Revolutionary said:
Again, that was just one example of what I was referring to. Tension essentially is a form of psychological terror - the anticipation and fear of something appearing.
Tension isn't necessarily a form of psychological horror - the latter simply includes tension as one of its elements. I also draw a distinction between basic tension and terror - tension describes more a general level of stress, while terror is a level of fear and apprehension. Many games and films and such far outside of the horror genre have plenty of tension, i.e. thrillers or mysteries, but they aren't particularly scary and can't be described as psychological horror/terror.
Tension evoked from jump scares, ultimately, is about as mild and ineffective as you can get. It's certainly not something I'd ever describe as psychological anything. It's the Paranormal Activity 2-style easy way out. If you want to evoke actual fear, you have to do more than jump scares, and Dead Space 1 barely even tried.
Revolutionary said:
I do believe the sound design, as we agreed on, is one of the more important parts of Dead Space's horror. My complaint is that in this game, the sound design is going for shock more than fear. I'm not saying DS1 didn't have it's own share of jump scares, but you can't sit there with a straight face and tell me DS2 didn't at least triple the amount.
I can't do that, because I'm still going through DS2. In fact, I'm still quite early, probably around chapter 5 or so, but what I can say is there have barely been any jump scares in those chapters at all (in fact, I can only even think of one, and it involved some blue computer screen suddenly lighting up). The sound design in DS2 so far isn't nearly as dependent on loud, sudden noises as in DS1, and there also isn't that shitty music letting you know exactly what is happening.
Dead Space 1 telegraphed its scares to such an extent that most players found it better to play with the music turned entirely off, and even that didn't do much to mitigate the predictability.
Revolutionary said:
See, I had the exact opposite experience with resources - scarce in DS1, plentiful in DS2. The fact that you can essentially grind the randomly-spawning enemies for their loot and then sell it to rack up resources completely negated the tension of only having a limited amount to work with in DS1 (IIRC, damn near all encounters were scripted). By the time I was done with my Survivalist run, I had at least 20 Medium Health Packs and 200 Plasma rounds (Plasma Cutter FTW).
Resources were everywhere in DS1, and you also constantly picked up ammo from other weapons, which you could sell and buy more ammo or whatnot (the latter is also the case this time around as well, but it's to a lesser extent). I never came close to running into ammo issues in the first game, while here so far I sometimes find myself low despite copious use of kinesis. I vary things up a lot more in DS2, while in the first game all I basically did was shoot, shoot, shoot. There was never any need for melee or kinesis because I always had more than enough ammo for every weapon and every encounter.
My experience could change as I go through the game, but so far, it does virtually everything better than Dead Space 1 (a game I loved).
