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.
