one of the most essential ingredients of a horror game.

ROUND ONE - SCARES!

It cannot be a horror game and not be scary and atmospheric. Dead Space would seem to have the advantage from the off if we look at things from memory. Wandering the cold, desolate halls of the Ishimura for the first time is a nerve racking experience. When Dead Space 2 rolls along we're prepared, we know the score and we know what to expect. The enemy is no longer unknown.

But I'm going to be as objective as I can. DS1 is a slower paced game, it urges caution as you delve deeper into the ever degrading Ishimura.
Necromorphs can be heard clambering through the vents before bursting out and attacking and a lot of the time you'll hear them but you won't see them, until it's too late.
Many Necros play possum and appear dead until you step too close and they spring into attack. That's right, Dead Space was doing this long before The Evil Within.

DS2 on the other hand is a more action and story related affair. Unlike in DS1 Isaac isn't actually primarily concerned with surviving. When he learns there is a Marker on the Sprawl he commits to destroying it.
The Necromorphs become more obstacle and are presented to you in cinematic ways or spawn into well crafted combat environments.

When I play DS2 I don't feel tense throughout, sure there are moments. (Hate those charging Necros that peek around corners, eesh!) But playing through DS1 is a generally unnerving game. Necros often flank you in any given combat scenario and the sense of claustrophobia is palpable. Blood written scrawling on the walls begging for help and nothing is more creepy than when you exit the transit and there are pearly white body bags littered all over the place, surrounded by dimming candles and a chilling rendition of twinkle twinkle little star starts up. It's creepy as hell!

DS2 doesn't really do this, I mean the creepiest location in DS2 is the Unitology centre and that's due to those creepy Stalker Necros as mentioned before. The rest of the game has more in common with Resident Evil 4 in how it plays than DS1.

Ultimately, I always tell people; "Dead Space 2 is to Dead Space 1, as Aliens is to Alien."
The creepy creatures are still there but the atmosphere is less isolated survivor and more one man army blasting through the hordes.
It's not even a bad thing, it's just not scary so...

WINNER - DEAD SPACE 1!

Next on my list is weapons! Dead Space has quite an interesting array of weapons, unlike say Resident Evil or Silent Hill or any other horror game of the time. Isaac primarily utilises engineering equipment to destroy Necromorphs.
Unlike zombies and the whatnot, Necros vulnerability lies in their limbs. Severing them apart is how you ultimately destroy them. Blasting ones head off is little more than an irritant to the monstrous creature!

WEAPONS

Unlike the previous segment which, lets be honest. Is relative, this a direct blow to blow. Who has more and who has the best/most satisfying to use.

Dead Space 1 has seven weapons. Starting with the humble but deceptively overpowered Plasma Cutter all the way up to Necro eradicating contact beam.

Some highlights of the arsenal are the Ripper, which in it's primary firing mode levitates a rotating saw blade in the air for a set amount of time. It's a gory weapon as you walk the destructive blade into Necromorphs and watch their limbs blast off in visceral beauty!
It's secondary is a more cautionary attack which simple blasts a blade at full speed across the room and isn't nearly as satisfying!

I'm also a big fan of this game's shotgun - The force gun! It fires out a kinetic blast that literally rips enemies apart and even if it doesn't outright kill an enemy, it'll at least knock them down for followup attacks. It's secondary attack launches a grenade that detonates a powerful kinetic blast with similarly great results!

There are a couple of turkeys in the mix here and one is the plasma rifle. You'll be punished for relying on shooter favourites here. The plasma rifle eats ammo and isn't as useful in dismembering limbs as other weapons.

The last lame duck is the flamethrower that seems to do next to no damage and doesn't even cause Necros to flinch! You're completely vulnerable whilst using it! Not very good for Necro slaying.

Dead Space 2 has a grand total of twelve weapons, if you include the secret handgun weapon. (which is a foam hand that destroys anything you point it at... told you DS2 isn't as scary).
Most weapons return from DS1 with balancing, but a couple of the new guns are very delectable when it comes to Necro hunting!

Of the new guns, I really like the javelin gun. It's quite strong and it's secondary function is an AOE attack of chain lightning that effects surrounding Necros. It's good for dealing extra damage against larger Necromorphs also. It does takes some skill and practise to optimise it for limb detachment though.

Something that requires less skill is the detonator, which fires proximity mines that do devastating damage. It's the perfect weapon for slow Necros or the Stalkers, specially on higher difficulty settings. As a bonus it's secondary function is it disarms all placed mines for retrieval!

There are still some turkeys unfortunately, the pulse rifle is buffed up and now enjoys a secondary function as a grenade launcher but unfortunately the flamethrower is still pretty meh. The new addition the rivet gun is pretty underpowered  however and is just surpassed by so much else available.

The plasma cutter is still beastly and more than capable of being your sole weapon through the main game. But then again, would that really be much fun?
Having extra weapons adds to the variety and therefore fun factor. Coupled with the weapon balancing of all the existing weapons returning from DS1 prove that DS2 has the superior arsenal with even more ways to rip Necros apart!

WINNER - DEAD SPACE 2!!!

We're on to the third category now and it's the real stars of the show; the Necromorphs!

The hideously mutated humans and animals of the Dead Space universe are collectively known as Necromorphs and they come in various forms with differing methods of killing.
Stalkers are your most standard Necro and attempt to flank Isaac at every opportunity, either by sneaking up behind him or bursting from nearby vents.

Other notable Necromorphs are the twisted Lurkers, infected toddlers really, that sprout three tendrils and fire barbs at you. Dead Space 2 introduced Pukers that well... puke at you! And did I mention their gastric insides have sunken down into their left leg! Last but not least, we have the Regenerator and it's DS2 equivalent the Uber Morph! Nothing is more terrifying than a Necro that regrows it's limbs!

One of my personal favourite Necromorphs is found in DS2 and it's the Tormentor!
This Necromorph is encountered several times in Dead Space 2 and it has one of the best intros of all the games bosses in my opinion!
Isaac falls into one of the Sprawls many maintenance tunnels and is immediately set upon by the Tormentor! It chases you up the tunnel as you blast open the maintenance doors and then bam! The Earth Gov attack craft appears and blows a hole through the colony! Isaac and the Tormentor get sucked out into the vacuum of space! It becomes almost silent, only the sounds from within Isaac's suit can be heard.
They crash into the craft, the Tormentor's powerful claws grasping for Isaac! It begins inadvertently pulling missiles off the craft and Isaac cunningly shoots one point blank in the Necros face destroying the creature and the Earth Gov forces in one blow.

What a buzz! What a thrill! DS2 is full of these heart pumping set pieces but that's not what we're here about. We have to decide who has the best roster of Necromorphs. It's undoubtedly going to be Dead Space 2. There's more bang for your back here, the Puker alone is a major boost for both disgust and horror. The chilling macabre children that chase Isaac on mass, I mean DS2 showed some truly grisly iterations of the Necromorph species. So thus...

WINNER - DEAD SPACE 2!!!

So Dead Space 2 looks the clear winner but I'm giving Dead Space 1 a chance with the wildcard category:

WILDCARD - IS IT REALLY SURVIVAL HORROR?

Here's a strange one and you may be thinking "huh"? But both games are listed as Survival Horror, which is a broad term to say the least. One of the biggest criticisms for either game is that in standard difficulty they're both pretty easy. Ammo is quite plentiful, both games challenge you to finish them using the one gun and it's quite easy!

Health pickups are also prevalent in both games and by the end I had shed loads of surplus items stored up.
It's evident we're not going to find survival in either game's default difficulty so it must lay in the harder modes. Both offer a hard mode but it's actually not that big a difference! Damage received is higher sure, but it doesn't take much more ammo to obliterate your foes and some guns are so overpowered you can laugh in the face of Necros.

However, DS2 sports a fourth mode: Hardcore. It's a perma-death mode, one fatality and it's back to the start and also affords you only three saves! It's pretty tough, in the easier modes death is virtually weightless with so many checkpoints saving you from repeating long sections.
Hardcore mode is the closest the Dead Space series gets to survival horror, truly upping the stakes. And so without further ado...

WINNER ALL ROUND - DEAD SPACE 2!!!

Sequel syndrome is a miss here, Dead Space 2 truly expands on the original and takes the series further. More and better weapons, more Necros, tighter gameplay controls and better combat scenarios all add up for one amazing rollercoaster ride that is damn near perfection. At least in my opinion any way.

Both games are worth your time and if you've never played them I urge you do. They're not as intense as other horror games like say, Resident Evil 7 or some of the Silent Hill games but definitely a joy. If you like Alien and The Thing then this is the game for you!

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Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Septerra Core Legacy of the Creator: Ambition, the enemy of success

Septerra Core Legacy of the Creator is an RPG game that attempts to blend western RPG mentalities with JRPG sensibilities. It's got oodles of dialogue, world map exploration and even a ATB system. It was generally well received when it released back in 1999 and garnered praise for it's visuals and voice work and you know what? They both still hold up well today but I'm going to be honest here: Septerra Core hasn't aged well.
What it got somewhat away with back then doesn't cut dry now. It's a slow game, with slow player progression, pacing and combat. A linear story with vague cues on where to go next it's quite a frustrating experience and I was reliant on reading a strategy guide just to make sure I wasn't going backwards and forwards for tens of minutes because I didn't realise I had to speak to one particular generic looking NPC to gain some intel to progress the story.

I hate to be utterly critical of a game and it's true it's still visually beautiful and interesting to look at and that voice work was years ahead of it's time.
Each character and environment has had a lot of attention to detailed paid to it and it really does have it's own sense of character. The story itself is interesting and layered and filled with a memorable core cast. If there was one thing going over and over in my mind when playing this game it was that it seriously needs to be remade with all the mod-cons of modern gaming.

To give you a bit of context about Septerra Core; it's plot revolves around a young woman named Maya. She lives on the planet Septerra that has all it's landmasses split apart and revolving around the planet's computerised core.
Now the bad guy in this story is Doskias, a direct descendant of a powerful hero. He's arrogant and entitled and sets out to manipulate the world so that he can access the planet's core and receive the "gift" which is obviously going to be the power to control the planet.

He's pretty much hell bent on achieving his goal so much as to destroy anyone who he thinks will even pose the slightest threat or hindrance to his plans, even some of his own allies are dispatched without a second thought.
We're pretty much assured within the first ten minutes of the game that Doskias is a bad guy. However, he is interesting with it, not just some hell bent power monger, Doskias believes this to be his birthright, that it was almost prophesied for him to "save" Septerra.

Maya on the other hand, is a humbled character in the beginning: her parents were killed in a war and she just lives day by day in her piece of the world just trying go get by. We learn that it's a pretty harsh world for most with only a few civilisations achieving prosperity.
One of the other orphans that Maya knows gets involved with smuggling goods to people from another continent (or a shell in this game), whom are directly working for Doskias.

Maya is a well rounded out character, she's proactive, not whiny. Portrayed as strong and confidant, Maya takes on the defacto leader role in the group. It's great to have seen this in a game from 1999 where strong female characters were even struggling to be on the cinema screens.

Maya is joined atypically by a rag tag group comprising of an old friend and his robot dog, an exiled soldier, a general's daughter, a bounty hunter and surprisingly Doskias's lover who interestingly is trapped between stopping him for the sake of the world or selfishly hoping to "save" him from himself.
And this isn't even the full roster, there is a total of nine playable characters in Septerra Core.

I liked the story and it has that JRPG thematic feel to it coupled with the FMV sequences for the more bombastic moments. It makes sense, the world is well constructed and each of the shell continents have their own personalities and politics all for the player to immerse themselves in.

Where I have to become critical of Septerra Core isn't in it's story or it's graphics, it is in it's gameplay. Level design and battle scenario design, just doesn't work well.
I definitely feel this game got let off it's less than amazing gameplay in reviews partly because of it's graphics and plot. Sure this is a RPG game and we generally have a lot of dialogue to get through but at least 50% of the game is fighting and exploring so these areas should be just as polished.

So combat, it'll be familiar to anyone who has played a JRPG. Forgoing western RPGs of the time, combat doesn't play out in real time. Instead characters enter battles in fixed positions. You cannot alter this in any way at all, but positioning can be exploited by you or the enemy party by using attacks that cause damage in a direct line or area of effect.

All characters in battle have an ATB (active time battle) bar that is segmented and slowly fills up during battle. Each segment represent an attack. The longer you wait the stronger the attack. Also some skills you can "equip" also have a preset ATB position. For instance you can equip Maya with the grenade skill but her ATB must reach segment two in order to use the move. Later you can equip Napalm which acts like Grenade but requires all three segments of the ATB bar.

Makes sense? Sounds technical, has the opportunity to deepen combat but it doesn't a whole lot. But more or that later, Septerra Core also has a magic system along with regular attacks and skills and magic too takes advantage of the ATB bar, spell power increases in correspondence with how full the bar is.
All characters share the same MP bar, which is called CP (which stands for Core Power) and it's consumed by using spells or in the case of this game; fate cards. Skills also consume CP as well and so spamming multiple spells and skills eats up the universal CP gauge at an alarming rate.

The biggest flaw of Septerra Core's magic system is that it's just not that versatile for the main game. Spells and skills are vastly under powered compared to regular attacks with the only obvious benefit being that they have 100% accuracy.

You can attach a fate card to multiple characters to create combo attacks but again, very pricey. Uses up a lot of the ATB gauge and only useful in the endgame. No one character has an exceptional magic stat, they lose huge points in strength but don't have the gains elsewhere other than speed leaving them quite underdeveloped.

Honestly, there is a lot here to work with but it's all underbaked. Enemies don't have elemental weaknesses to be exploited and so elemental spells are just attacks with special effects. Ultimately battles resort to waiting out the ATB bar for level three attacks. Rinse repeat. Every now and again you can use skills but the opportunities to experiment in battle are just not there.

I applaud Septerra Core for it's interesting ideas but I'm so let down at their execution. Battles are incredibly slow paced and they make exploring dungeons feel really tedious and that's when your attacks connect! When you have several misses in a row it's infuriating.
Having detailed animations is all well and good but they're long winded and repetitive, in a bad way. The generic attacks lack flourish and enemies interrupt your ATB charge way too often. Even when you're in the middle of a boss fight the game lacks urgency. A boss should be bang, in your face! Best strategy... Nope. It's rinse repeat, it's disappointing. All the drama happens outside of combat.

 Speaking of outside of combat, here is another critique I have of Septerra Core and it's what is the point of having all these beautiful textures and interesting locations when the map design is so bland?
Textures repeat themselves over so locales feel like mazes rather than livable spaces and this problem is compounded by the camera distance - it's close. Really close.

When I think of Chrono Trigger and how well the map design is in that and then I look at Septerra Core I'm just puzzled. It could have made so much more interesting places to explore.
To make things worse, there is almost no soundtrack. You have three random battle themes, a world map theme and that's about it. So, whilst you're exploring the labyrinthine dungeons you get to do it to the sound of gentle wind, humming machinery or nothing. I think if we had some music for the towns and dungeons it might've helped stem boredom but listening to nothing but the odd battle theme for hours is a joy kill and inexcusable in a game like this.

I'm really disappointed replaying Septerra Core. Games age, that's true but the elements it fails on are as crucial today as they were then, the only difference is that it's harder these days for game to succeed on looks and story alone. We're spoiled, we have played decades of games that have pushed gameplay so far and refined what a RPG is or a shooter or a platformer. We're know what near perfection looks like, we know what is competent and it isn't here.

Septerra Core could use a remake, it's story and world deserve to be told to a large audience but someone needs to take the game mechanics, sling them out the window and start from the ground up. My first thought is that the reward for charging the ATB gauge should be better. Instead of just a small damage modifier, how about Maya's level 2 is a cone AOE attack against all targets in a direction and her level 3 is a an all out barrage against all foes. They don't even have to deal huge damage, slight reductions even to balance it. But make it not cost CP, you want the ATB gauge to open up options of attack with no cost penalties.
Mentioning CP, each character should have their own. It differentiates between magic casters and non-magic casters. You can also boost the CP cost of fate cards and their damage, coercing players to use CP to it's fullest potential as long as they have the reserves.

There needs to be a greater variety of enemy types with dedicated elemental properties. In an RPG, elements are essential to keeping the combat engaging and not reduced to 'spam the most strongest attack' scenario that Septerra Core certainly suffers from.

The Shin Megami Tensei games have shown how well elemental play keeps players on their toes in battle, we all love to feel powerful and outsmart the computer. It's not rewarding to just obliterate them because we've grinded to god-like levels.


Visually, if Septerra Core was updated hands down it would look great cel shaded. I would even like to see them keep the isometric view point but give the players control of the in/out zoom of the camera during exploration and to be able to rotate the camera during both exploration and combat.
Obviously these are just ideas off the top of my head and the chances that Septerra Core will be remade is incredibly low to non-existant but I like to dream up how a game from the past would look if it benefited from what we've learned up today.

Hope you've enjoyed reading this article, and if you have thoughts or experiences of your own please leave a comment.

Have a good day, everyone!