Dead Space, My Japanese Coach, and the Geometry Wars Gauntlet

After posting on Monday, I went and threw down the proverbial gauntlet at Jessica, besting her 19,700,000 high score in Geometry Wars 2 with a posted score of 24 million, restoring myself the rightful place of first on my friends list. 

I got a text tonight after work, with the passed along message that she had now reached 27 million. 

Oh man, I don’t need this…right now, at the height of the video game release season.  And yet that’s the beauty of Geometry Wars 2’s friends list functionality.  Jessica’s high score is a constant thorn in my psyche, mocking me from the right corner of the screen as my ship perishes over and over again until I right the universe.  I’ll probably be playing it tonight instead of Dead Space.

Which is saying something, because Dead Space is absolutely worth your 60 dollars.  I’ve just started chapter three, and I’ve spent the first two hours of the game creeping around in the dark, spinning around with every well placed sound effect and phantom enemy that may be lurking around every corner. 

Every time I see a pile of corpses I stop and consider…do I waste what precious little ammo I have left to test and see if everything is really dead, or risk repeating the mistake of walking over something that was lying in wait for me, playing dead?  That I’m even having this conversation with myself…that I mistrust the very walls that I hide against to protect my flank, is proof that the game is a quality piece of survival horror. 

Aside from the well designed tension of the story and layout, Dead Space’s visuals are its other main asset.  At one point, Issac treks into a room that has been blown open to space.  In this vacuum, you have around 60 seconds of air before you die, which would be fine except every ounce of me wanted to simply stop and stare in wonder the view of the planet before me, unblemished by any window.  It was simply breathtaking, and I forgot for a second that I was looking a digitized game visual on an HD screen.

My hope is that Dead Space doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of all the bigger titles around it.  People’s wallets have to give some time, and this might be a game your considering passing over this holiday.  Don’t. 

I also got my copy of My Japanese Coach for the DS, which is less of a game and more of a learning tool for me.  I’ve been studying Japanese for about two months now, via a website called Japanesepod101.com.  It’s an amazing learning tool, and I’m picking up more and more each day.  But since most of my learning time involves me listening to podcasts on the go, the one area of deficiency I have is reading and writing.  Especially writing.  In twenty four hours My Japanese coach has helped me recognize and write hiragana faster than in two months with other methods.  I’ve just started with the beginning few lessons, but hopefully the quality stays high as the lesson difficulty increases.

I’m hoping to have a new segment here on the Weekend Gamer very soon, which will hopefully help round out the scope of the blog.  I wish I could tell you more, but I’ll have to leave it at that.  If all goes well, you should be finding out sooner rather than later. 

–WG