Dead Space Extraction

I was a kid back in the days when video games were mostly an amusement park affair… boardwalk arcades full of quarter-devourers with bright red throttles and buttons that may as well have been forged of laffytaffy (stickiness and all.) These were the days of Donkey Kong and Gauntlet and Arkenoid, and it was way back then that I last clutched a plastic gun on a wire and desperately tried to shoot things flying at me on the screen. No, I’m not talking about Duck Hunt here… it was the games like House of the Dead and Time Crisis that had me emptying my pockets of allowance money and possible future equity. Nowadays, with the advent of the Wiimote, it is no longer necessary to purchase a special extra accessory for your console to play this sort of game. Judging by titles like Resident Evil Darkside Chronicles and new versions of House of the Dead, it is time to pay a visit with the modern rail shooter phenomenon… let’s see if Dead Space extraction can sweep us off of our feet, so to speak.

Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: Dead Space Extraction
Platform: Wii
Played For: about 6 hours

By my count, this game represents the fourth retelling of the series of unfortunate events that befell the starship Ishimura and the Aegis VII mining colony. The original Dead Space takes place on the Ishimura, but includes plenty of backstory on the colony. Events on the colony are also explored in Templesmith’s excellent video comic released as a free download a year ago (all six issues are faithfully included as unlockable extras in Extraction as well.) The Ishimura itself was the subject of a superfluous full-length badly animated movie… not Dragonlance bad, per se, but still very hard to watch for anyone spoiled by the Japanese anime industry. So if you’ve been faithfully following the Dead Space IP as it is carefully nurtured by its corporate caretakers, there will be few surprises for you in the plot of Dead Space Extraction (there is one significant new bit, but I won’t tell you what it is… go see Wikipedia if you want spoilers.)

This time you follow various doomed or semi-doomed temporary survivors as they make their bids to escape the death and insanity and alien zombie goo that the recently excavated “Marker” inflicts on the hapless unwashed mining colony. The game quickly takes you to the Ishimura, where you’ll find yourself retreading some familiar ground if you stomped all over the place in the company of _____ Asimov Arthur C. ____ two years ago (you fill in the blanks.) As a rail shooter, Extraction is much, much shorter than the original game. It weighs in at about 300 minutes or so, roughly the time I remember spending trying to make it through Lawrence of Arabia. It is also cheaper at $49.99, but I just checked on Amazon and the original is down to $20 so there goes that argument in Exraction’s favor. So what you’re getting is a strangely interactive movie/game hybrid that costs four times as much as your standard DVD.

Rail shooting is a very strange genre indeed. Extraction gives you a first-person perspective, but it grants you no control over your legs and, more frustratingly perhaps, almost no control on where you are looking either. It is kind of as if your legs were cut off and your upper torso had been forcibly grafted onto alien mechanical spider legs with a will of their own, and the operation had further caused some unfortunate neurological damage resulting in itchy trigger fingers and a lolling, uncontrollable neck. Sound a little unnatural to you? Well, it is.

The point here is to consider as the primary gameplay the brief chances to click on important items buried in the background as your character glances around and adamantly refuses to look where you want him to… without this and the straightforward dismembering of any and all things that move towards you, the game would be nothing more than a lengthy cinematic. Thankfully, unlike the silent protagonist of Dead Space, the characters you play in Extraction each have a voice and some personality. The story is enjoyable enough to keep you interested, especially if you are enough of a horror buff to not feel guilty about a continued fascination with the torment and disaster of a full-fledged no-holds-barred shit storm (excuse my French) like the one taking place on the Ishimura.

One nice touch in Extraction is the success that some of the weapons had being ported to the new interface. The hovering buzzsaw is back, as are the ever-popular line gun and flamethrower. I found these three guns to be the most useful, but there are other choices out there as well. Your telekenesis also provides another happy option, as the Ishimura, like all good science fiction horror spacecraft, is ubiquitously stocked with explosive canisters just waiting to be launched into a crowd of nearby enemies. This struck me as more weapon options than those found in a standard rail shooter, and I enjoyed regularly having to switch tactics as I was confronted with differing mobs of necromorphs.

Let’s consider how Dead Space Extraction falls within the greater zeitgeist of American video game culture for a moment. The Dead Space series has already successfully capitalized on two things gamers really love… aliens and zombies. You have monsters spitting up alien goo all over the ship and enough running through air vents and pipe tunnels to wonder when Ripley and her Colonial Marines will arrive to nuke the place from orbit. You also have the gore and feeling of infection from the modern fast zombie movies… although it doesn’t look like the Ishimura will make it through a full 28 days. If they could find a way to include pirates and ninjas as well, Dead Space would be the most all-inclusive genre-defining game of the oughts.

Alas, there are no shurikens or Johnny Depps around, but kudos to Extraction for catching and matching another popular zombie series by increasing the number of survivors… maybe the game should have been called Left 4 Dismembered in Space or something like that. In today’s multiplayer environment there is less crawling around scary spaceships alone, and more of the “small band of heroes” concept at large. Also, with the advent of actual speaking characters (and even a romantic interest) Extraction moves away from the scary ugly burlap that Isaac Clarke wore all the time, instead letting the male characters take more of a page from Sam Spade. The heroine even gets a mini-skirt of sorts… fashionable, but this added ease on the eye somehow takes away from the atmosphere of fear the game is trying to cultivate.

So how does Dead Space Extraction measure up? In terms of rail shooters, it was pretty good. In comparison to the preceding game Dead Space… well, HD is better. Third Person perspective with control of both feet and head is better. 30 hours of gameplay is definitely better. And an original epic story is better than the slight addendum this prequel had to add. I find it amusing that one of the primary critiques of the original game was how linear it felt. Switching to a rail shooter was about the only way that particular issue could grow worse.

The original Dead Space is the must-play title for horror buffs. Extraction is fun, but I’d highly recommend waiting a while and nabbing it at half-price down the road.