Sunday, October 12th through Wednesday, October 16th - I did managed to get
Fallout 2 going again, starting a new character and making my way quickly through the opening sections, just about to where I left off. Then life happened. I'm not sure how exactly I missed so many days of gaming, but even despite taking 2 days off for being sick on Wednesday and Thursday,
still nothing happened. I spent part of the time working on
Wardock, and I guess I just crapped out for the rest of it.
Until Thursday evening...
Thursday, October 17th - Dead Space. Yes, it's EA, and yes, it's not like you haven't played a survival horror game before, or a game with crazy aliens or zombies in a derelict spacecraft in the vast reaches of the far future, etc. etc., but this game is
still fucking awesome, and entirely responsible for my lack of progress with
FO2. It's also one of the most violent, gory games I've ever played. It's just palpable with that stuff. See
the Dead Space thread for more info.
Anyway, I basically suckered my wife into the whole thing right alongside me, hyping her up for what a great Halloween game it would be. She's a big horror fan and all (she recently convinced me to go through
Haunting Ground so she could watch it -- she likes scary games, but doesn't so much like playing them), so it was a pretty easy sell. We picked the game up Thursday night and brought it home to play for a few hours. We had tons of fun being utterly grossed out.
Friday, October 17th - I got to play exactly jack and shit. My job threw me a major curveball, and my personal life threw me another one. The result was a double-beaner that
profoundly took the wind from my sails. What a waste of a fucking day.
Saturday, October 18th - I'm now thoroughly invested in
Dead Space and starting a new game on Hard so I can play when Julia isn't around to watch our "main" game (which is on Medium difficulty). This is also for the purposes of later starting a New Game +, which I've heard you can't change the difficulty on. So if you finish the game on Medium, you'll be playing it again on Medium, and since you can't actually upgrade your guy all the way on a single run, New Game + seems to be a fun thing to try (and by all accounts, the game is well worth going through multiple times). So we'll see how it pans out, but for now I'm having a blast even treading through the same areas on Hard (and it should be noted that this is
way harder than Medium -- health loss seems to be doubled, and dismembering your enemies seems to take about twice as many shots).
The day is far from over, but I plan to get in as much of this as I can. Also, I'm going to look into the
Dead Space comics (available online all over the place in animated form -- quite nice looking, and well acted -- and also in print from comic shops, with a trade paperback coming out at some point soon that apparently will also have a nice hardbacked edition), the noknownsurvivors.com site, which is supposed to have some fun backstory type stuff on the USG Ishimura, the ship where the game takes place, and also spend some time with the cryptic alien language in the game that's written around on various things. At one point you can find a thing smeared on the ground where some guy took the time to write out what the letters mean (standard English-to-Alien, letter-by-letter translation, as you'd expect... it wouldn't be fun if the cryptography was too much for your average dude to translate, and hard enough since the textures can occasionally be just a little blurry for the samey-looking letters), so I'm going to get translating and see what I can come up with. I know it can be done because Julia and I hashed out a single line from our previous play session, which read "Keep us whole". There were about 5 lines underneath that, not to mention about 10 other blocks of text in the surrounding area, so we'll see how long it takes me to come up with translations.
Sunday, October 19th - Got a lot of playing in, and a lot of translating. So far I've translated about 7 - 10 messages, I'd guess. Most I've written down, though a few I haven't. They're pretty fun, because they aren't at all necessary for the story (obviously), and they don't even really add to it
that much, but there are hints at bits and pieces that do add a layer of intrigue. Some of them are strictly dogmatic, some seem to have context in the actual situation, and some are written by terrified people likely on their way to becoming victims, while others are in a steady hand that wrote them down with purpose. I've seen a whole host of them that I still need to translate, but that was in my Medium game that Julia and I are playing, so I didn't take the time to do those. I'll try them when I get to the same areas in my Hard game. Which I'm not looking forward to. One room in which there is much to translate is decidedly... let's just say "unpleasant".
I seem to have unlocked all the guns in both of my games now, though I'm still only carrying two. Plasma Cutter (the "pistol", default weapon) and Line Cutter (really big, wide mining gun that sets mines) for my Medium game, and the Plasma Cutter and Flamethrower (gradually degrades multiple limbs on a creature until they eventually fall off) for my Hard game. I want to try another weapon or two, but I'm not going to do so until I can upgrade the suit to level 3 and get some more inventory space. I've spent a fair number of power nodes on upgrading the Plasma Cutter anyway, and it remains my primary weapon mostly due to the abundance of ammo. On Medium I'm constantly fighting for inventory space since there's just way more shit to pick up than I actually need to use (my storage space is overflowing with goodies in case of emergency), but on Hard I'm constantly in need of just about everything and have to play much more carefully.
Just got up to the Hydroponics Deck in my Medium game, and will be attempting to get there on my Hard game shortly (not too far behind). Really hoping for that next suit upgrade soon...
