So, about an hour ago, I beat Dead Space. It was a decent game, though the use of a silent protagonist seems a bit far fetched due to the sheer amount of time you are supposedly in two-way communication with people (Incidently, the Wikipedia article on silent protagonists has been deleted due to the lack of scholarly work on the subject. I nominate Greg to correct this.). Dead Space did make me realize how influential System Shock 2 was on gaming, especially first person gaming. I believe such a point has been made by Yahtzee before, but it bears repeating.

Doom 3: SS2 with demons.
Bioshock: SS2 underwater.
Dead Space: SS2 with dismemberment.

Also, it is worth noting that I originally had problems with the game crashing whenever I went into submenus for any length of time. It turns out that my ancient Sidewinder Percision Pro joystick causes the game to spaz out. This is probably due to some mildly broken interface into the joystick system system as the joystick (even when not being touched at all) constantly generates events of various kinds. I figured out that this was the problem when I noticed the menu instructions freaking out and showing the "360 standard" controls flashing in and out along with they keyboard controls. Disconnecting the joystick resulted in zero additional crashes for the rest of the game.


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