Dead Space 2: Day 4

He forgot about the hunter that came that jumped out from nowhere and murdered him last time, and made the exact same gruesome mistake right at the outset of this session.  You'd think the graphic punishment for failure would have left a stronger impression, somehow.

In the 'mainframe' room (I don't have any recollection of what it is we're trying to do, as usual) we get another call from our authority figure who is trying to remotely shut us down.  We have to crawl around inside the mainframe to get into tiny, claustrophobic rooms to pull out some fuse-like instruments.... at least I think that will get us what we want.  Xian mutters: "Exactly where I want to be during a deadly necromorph crisis - crawling around in a cramped, dark tunnel."  He also mutters: "Why does everything in this game have to sound like a monster."

When a dark slicer comes boiling out of the walls not two feet away from him, Xian throws one of the big panels at him, and that actually stunned him for long enough for Xian to pour some pulse rounds into him.

I've got to admit, even though I did some extensive crawling around in the ductwork earlier in the game, it's a pretty harrowing camera angle.  We had to crawl back and forth between the two cramped rooms before we figured out that we had to replug the fuses in a different order, a la Star Trek relay chips.  Once we achieved that, of course the path opened up and we saw at least one large slicer walking around outside the fuse room, and Xian decided 2 very important things: 1) this fuse room we were in was lovely and perhaps he could make a permanent home of it, and 2) the pie I had made earlier was getting cold, and someone probably needed to attend to it immediately.  "What's so good about outside, anyway.  It's perfectly delightful in here." (He also cried into his pie)  Caution was hardly warranted, as it turned out - he didn't even take a sliver of damage from the two slicers that were meandering around outside.  We had to punch out five separate circuits (destroying = forward progress, I guess), and that somehow angered the necromorphs greatly, who would come tearing around the corner with each break.

When those were dealt with, the security system finally shut down and we were relieved to finally get through the door.  Naturally we should have suspected something was up - as soon as the door opened, a bloody corpse fell on us and, well, let's say he was displeased with the way it seemed like the corpse was grabbing him around the neck.

We actually had to start leaving ammunition behind!  Good sign, or bad sign?  There were plenty of fiends in the next room, and he managed it in the first go with a relatively minimal loss of health.  After that, we finally made it to the solar array!  We just hopped outside into a vast region of space that housed the massive solar array mirrors that collected solar energy.  Two of them were out of alignment, so we reset them (there was a gigantic arm that flung mini homing bombs, but he turned out to be not a huge deal if you keep the jet pack strafing to max).  Meanwhile, audio reports from Ellie weren't terribly encouraging - she advises us to ... hurry.  Maybe she mentions it with a touch more urgency than that.  It might help to explain why Isaac decides to hurl himself off the solar array tower towards the station many millions of miles below.  Mini-game of dodging!  Exciting!  And blood-smeared, when Xian messed up.  Great landing, Isaac!  Gotta love this game's setpieces.

And, back to the trasport hub, where we get on a transport and get the hell out of dodge.  HAHAHA, if you thought it was going to go that easily.  No, of course the whole area blows up, gets de-oxygenated, and Isaac has to fight off an endless wave of increasingly dangerous baddies as Ellie tries to hack a door!  What did you think was going to happen?  It takes a couple of restarts, all of our health packs, and all of the ammo we just bought at a shop to get through that mess, and we're stranded back in the factory, where Ellie just spent her morning hacking her fellows to distinct pieces.

We spent some time hovering around the entrance to a blood-soaked room.  Xian is not very keen on crossing bloody rooms.  I was encouraging, but he decided enough was enough.

Dead Space 2: Day 3

Not only are we finally in chapter 7, but it didn't even take much coercion to get him back to work on it!  So, progress is being made on all fronts.  I did have to talk him into leaving some of his spare ammo behind in stoarge.  I like carrying ammo myself, but leaving ammo drops on the floor is just bad form, and I think everyone here knows it.

Chapter 6 ended with us reaching the transport hub and all the power being shut off by some unknown (or unremembered) authority figure with ties to the Unitologists.  We reunited with Ellie and CrazyMan, and Isaac actually said some stuff.  This is probably a far cry from real character development, but relative to regular old Dead Space, hey, I'm quite enthusiastic about it.  We agreed to team up with Ellie to do.... something.  With the solar array panels.  Look, with the objective tracker, sometimes I don't pay a whole lot of attention to the details of the mission.  The elevator was broken when we got there, and we had to go downstairs and fix it (because Isaac is an engineer, see?).  Xian was truly paranoid the whole time, but get this - no one showed up to fight!  Even on our way back, only one scorpion tried to stop us.  Of course, when we got in this massive elevator to the sky, it was much too large for no boss to be jumping us during the trip.  So I suppose it was anticlimactic when large beasts tried to get at us through the windows and the oxygen all escaped.

At the top of the elevator is a generous ring area, where we thought we'd be facing off against a boss due to an array of consumable items littering the area.  Oddly enough, no one was there.  We headed over to the restricted area for the solar array station, which was apparently manned by one Howard Phillilps, who we get to know, despite him being very dead.  The door to the array wouldn't open without  his rig, so we carried his dead body over there to activate it.  Next, it wanted a verbal access code, and we looked around, thinking it was another puzzle, but those laser beams were defeated by simply chucking something through them.

The AI security is making a huge pest of itself with these laser security beams, sometimes activating them just as we walk by and doing massive damage.  She's got a holographic figure that kind of lurks after you as you move to room from room, watching you trespass with her hands on her hips and reporting her security responses.  What I'm saying is, she's getting on my nerves.  And one straightforward setpiece moment was ruined several times in a row when Xian got caught by a security beam set that was supposed to activate behind you and trap you with a monster and a blown out window.  He can handle those two things, but the beams activating on his face kept killing him first - Xian kind of... creeps along, so the game sort of expects you to have moved to the middle of the room, and he's still standing near the entrance where the beams activate supposedly to cut off your retreat.  Anyway.  She disengaged the life support, so we had to run down a hall way and "engineer" (remember, do a little mini game where Isaac pulls out the wires from a glowing panel) something, only as soon as he put his hands on it, a Hunter came out of nowhere to blindside him with a huge shriek of noise and sudden violence.  Xian threw up the controller and declared the night over.

AC:R, Day 5

Day 5, and as I may have mentioned previously, much of my time is spent in upkeep of my weighty empire of assassins.  Maybe I should just let it slide (let the Templars recapture areas and cities) and just get a move on with the storyline.  I've only managed to grab one more Masayaf key, and haven't even gone back to HQ to relive the memory of Altair that it opened up for me.

I did, however, finally conquer the last Templar controlled area in Constantinople.  It remained for so long because every so often I'd go into the area, look around for the Templar Captain, get identified in return by some guards, and the Captain would bolt, rendering the area uncapturable for "a day" of gametime.  I must have repeated that series of events five or six times now.  This time, I just ran in, place a tripwire-triggered death-bomb in front of the house that the Captain runs to, and then arrow stormed the entire area.  I got the pester-some message "Warning: Ezio did not kill civilians" and for once I did not feel chastised.  Yes, game, Ezio DID kill civilians.  When he was at the tail end of his patience, he killed who-so-ever was in the area to get that lousy coward Captain.

So, that side quest is rounded out and finished, just need to wrap up the associated master assassin side mission, and all the areas will be mine and locked from takeover.  I'm not sure if that means I'll never have a chance to play the Den Defense mini-game again - there must be a way, because some achievements depend on it, but at the same time, I certainly don't want to risk losing this loathesome area to the Templars.  If I never get a chance at that achievement, so be it.  Better locked than to risk dealing with that nonsense again.

I've also gathered enough Animus Fragments to unlock several "Desmond's Journey" missions.  I gave one of them a go, but it made me incredibly ill almost immediately.  It was similar to Mirror's Edge's "too close up first person view", only quicker to reach the "headache and vomit" threshold.  I tried to get Xian to play them, but he can't stomach it either, so those might go unplayed.

Deadspace 2: Day 2

He grimly got back to work today, resignedly saying the following: "Every time I restart this game, it doesn't matter how long it's been, I've actively forgotten how to play."  We saw an actual living woman, but of course only spoke to her through a barrier, and she not-so-politely declined our request to join forces.  It was nice to have someone to talk to, though.

We found ourselves near a store, and he bought himself some new guns, since we were previously trying to navigate these dire halls with just the plasma cutter and javelin.  I'm pretty sure I've shocked myself using the javelin, so it's not my favorite.  Also, there's only 5 shots available on it right now, and the reloading is terribly slow.

As soon as we were out of the store, a number of necromorphs came roaring down the hall, including a spitter and a pregnant.  It was a very wide and long hall, though, so he was able to dispatch them efficiently.  There were a few booby traps, though, which took a chunk or two out of his health.  Also, while he was busy with those, a few more necromorphs got the drop on him.

The objective trail led us into a brightly colored elementary school, and you know things are gonna get ugly in a place like this.  We saw a living woman through a window that we could not communicate with, and you know that's going to end badly, too.  Yup, she cuddled a necromorph baby, and they both blew on up.  Gross.  And, of course, you know that's not the last we're going to see of those babies.  As you enter the nursery area of the elementary school, a whole horde of them come crawling out of the duct-work.  I didn't say that game wasn't predictable, I said I enjoyed the delivery of the story.

Next up was a children's theatre, and Isaac needs to take a convoluted path to get to the stage area - as usual, Xian took it very slowly and deliberately, first vanquishing the necromorph children that came crawling over the stands, and then a dark spitter underneath the bleachers.  He got a really good scare from a cardboard sun backstage that dropped in his face, and we had a momentary hallucination phase-out.  Nothing too scary, this time.  When he activated a control panel backstage and all the obstacles retracted, we knew things were about to get serious, and tons of babies and children came pouring out from the stands toward the stage.  Had to repeat that one a few times, but the death sequence was not too bad - the sight of Isaac blowing up is actually really tame, compared to some of the bad stuff that's happened to him, honestly.  We also found what appeared to be a stasis "bomb" - a lamp-like object that you can blow up or throw that creates a stasis field.  Awesome.

We got out of the elementary school and finally reached the transport hub, where we met up with Ellie (the lady from before who declined to join forces with us) and Stross (our CrazyFriend).  "Meet up," meaning that they were somewhere Isaac couldn't reach, and instead we faced off alone against a Brute.     Xian called it quits after a few deaths.

Dead Space 2: Day 1

So amused by my journal-style musings on AC:R, I'm re-forcing Xian to play Dead Space 2 so I can observe and actively blog about the happenings.  We are in the sixth chapter, I believe?  When we booted the game back up, I recalled the reason we (he) had stopped - he had thrown the controller down, angrily declared this room to be impossible, and vowed never to play again until "this game stopped being unreasonable.  Or scary."

So you can see how it took some extensive coaxing to get him to even get back on the horse, so to speak.  I used every trick in my repetoire - cajoling, imploring, appealing to his ego, outrageous flattery, the works.  He walked into the room in question, got murdered by the first enemy, and quickly decided to backtrack and find a store.  We went back upstairs to a residential area and he got the life scared out of him by an alarm clock that went off suddenly, and gave up that notion immediately.  He gutted his way through the room of death - two pregnants, six lurkers (the legless tail creatures that crawl on walls).  And wasted a sizeable amount of ammo and at least one health pack while he was at it.  But, we were through, and on our way to a store, a bench, and a save spot.  In the hallway before the bench, though, there was the tell-tale sound of enemies and what appeared to be living nodes on the walls and floors.  Not one to be taken by surprise in a game like this, Xian grabbed the nearest dead body to use as a test dummy, and sure enough, the little nodules were booby traps that exploded on contact.  Xian inched his way down the corridor using every body piece available to spring every trap.  At the end of the corridor there was a locked closet that could only be opened with a power node - in my memory, these were always good rooms that were largely worth the one power node price of admission. Xian, however, seems to recall at least one of these rooms which was "filled with nothing but monsters".  I tried to talk him out of being so negative, but it was useless.

The next room was filled with fire, and he had to manually de-oxygenate it to continue.  In this game, of course it's never as simple as that - I'm sure Xian was also not surprised when some rocket-tentacles showed up to impede his escape from the oxygen-less room.  In the elevator, Isaac had another nonsensical conversation via radio with his only friend, CrazyMan.  You've got to appreciate the fact that they put in effort to give Isaac a human personality, right?

The next room was a maze of crates, and a lot of wheedling and encouragement had to happen before he would so much as set foot inside.  It sometimes makes him feel better if he looks up the walkthrough and is more mentally prepared for what's about to happen?  So he left it on pause while he did that.  He inched around crates and for a time, he refused to go further.  I reminded him "the only way out is forward," and he gave it a go.  Alas, it turned out the monsters lying in wait were the raptor-hunters, who we met once before in a similar maze atmosphere.  We should have guessed.  These creatures are two-legged and extremely fast, tearing straight for you and knocking you forcefully into a wall, stunning you for a moment.  Too many of them on you at once certainly means death.  They also like to lurk behind corners and peep out at you to see if you're looking before charging.  It took two tries - and the death sequence was  extremely unpleasant.

He called it quits after that.

Random Observation: How I Met Your Mother

Here's something I'm not sure you care about.  In the sixth season of How I Met Your Mother, which we binged on recently and caught all the way up to the seventh season, there's an episode - well I guess this is kind of spoilers, so
.
.
.
.
.
So anyway, the 13th episode is entitled, "Bad News" and you may recall, since you probably watched it before, but at the very end of this episode, Marshall's father dies of a heart attack.  But did you notice that throughout the entire episode, the numbers from 50 to 1 counted down on prominent things in the background, like a CD cover, or a news cast, or a calendar.  Just as it reached 1 (on the cab that Lily takes the bar), Marshall receives the shocking news.  You can watch it again - it's pretty obvious when you're looking for it.