Dead Space 2 Dismembered: Ashbath Videogame review--9 Feb, 2011.

There is an ad campaign for the videogame Dead Space 2, which features the tagline "Your mom hates this game."

Well, my Mother's Day gift this year is saving her the trouble by hating it myself.  I gotta show appreciation for all those wonderful home-cooked meals, after all.  So prop your feet up, Ma, and let me handle this one for you.  Love ya!

I don't buy or play many videogames nowadays, but I remembered there were glowing reviews for the original Dead Space, and the sequel was due out in a few days.  I had a gift card with a fifty bucks on it, so instead of buying [almost] two tanks of gas with it, I bought Dead Space 2.  Halfway through playing, I realized that this purchase had all the financial wisdom of buying a woman a cocktail.

Have you ever had one of your buddies loudly fart in public and then, just as loudly, blame it on you?  Combine that wounded frustration with the masochism of overpaying for beer at Whole Foods, and the agony of a divorce. Code that into a videogame, and you get Dead Space 2.

I am being quite literal about the divorce reference; you, Isaac Clarke, are stumbling through a crippling assault on your sanity--in space!  Galloping children and screaming babies demand constant attention and beatings.  The spectre of your wife, who you thought you had disposed of once and for all, torments you constantly with guilt trips and insults.  The mutants onboard (analogous to lawyers) endlessly seek to sever you from your most valuable assets (in this case, your arms, legs and head).  Perhaps worst of all, you constantly fall just short of amassing enough space credits to upgrade your arsenal's ability to dispatch them all with the level of retribution they deserve.

I ask you: how is that not like a divorce?  Imagine failing a Cosmo Magazine dating quiz so hard that your body just collapses into diced ham.  Welcome to Hell!

 Sector 7G: Whaddya mean, no bike for Christmas?!

Here is your worst nightmare ever: you have stolen the plot (as well as the gravity-drive) from the movie Event Horizon, and as punishment you are marooned on a crumbling space station.  You are getting the shit beat out of you by an endless parade of paraplegics and toddlers, and even though you possess an array of high-tech weaponry, you cannot keep yourself from getting repeatedly dismembered and toppling over into stupid piles of spaceman Jenga. 

Your infinite deaths are senseless and mindboggling; a dog-like creature headbutts you, and all your limbs spontaneously eject from your body.  Seven-foot-tall slimy space-mantis-men plod towards you like angry senior citizens, while belly-crawling torsos with no legs somehow leap entire blocks with lightning speed, savaging your ankles and butthole.  As you frantically try to aim, another gaggle of genetic misfits busts out of the airvents in the hallway you just cleared.  You even get the horror movie "dun-dun-dunnnn" sound when you die, which is the corpsefucker equivalent of a dinner triangle going off. 

...Just when you start to think it couldn't get any more ridiculous, a head with tentacles rips off your own head, jumps onto your sopping neck-stump, laces in and then pilots your body down to the computer facility to begin programming Dead Space 3.  On the way there you hear over the intercom that John Travolta is going to play John Gotti in an upcoming movie!

Well guess what, folks?  For sixty dollars all of that can become your reality!

Relax, mom--I'll handle that Gotti movie review, too.

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