Actually, I first learnt my lesson with Metal Gear Solid 4. On my first playthrough I got 0 continues, 0 alerts and 0 kills. Awesome, right? Wrong. It became a game of trial & error, constantly having to restart just because I fucked up. And I fucked up a lot. It was like watching a movie with a bag of chips, and having to rewind back to the begging of the scene every time I chewed too loud and missed a line. Or something like that. Needless to say it became a chore to play and while it's still one of my favourite games this generation, looking back on it I should've just run n' gunned through my first playthrough.
So if MGS4 taught me first, I guess Dead Space 2 was the proverbial spanking I received at the hands of Sister Common Sence.
YOU SHALL NOT START GAMES ON HARD DIFFICULTY!
Having just finished the original Dead Space only the night before, for the third time I might add, I thought it was a good idea to start Dead Space 2 on Survivalist. For those unfamiliar, that's code for hard. After that comes Zealot aka very hard, then Harcore aka you gotta be fuckin' kidding me. I can only imagine what those higher difficulties entail, since as the name suggests, Survivalist was a struggle to survive. Well, at least for the first few chapters. I scraped through most encounters barely breathing with only the boot on my feet left for ammo, and I died a few times heare and there, but for the most part it was manageable and at one point I thought to myself "this is the perfect difficulty".Then shit got real.
About halfway through, the game became much more difficult. Too difficult. At some points, I was dying 10, 20, 30 times before progressing. I was often surviving on the loot scavenged from the last Necromorph, and at many times my life depended on whether they drop ammo or fucking credits. "But EVO, you can buy ammo and health with credis!". Back to MGS4, like that game, getting 0 continues and whatnot, I kinda set myself limitations on the way I play Dead Space. In both games, I never buy ammo or med kits. All credits go towards guns and Power Nodes. Why? In my One Gun playthrough of Dead Space I figured this was the best way to urdrade everything, albeit at the expensive of the necessities.
Some people might argue that this is the way it should be played, like the survival horrors of yore. But when developers Visceral put so much thought into pacing, so much effort into creating atmosphere, the easiest way to break the immersion is facing a game over screen every 5 minutes. Sure, I could've just changed difficulties, but by the end of the game I'd grown stubborn and determined to beat the game, instead of just experiencing it as I think Visceral intended.
So, if you're starting Dead Space 2, start on normal.
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