[QUOTE="Titans23"][QUOTE="FantasySports02"] Why? You'll just respond by saying they're not exclusive, thus eliminating all value the game has.FantasySports02

Out of ten, I give Dead Space a 6.5, 7 at the very highest.

The action is satisfying but after you've eviscerated a hundred of one of the eight or so monsters in the game, the combat becomes a bore. The puzzles are overly simple and require basically no thought to solve. You only need to use two weapons (plasma cutter/flamethrower), your stasis and kinesis modules and you're set for the entire game.

It does look good, if you can consider grey corridors covered in blood and gore good looking. There is gore, there is excessive gore and then Dead Space sits somewhere above that, way above that. The atmosphere isn't terrible but after you look down the millionth blood soaked corridor it loses some of it's appeal.

It also isn't that scary. I tried to be scared, I really did. Sure, the dead monsters can get back up but they stop doing that when you learn to put an extra few bullets into their corpses before taking another step. There's no tension, the monsters just walk around the corner and then rush you, giving plenty of time to blow their legs off then stomp on their heads. I never ran out of health packs or ammo, even on the hardest difficulty. Careful management of upgrade points and credits removes all the challenge from the game.

The story is so dull and predictable that there is very little encouragement to keep playing. The missions do little to help this, it's always go here, fix this, go there, kill that, backtrack to a previous area, flip a switch, go back to the area you just came from, add a boss fight every few chapters and repeat a dozen times. I had to force myself to finish the game, just so I could say I had and then I returned it to EB Games.

So there you have my brief opinion of Dead Space. It's a decent game but it loses it's appeal and becomes boring and repetetive after the first few chapters.

Allow me to introduce some negativity into this thread of glowing praise for Lost Odyssey.

Warning! Opinionated rant ahead.

Battles require little thought and most can be won with the same party formation and the same battle tactics leaving several characters completely un-used, except in the sections where they're broken into two or more groups. Later enemies are also immune to many status effects which even further reduces the strategy required to win against them and it basically boils down to defend, damage spell, defend, heal, attack, heal, damage spell, victory. The ring system may as well be non-existant as most have little to no effect on the battle. The random battles become annoying when you encounter one every two steps and then none at all during incredibly boring stretches of the game world. Several boss battles contain mechanics which serve only to lengthen the encounter but requires no fundamental change to your strategy except "use more healing items."

I found some of the later quest targets obscure and only found them by pot luck. The free-roaming segments become tedious and, combined with the obscure quest targets, removes all sense of urgency from the game as you are stuck wandering around the gameworld trying to figure out where the heck you're supposed to go next.

The character relations are bland, uninspired and predictable and I felt absolutely nothing for any of the characters. The story itself is actually rather short, considering you're going to put 40+ hours into this game, most of it consisting of artificially lengthened battles and puzzle segments.

Character levelling is a joke. The only input the player has is choosing which skills the immortal characters learn and use and even this is pointless as you'll find you'll never use a great deal of them.

I'll admit, it wasn't too bad until the third disc when I realised I was just watching a movie while twidling my thumbs.

In summary, if you like JRPGs you'll inevitably love Lost Odyssey. If you don't like JRPGs, Lost Odyssey embodifies everything there is to hate about the genre.

I think it would be really cool if the next Fallout was in China. Get a chance to see things from the other perspective of the 'war'. Of course, since Fallout is firmly set in an American culture, it is very unlikely to happen. stevenrkorea