Pressing Buttons

Dead Space Wii, the polar opposite of Chop Til' You Drop

Alright, the title's a bit preemptive, but sometimes you gotta make a stand.

I can't be bothered to look back and see if I've talked about Dead Space yet, but I'm sure I have. And if I haven't, go listen to one of the million available podcasts that talk about video games. I'm positive some cool guy made mention of it at some point. But if you want to be as lazy as me and not bother looking for some other people's opinions, know this, it is truly something else. It's a bit easy to pick on Resident Evil 5 right now, but Dead Space really made it too easy to. It feels like the step-up the survival horror genre needed (and yes, lets argue whether RE4 through 5 is survival horror in the comments, I'm sure readers will love it).

But I've gotten off track. This is all about how awesome Dead Space for the Wii can be.

A lot of Dead Space's success rides on it's aesthetics. The lighting is nuts, and the engine this beast runs on looks allows Dead Space to look very, very impressive. So, it's natural to worry when a game that looks so good is ported down to the Wii. Now, graphics aren't everything as Nintendo and myself would tell you. But, in Dead Space's case, they really help create a mood and ambience that may be harder to pull off on the Wii.

But here's the rub.

If you click those blue words above, you'll be thrown over to Kotaku's post concerning a presentation that showed Dead Space off as an Xbox title. Not Xbox 360 mind you, we're talking about the original black beauty here. Now, while it was rarely proven, the Gamecube was a very capable machine that like, two developers took advantage of (Nintendo and Capcom). So, despite the presenter's feelings towards the Xbox version of Dead Space, "...mostly not good" he chimed,  I think it looks great. I'm sure the handycam footage cuts the visuals some slack, but regardless, it looks great.

So I think Wii owners are avoiding the disaster witnessed in Dead Rising: Chop til' you Drop when it comes to Dead Space. The best part will be the controls, especially since Resident Evil 4 played so handily on the Wii.  The precision needed to point out specific limbs in Dead Space will become that much more satisfying if it uses the pointer controls. If it doesn't though, it'd be a crying shame.

Auto-updates on PS3 and 360 are a must

As I write this, I'm at stage 59 of a Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds update.

Stage 59 of 669.

It's been five minutes so far.

59 updates in five minutes is pretty cool, say, if those updates were from someone's Twitter page or something. They'd be really keeping you abreast of what's going down.

But 669 updates for a video game? I mean, it hasn't even been that long since I've last played. Yes, it's been a few months, but how could there be so many updates for a game thats online component has been a wasteland.

Just what am I updating here? It better be some sort of online simulation, so I can play with artificial intelligence that mimics the once thriving online community.

All this for a new course. That's all I wanted. A new course with dinosaurs running around.

I'm at stage 122. 34 per cent done.

Anyways, the Playstation 3 and 360 really need to work something out wherein they can automatically update my game collection. If it's a worry that I wouldn't want an update plugging up my hard drive, ask me first. I hate throwing in a game and having to sit around while it updates, it's ridiculous. Valve's Steam service automatically updates your games whenever you boot it up. And here I am like a sucker waiting for the last 59 per cent of an update to go through so I can fool around with it for half an hour.

Oh the life of a gamer.

Zombie outbreak? Don't throw a tantrum.

Oh, Left 4 Dead. What could there be left 2 say? I instantly regret doing that.

But I have even worse regrets.

For starters, I appear to love throwing myself to the wolves. The wolves I speak of are pre-pubescent males who hail from England. I'm a bit ignorant of their exact whereabouts, but that would make me appear to be some sort of online pervert if I did. 

I'd like to shy away from this predicament, but I just can't sit around waiting for my few L4D owning friends to pop on for a quickie. I'd probably get the chair version of bed sores if I did.

So, I turn my mic down real low, and prepare for whatever random teammate gets placed beside me. Generally things look their gloomiest when I'm informed that "Aye! I'm gonna be going for the witch, aight? Don' touch 'er!" The best was when one dude told me he hadn't played the game yet, and then proceeded to ask which achievements were easiest to get. Because, that's the whole point, you know? I told him the easiest to obtain was quitting out of a match while still in the lobby. Unfortunately, he was too slippery a toad for those shenanigans.

I guess it goes to show how fun L4D can be in the face of these annoyances. I should probably learn to fight back a bit more. Just today one of my more valuable teammates berated another for not listening to his orders. Instead of spankings he dealt out shotgun shells and the inability to help the buffoon up should he fall down.