Dead Space 2, an Alien-View

Beginner’s advice:

For the beginner who has zero experience with playing Dead Space, just try to upgrade your rig’s health capacity and acquire new rig suits first before anything else.  Right after you get a new suit, feel free to buy nodes for upgrading your weapons for the next 2-4 chapters.  Like in Dead Space 1, the next rig suit upgrade becomes available every 2-4 chapters, so make sure to start saving money again after about 2 chapters of spending freely on power nodes.  The more powerful you are, the less ammo/health packs you are likely to need – and therefore the more ammo/health packs you can sell.

Shoot the heads and the limbs first!  Shooting in the middle of the bodies takes up so much more ammo (and deadly precious time) to kill them.

Use telekinesis to pick up objects and throw at enemies whenever possible, to save ammo!

Advanced tips:

On my computer, using Vista x64 SP2 and also WinXP-32, the Xbox360 controller worked great for the most part, except for when the frame rates dropped below the Vsync rate.  Then I could only turn left at half the normal speed.  That meant it took forever for me to turn around to react to a monster attacking from behind.  I tried to look into it, but didn’t find any solutions – the obvious one is to make sure that the frame rate does not ever drop below your monitor’s refresh rate.  Perhaps it’s just my isolated issue, but I was able to replicate this on another computer.  Hopefully a patch could fix this.

Eventually, I ended up preferring to use the keyboard/mouse combination.  Reasons:

• FAR quicker and more accurate aiming so that the highest difficulty can be beat without having to be some kind of a controller wizard.
• Although I had to sit closer to my 24-inch monitor using 16:10 aspect, where the narrow field of view felt a bit too narrow up close, the speed and accuracy still made it worthwhile. The controller’s dead-zone for the PC is noticeably worse at default than for Xbox360.
• The controller’s vibrations did add more to the experience, but BUT.. the vibrations are so one-dimensional, shaking like a vibrating toothbrush every time I shoot or stomp a corpse. I decided that just to feel the bass vibrations from my subwoofer was a more genuine and realistic experience, and I felt it all over my body, regardless.

Now, for one serious PC-related issue with this console port,  if Vsync is enabled from within the game menu, this option would limit the frame rate to 30fps on a 60Hz LCD monitor, and introduce some unacceptable lag with using the mouse.  Even using the Xbox360 controller, the only controller this ‘Games for Windows Live’ game was designed to work with, was laggy.  An easy workaround to fix this lag problem is to turn off Vsync from within the game menu, and if you still want Vsync, simply force Vsync from the video card’s control panel.  Like most new games nowadays, it automatically calls for a triple buffer regardless, so that the frame rates are not automatically halved or fractioned whenever it drops below the monitor’s maximum vsync refresh rate (no need for D3DOverrider).

The scenery relies on the same engine used in Dead Space, with somewhat better lighting and more intensive use of dynamic shadows cast by movable objects.  Some places in the game are filled with a good amount of fog – not too much fog, but good-looking fog. The only change in the graphics options menu is the addition of “Very High” quality shadows, whereas the original game only offered up to “High” quality shadows.  The game is somewhat more graphically demanding on video cards than Dead Space 1, where an 8800GTX could play it smoothly at 2560×1600 with maxed-out settings.  Now, an 8800GTX can only bear 1920×1200 max settings, but my new GTX 460 1GB could still handle 2560×1600 just fine at well over 75 fps most of the time, occasionally dipping to around 55fps in some scenarios.

It’s highly recommended to just max-out all of the in-game graphics options if your computer can handle it at over 30 frames per second.  That is, EXCEPT for the Anti-aliasing option in the menu – leave it disabled because it does not do true AA.  It only blurs things, similar to MLAA found on AMD cards.  Try it yourself and see if you prefer crisp detail or soft images.  Personally, I just jacked up the resolution as high as possible–2560×1600 @ 69Hz on my 24″ CRT monitor made the jaggies super tiny, so I didn’t really care about AA anyways.

It is not recommended to try a “driver hack” to force multisample anti-aliasing by changing the compatibility flags using Nvidia Inspector, since it will make the shadows disappear and cause some other buggy instances (like the game crashing when Alt-tabbing to Windows).

Also, I tried forcing ambient occlusion through the NV control panel (as it supports Dead Space 1) by renaming the .exe to DeadSpace.exe (the same as Dead Space 1’s .exe).  The enhanced atmosphere gave a more real feeling to it.  Although the picture only shows an obvious difference in the shadow covering the left area of the floor, it added quite a bit to the overall environment’s cinematic appearance, making it seem “unreal”.  Unfortunately, the frame rate hit was too great, bringing my GTX 460 down to its knees.  The lighting implemented by the game itself is already excellent, after all.  

Default without Ambient Occlusion (above)

“Quality” Ambient Occlusion (above), note the frame rate hit

The developers really should have worked with Nvidia to try to include full support for stereoscopic 3D without having to disable shadows, DOF, motion blur, etc.  Playing in S3D does make it almost too frightening to handle, but without the shadows, I decided I’d just play the game as intended and wait until 3D truly takes over the world in a year or two.  Perhaps IZ3D would have worked just fine, but I have not tried it out yet.  As for physics, the Havok-based physics engine works wonders with rag-doll physics where the body parts and limbs can be thrown around, into the glass, sometimes breaking it into shards.

If your video card has a hard time handling your monitor’s resolution at a smooth frame rate, just drop down to either “medium” or “high” quality, from “very high” preset and see if this helps.  Lower the resolution first before dropping the quality to “low”, because “low” quality is pretty much never worth it just to maintain the resolution.  Check out my Voodoopower ratings to see how your video card is ranked.

Dead Space 2 could have been a flat-out stellar game with amazing graphics if it used high-resolution textures throughout the game rather than incredibly low-detail textures in several key areas, consistently.  The linearity of this horror shooter game isn’t a bad thing for most people, but it is its shortcomings that makes it actually fall short of PREY, a game released five years ago.  Still, it is an excellent game with several excellent highlights, with lots of different highly detailed object meshes found throughout the visually impressive maps that make for a mostly pleasant showcasing tour.  If Dead Space 2 used multiple DVD’s for Xbox360 and PC versions, while filling up the PS3 blu-ray disc, it could have had Crysis-like textures all over, rather than “contradictory” quality textures where it matters the most.  Here’s to the future!

ENTERTAINMENT RATING:

84/B

By Bo_Fox

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