Dead Space – Ride The Spaceship To Hell

Let's face it. Electronic Arts isn't actually known for publishing genre-essential games. In fact, EA is famous for closely the contrary: bungling games which were one time thought of as dependable hits.

For Holiday, 2008, however, EA may very well have the most excellent release of a pristine and novel name in its recent account since becoming a near-monopoly.  

I'm referring about Dead Space, a survival horror game like no other.

Honestly, there have been survival horror games in the past. Alone in the Dark, of course, created the genre. Resident Evil and its many episodes advanced and perfected this forte. The Silent Hill series took it for a spin and pioneered the concept of emotional horror, which was brought to the advanced stage by games like Fatal Frame.

So what maked Dead Space any unusual?

For starters, Dead Space doesn't happen in an old deserted manor or a town looted by currently-made zombies.

Dead Space comes about in, where else, space.

Consider Alien. Consider Sigourney Weaver being chased by the brood in a spacecraft that has been sucked of Visualize this automation completed to a tee.  

Visualize crazed,mutated, and absolute vile crew associates substituting aliens. Think of pure, untouched evilness coming from the guts of hell. Imagine a lone marine having to keep at bay these horrible entities. Visualize bizzare entities and even more monstrous circumstances. 

It's the threatening alienation and the haunting dread that makes Dead Space the upcoming groundbreaking march in the survival horror genre.

Surely, we shouldn't disregard the big, powerful firearms, the profuse supply of brutality, and the variety of dismembered body parts.

Dead Space is said to be so brutal that it had to go undergo some mendings just to attain an acceptable M mark from the ESRB. Its designed box art, a visual of a dismembered limb floating in space and a tribute to the mutilated finger that was used in the advertisements for the flick Saw, has been faced with so much criticism that an alternate box art is being made.

Upon the distribution of Dead Space, the survival horror type will never be the same again. As the preliminary assertion in Star Trek goes, "to go where no man has gone before." 

Well, Dead Space will go where no survival horror game has tried undertake before.

And we'll be present for one hell of a ride, literally talking that is.