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.
