After another disasterous Friday night recording session, all of us went back to the drawing board an triple checked our setups to make sure that we could record on Saturday night.  Lo and behold, we can now lay all the blame on Linux.  Just kidding Koss.  Nope, it appears that whatever problems the lastest Skype update were causing went away, and we got in a solid podcast that talked about the controversy surrounding the latest media event for Capcom, and in general how site can handle getting these kind of kickbacks from the industry.  I think that we also defined what our policy is here at Aeropause regarding these kind of giveaways and events.

The podcast was mixed, by Stephen “DJ Yaunt” Munn, and features “Droid Girl”, performed by Lazyitis.

Download the podcast from here or subscribe to the podcast using one of the services below.   Also make sure to review us on iTunes and now, the Zune Marketplace.  If you have not yet, make sure to  visit our Facebook Fan Page.

Back tomorrow with more CRAZY prices!

It took less than twenty-four hours from the launch of Dead Space Extraction for the gaming community to be buzzing with news of Dead Space 2. The source? Recruitment ads by Visceral Games, Electronic Art’s recently rebranded Redwood Shores studio.

The listing for a Lead Combat and Controls Designer was looking for “a highly motivated lead combat designer for the Dead Space franchise on Xbox 360 and PS3.” The ad, posted on networking site LinkedIn, confirmed that the sequel to the highly acclaimed title is currently in “the later stages of pre-production, ready for production in the next few months [...] with many of the navigational and combat mechanics in place.” It went on to add: “We have complete autonomy and creative control over our own decisions. The Games Label at EA is 100% committed to this IP, and has already worked on IP extensions such as comic, animated features, and action figures.”

The listing also confirmed that the same “core team” will be working on the sequel. Great news for those who, like me, thought that Dead Space brought something new and terrifying to the survival horror genre, and would’ve been concerned had Visceral messed around with such a solid formula.

I was also excited to read about the action figures. Although that’s possibly only because I want to remove Isaac Clarke’s clothing.

IGN.com

Good news for those of you with a thing for necromorphs.

Despite still reeling from the unexpected departure of Executive Producer Glen Schofield last week, the show at Visceral Games/EA goes on. Today they announced that survival horror hit Dead Space is on course to grace the silver screen.

The news also confirms that the future of the Dead Space franchise is rosy, with hints of “second and third installments”. It’s unclear at this time if this is confirmation of a trilogy or merely reference to the Dead Space: Extraction and upcoming Dead Space 2.

One of five projects currently in talks, Dead Space the movie is expected to follow on from straight-to-DVD anime prequel, Downfall. As with the game plot, engineer Isaac Clarke and crew respond to a distress signal from the mining ship USG Ishimura, upon which they find the reanimated corpses of their friends and colleagues, mutated by an alien virus. D.J. Caruso (Eagle Eye, Disturbia) is already attached to the film as director, with EA producing alongside Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey. There is no release date at this time.

Other titles in discussion include the Dante’s Inferno film that will be produced by Strike Entertainment partners Eric Newman and Marc Abraham, and EA is in business with Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum) to script and Scott Stuber to produce Army of Two. EA’s The Sims is being developed by producers John Davis and Avi Arad (Mass Effect, Spiderman). Temple Hill’s Bowen and Godfrey are producing Gears of War, a live-action adaptation of the Microsoft and Epic Games’ video game for New Line, with Len Wiseman attached to direct and Chris Morgan for scripting.

Here’s hoping EA manage to succeed where other console-to-movie transitions have failed.

Source: uk.gamespot.com

Although‭ ‬Dead Space borrows heavily from well known science-fiction convention,‭ ‬it manages to establish a reasonably eerie atmosphere before mucking it all up with chronically over-exposed flesh-eating horrors.‭  ‬The concept of‭ “‬cracking‭” ‬a planet open for mining purposes and instead finding only suffering and death and making the player an engineer rather than some Duke Nukem/The Rock variant had enormous potential.‭

Aaah, spoilers! Dammit! Seriously, though, the article is a very thorough and entertaining read. Stay tuned for the contrast of Dead Space‘s tools-as-weapons plot device against that of Fatal Frame.

Source: What Not to Fear by Jason Dobry, Four Fat Chicks. Image of Silent Hill from the article.

Stephen has returned to join the regular crew of Koss, Fourhman and Joe on this weeks podcast. We try to talk all things fighting games, but somehow it all seems to come back to Tom Clancy and his name on everything. That and the fact that we finally had to use the explicit tag for the first time, because Stephen finally gave up on tracking all the language and of course, cock shots.

We did get to several questions from the listeners, and we really want to get more. Feel free to post in the Question thread in the forums, or email us at tips@aeropause.com. We also want to get more of those reviews and subscribers, so make sure you subscribe if you are a regular listener, and please try and review us. Good or bad, we want to know what people think.

Music is brought to you by RevolutionVoid, at www.revolutionvoid.com. The podcast as always is put together by our expert mixmaster, Stephen. We also went back to Skype, so the lag issues should be behind us from this week forward.

Download the podcast from here or subscribe to the podcast using one of the services below: Also make sure to review us on iTunes.

Electronic Arts CEO John Ricitiello had recently announced that the Dead Space franchise would be coming to the Wii.  Most heard that announcement and wondered how, or what would Electronic Arts do to port the Dead Space experience to the Wii.  Today, we got that announcement from Isaac Clarke himself, with a new trailer for Dead Space: Extraction. 

Dead Space: Extraction is not a port of the orignal game, but a prequel, taking place on the USG Ishimura before Isaac Clarke and his companions come aboard to save the day.  The action in the trailer is fast and violent, and the game in the short bits where you can see it looks suprisingly good.  The biggest question I have is that if this is a prequel, and it takes place on the USG Ishimura right before the events in Dead Space, does this mean you will be involved with the events that take place in Dead Space: Downfall.

If you have not followed the Dead Space universe, Electronic Arts has spanned this franchise into comics and even an animated feature film.  The film, Dead Space: Downfall, takes place on the USG Ishimura, and sets up all the events that we then play through in the 360 and PS3 versions of Dead Space.  Now we have a game that is suppose to take place during that time, so one has to wonder if you will play as any of those people, or someone else isolated in another part of the ship.  The question has been asked.

Also, the Executive Producer of Dead Space, Glenn Schofield, will not be the producer on this title, due to his recent promotion to GM of Redwood Shores division of Electronic Arts.  Instead, that title will be passed to Steve Papoutsis.  Steve was a Senior Producer on the first Dead Space title, and will now helm the Dead Space team for future endeavors in the Dead Space universe.

Well, it took me longer than I thought, but I did finally pick up Dead Space for the PC, and I have to say that I am more impressed with it than some of the reviews might have said about it.  So sit back, take a load off, and read up on what my thoughts were with the first thirty minutes of Dead Space on the PC.

First off, make no bones about it, Dead Space is definitely a port of the 360 version of the game.  It plays exactly like the 360 version of the game, looks like it, and even works perfectly with a 360 controller.  You start the game sitting on your ship, decending into the area where the USG Ishimura is located.  After meeting the three four main characters that you will deal with in Dead Space, you are catapulted into the action, with a hard landing, and the partial destruction of your ship.

With no other choice you enter the Ishimura, only to be attacked by these horribly grotesque creatures, that seem to be formed out of human people.  With some hints along the way, you realize that the only way to really defeat them is to make sure to remove their limbs, a fact we hear and read six times over in the first thirty minutes of the game.

Some reviews have stated that the controls are rather convoluted, but I did not have any real issue with them.  My biggest problem is that I had an Xbox 360 controller hooked up to my PC, thereby killing all the keyboard instructions, overlaying them with controller controls.  As you will see in the video at one point, I am trying to figure out how to foot stomp, because the control layout only showed RT as the control for the foot stomp.

I stated earlier that Dead Space looks exactly like the 360 version of the game, barring the higher resolutions.  I wonder if this is a testament to how good the 360 version looked, or if the PC version did not add any bells and whistles.  Sound is also lacking as I only have a 2.1 speaker setup at this time, limiting the surround sound that made Dead Space sound so creepy on my 360.  The game does run exceptionally well, with no slowing at any point running on a 1920x12oo resolution on a Geforce 8800GT with 512 MB RAM.  I would suggest passing at this point if you have the game already on the 360 or PS3, but if you have not played it yet, it seems to be a solid game for you collection thirty minutes in.

Yesterday, Electronic Arts had a quarterly earnings discussion, in which, John Ricitiello admitted that they dropped the ball when it came to supporting the Nintendo Wii.  Ricitiello stated that Electronic Arts would rectify that in the upcoming fiscal year, by releasing a significant amount of titles on the Wii this year, including the porting of Dead Space to the Wii.  Ricitiello said that mistakes were made by tying themselves to the PS3 and 360 over the Wii from the outset, and for not adjsting to popularity of the Wii at some point.

All this is fine and dandy, but I was hung up on the announcement of Dead Space for the Wii.  It is an interesting choice for EA to port to the Wii, due to the high quality visuals that were on display in Dead Space.  Controls also seem to be a difficult thing, as there seems to be far more controls for Dead Space than there is on the Wiimote and Nunchuck controller.

My concern for this title coming to the Wii starts with another port that is currently in the works for the Wii from the 360, and that would be Capcom’s Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop.  When Dead Rising was announced for the Wii, it really made a lot of sense.  Easier targeting system, and a motion control attack system, which would work great for all the melee weapons that are available in Dead Space.  The question was how Capcom would capture the graphical polish from the 360 version of the game, when translating it to the Wii.  We shortly found out how Capcom would make this happen, as you will only have 5-10 zombies at a time on the screen, vs. the 100′s that you would find in the 360 version.  Other features were to be removed from Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop, including no photojournalism and the scaling back of weapons available, which made the release seem handcuffed from the start.

Dead Space, at first looks like a really good candidate for porting, as you will get a better targeting system for aiming at limbs to sever, and some of the shooting gallery stuff like the asteroid belt should end up being far wth a pointing targeting system.  Melee attacks could feel more immersive using the shaking motion of the Wiimote.  But with all of his, you have to wonder if the dynamic lighting, sound, and complex visual presentation will hold up on the Wii.  It seems like EA could end up damaging their brand more than helping it by porting a title like this to a hardware platform that cannot handle it.  It will not be the same Dead Space that people played on the PC, 360 and PS3.

I can understand EA wanting to get a large name brand title on the Wii, but I am surprised they did not go to Mirror’s Edge before Dead Space.  Mirror’s Edge seems to you a bright palette of colors, but never too many at the same time.  Also, the movement that the character is based around is a perfect fit for the Wiimote.  Shake, twist an twirling the wiimote to control Faith through the world of Mirror’s Edge would be a far better solution for the Wii, than moving a complex title like Dead Space.

I am all for getting more hardcore titles on the Wii, but if what made the game great is going to be compromised, is it really worth taking the effort to put it on the Wii.  Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop will be a good test to see if consumers will go for this type of port.