My weekend in gaming – Dead Space impressions

On Saturday morning I made the leap and grabbed myself a copy of Dead Space. The game didn’t cost me any money, but don’t be mistaken, the price was still high. I took advantage of JB’s trade in offer, and handed over Resistance, GT5 Prologue and Smash Court Tennis for my copy. It was a difficult decision, I usually choose not to support trade in schemes, stores like EB make a far higher profit margin on second hand games sales than new game sales – hence their constant push to get you to trade in your games. I don’t like to support the system because it cuts the game developers out of the cycle – they sell the game once, and EB can sell it as many times as they can coax the consumer into handing it back to them. 

Of course, the task of selecting the members of my hand picked game collection that I would be sacrificing took some thinking about, getting rid of tennis was straightforward, this was a launch title and I’m sure I can find a newer, better title to take it’s place. GT5P was a no brainer, it’s not even a full priced game, and I’ve been kicking myself for not purchasing the downloadable iteration, I’ve really warmed up to the idea of having full games on my HDD – I know I wouldn’t play Warhawk as much if I had to track down a disk each time.  

Choosing to chuck Resistance took a bit of though, but I know if I ever wanted to play it again I could easily pick it up as a  budget title – things have changed since Playstation’s debut, back then it seemed all games were in limited distribution, getting hold of a quality title that was a few years old was sometimes an impossibility. Now days, if it still capable of selling, they’ll sell it.

So after much deliberation and an extended conversation with the JB games dude about WoW (Yes, I know I’m wearing a Penny-Arcade Rogues do it from behind tshirt – am I the only one that thinks it’s funnier removed from the WoW context?), I walked away with a new game. I’m pretty fucking happy I did.

Dead Space is a good game. Everything EA have set out to do, they’ve done quite well. This does leave some basics a little under polished, but the unique ground this game treads more than make up for anything lacking.

Consolized Street Fighter IV dated for Australia

The (semi)official statement is that Street Fighter IV will hit Playstation 3 and xbox consoles this winter, a timeframe better known as summer here is Australialand. Thanks for the effort Capcom, but a vague release date doesn’t assist me in my need for this kind of information. Lucky, Kotaku have come to the rescue by contacting Red Ant, the Australian distributor for Street Fighter IV, who’s release schedule lists SFIV for a Friday, February 27 release down under.

Of course, this is not an official announcement, but as Kotaku notes, the date is a little too precise to be a placeholder.

So there you go, I’ve satisfied my obligation to report Australian specific content without boring the remainder of the world. Sweet.