What happens when PR goes awry? Not slightly sideways, as we saw recently with the leak of Rage 2 (which is probably the best thing that could have happened to it anyway) but completely, irretrievably wrong, in a way that inspires conversation and funny stories for years to come? Game publishers do their level best to keep the hype machine running along smoothly and inoffensively—that may be the most important part of all—but sometimes, out of malice or greed or plain old good intentions, the bus goes off the cliff and there’s nothing to do but hold on and ride it to the bottom. 

That’s when legends are born.

Daikatana: John Romero's famous bitch-botch

Back before the turn of the millennium, John Romero proclaimed that he was going to make you his bitch. "Suck it down," he added, presumably to ensure that we were all on the same edgy page. Three years later, Daikatana finally came out, and... well, there was some bitching, alright, but it wasn't quite what the ad had promised. The infamous FPS wasn't as bad as people sometimes like to pretend, but the pre-release hype (which was also wildly premature—the ad was followed by multiple delays) set the bar so high that anything short of perfection would have seemed a letdown. And the final product, while far from a disaster, was also far from perfection: Reviews weren't great, but the reaction from gamers was absolutely savage.

Romero ultimately apologized for the ad, acknowledging that it soured his relationship with the gaming community. Ion Storm Dallas closed less than a year after Daikatana's release.

Aliens: Colonial Marines - The actual gameplay demo that was not, actually 

Pre-release press demos for Aliens: Colonial Marines promised a game of impressive—some might say cinematic—visual fidelity, but the final release left players squinting and scratching their heads. Opinions varied on the degree, but the general consensus was that the visual quality of the released game fell well short of what was promised in those "actual gameplay" demos. The difference was enough that the UK's Advertising Standards Agency forced Sega to add an after-the-fact disclaimer to Colonial Marines promotional videos, shortly after which a lawsuit was filed over claims of false advertising. 

It eventually fizzled out but not before Sega and Gearbox pointed accusing fingers at one another ("It's Randy doing whatever the fuck he likes" remains one of my favorite lines from a leaked internal email) and while Gearbox was ultimately absolved of legal responsibility, the stench of that swim through a swamp of ugly recriminations lingers.

Dead Space 2 - EA pulls a “How do you do, fellow kids?”

For some reason, Electronic Arts decided that what Dead Space 2 marketing really needed was a literal "your mom" joke. The company released a series of videos in which middle-aged women were given an eyeful of interstellar trauma victim Isaac Clarke hacking and blasting at hordes of sticky space zombies. Clips of gameplay were mixed with shots of their horrified reactions: One participant described the game as "purely crap" at the end of her session and predicted that such games would leave us at the mercy of "a society of criminals."

The campaign was built on a framework of all the worst gamer stereotypes—Women! Old people! Games cause violence!—and didn't even attempt to make a save with an ironic twist at the end. It was embarrassing, and frustrating: Dead Space was a splattery mess, but it was also a top-notch survival-horror game with a dark psychological edge, and the juvenile focus on the worst excesses of guts and gore did the sequel a real disservice. (Also, your mom told me she actually loved Dead Space 2.)

Homefront - 9999 red balloons go into the bay

I liked Homefront, the Red-Dawn-but-North-Korea shooter that THQ pushed out in 2011. It was monumentally stupid and overwrought but so was Red Dawn, and the shooting bits were good enough to make it a “forgettable fun” kind of 6.5/10 shooter. (Interestingly, our reviewer, the redoubtable Norman Chan, saw it the opposite way: Intense story, “ho-hum” combat.)

Speaking of monumentally stupid, THQ released 10,000 red balloons as a Homefront publicity stunt during GDC 2011. The balloons rose majestically into the sky over San Francisco, but instead of rising high enough to break apart (or at least go away), crappy weather conditions brought them down prematurely in the San Francisco Bay. It was a hell of a mess. THQ claimed the balloons were biodegradable but city officials didn't care: The publisher had to pay to clean the mess up and ate a $7000 fine on top. Homefront tanked, too.

There's more...

Horse armor - The world's most infamous cosmetic (which you can still buy)

Before nickel-and-dime DLC was a routine part of the gaming life, there was Horse Armor, a $2.50 outfit for your mighty steed in Bethesda’s open-world RPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The steep price for a simple cosmetic did not go over well, particularly since you couldn't even use it to flaunt your affluence and/or financial irresponsibility in front of your friends, enemies, and indifferent strangers: Oblivion is strictly single-player, so the only person who would ever see your horse in her fancy new outfit was you.

To its credit, Bethesda did a good job of owning the error—eventually. Its 2009 April Fool's gag (Oblivion was released in 2006) included a half-price sale on all Oblivion DLC except Horse Armor, which was actually doubled in cost. More recently, it added Horse Power Armor to Fallout 4 via the Bethesda Creation Club. But it also never stopped selling horse armor, and it still goes for $2.50. There’s probably a lesson in that.

Mass Effect Andromeda - My face is tired

The point of demos and early access availability is to get people interested in your game: They try it, they like it, they tell their friends, everybody preorders, and it's happy faces all around. Mass Effect: Andromeda is a case study in doing it wrong, wrong, oh-so-awfully wrong. Origin Access subscribers got a one-week head start on the journey to another galaxy, and almost immediately began dunking on it: It wasn't exactly broken but it sure as hell wasn't right (well, okay, some of it was broken), and the legion of memes it spawned—including one courtesy of our very own Tyler Wilde—was the last thing BioWare and EA needed, especially since fans were already uneasy about the state of the game and its ugly, tired faces. Glitchy visuals weren’t Andromeda’s only problem, but they set a pre-release tone that the game was never able to overcome.

Battlefront 2 loot boxes - The microtransactions heard ‘round the world

An exclusive licensing deal to make Star Wars videogames in a post-Lucas world should have been a golden goose for EA. Instead, after setting a promising pace with a rejuvenated Star Wars: Battlefront, it set the game industry on fire with Star Wars: Battlefront 2—and not in a good way. The planned implementation of loot boxes and premium currency outraged fans and forced a days-before-release walkback, which was bad enough on its own. But it also attracted the attention of politicians around the world, leading to multiple inquiries and threats of legal action reminiscent of the videogame violence moral panic of the early '90s. Many gamers also very vocally took up the cause, seeing the legislative pushback as an opportunity to force real change on the industry.

The reaction from publishers has been somewhat less than graceful so far. Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson reiterated the company’s (and industry’s) position in a recent earnings call that loot boxes are not gambling and said that it will "push forward" with them in future games no matter what people think. Executives from other companies have said much the same. But some sort of compromise in the way loot boxes work seems likely: Belgium's Gaming Commission recently declared that three out of four popular games from EA, Activision, and Valve (FIFA 18, Overwatch, and CS:GO) contain loot boxes that contravene the country's gambling laws and warned that hefty fines or even prison sentences could be applied if they’re not changed or removed. Ironically, the one game that was found to fall within the boundaries of the law is the one that started this whole damn mess in the first place: Star Wars: Battlefront 2.

And because our console cousins deserve some love too, we've got a pair of honorable mentions ahead...

Sony PSP Black/White Campaign - Yeah, that's racist

To herald the launch of a white PSP in 2006, Sony rolled out an advertising campaign in the Netherlands that included an image of a very aggressive-looking white woman holding the face of a visibly frightened black woman. It was not good. Sony denied any racist intent but the subtext, intentional or not, was about as subtle as a kick in the junk with a steel toe boot. The backlash was immediate, and Sony quickly killed the campaign.

I mean, holy cow.

Xbox One is always online - Get with the times, chumps

“We have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity, it's called Xbox 360,” Microsoft’s Don Mattrick said during an E3 2013 interview with Geoff Keighley, addressing concerns about the Xbox One’s always-on requirement. (Start around 1:30 for the relevant bit.) “If you have zero access to the internet, that is an offline device.” It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable point but it came off as cavalier and dismissive, especially after he followed up the remark by basically implying that only chumps don’t have access to the internet. Xbox fans weren’t buying what Microsoft was selling, and possibly even worse, Sony used Microsoft’s struggles at the show to put on a master class in ownage.

Dead Space 2 is available now on Steam for just $5.00/£2.49—but be quick; it won't stay that price for long.

Dead Space 2 sees you reprise your role as Systems Engineer Isaac Clarke three years after the horrific events on the USG Ishimura. Expect more of same atmospheric horror and monster-stomping action, only this time around, Clarke's a little less taciturn when he encounters more of those murderous Necromorphs.

If you've never explored the original game, you can add that to your library for cheap, too. The Dead Space bundle—which boasts the tense prequel, too—is available for just £3.74, a whopping 81 percent off its usual retail price.

Last month EA closed Visceral Games, the studio behind Dead Space and Battlefield Hardline. Electronic Arts' vice president Patrick Soderlund confirmed the closure and confirmed that the design direction of Visceral's Star Wars project will undergo a "significant change."

In the words of one plucky commenter on the Dead Space 2 customer reviews page, "Don't be sad that it's over, be happy that it happened."

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. 

Electronic Arts closed the doors on Visceral Games yesterday, bringing to a close the studio whose (relatively) recent work includes Dante's Inferno, Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel, Battlefield Hardline, and the Dead Space series. Following the announcement, Zach Wilson, who worked briefly at the studio as a designer on Hardline, took to Twitter to offer some thoughts about where it all went wrong. 

Wilson's opening tweets say it all: 

In follow-ups, Wilson said that he's "back of the napkinning" the numbers, but added that they're close to the real thing. "I don't know the exact marketing budget but they're frequently close to the dev cost (I have heard this anecdotally)," he wrote. 

Sky-high budgets are also why developers are launching their own digital storefronts, rather than simply relying on the simpler and far more ubiquitous Steam.

"Do you hate uplay? Well, the pub gets 90% of the $$$," he tweeted. "EA makes $30 per copy after retailers and console makers take their cut. Then consider that a chunk of the game was sold on sale ... Through Origin they get 90%"

Wilson's tweets don't directly address the reasons for Visceral's closure, but they do paint a very grim portrait of the state of the business, and the extent to which major publisher releases are either big hits, or big busts. If a mid-tier game like Dead Space 2 can knock out four million copies and still be considered underperforming (and keep in mind that EA reported two years after its release that the original Dead Space had sold roughly half that number), then the bar is incredibly high. Any new project that looks like it won't be a huge hit, or won't have a long tail via microtransactions and DLC, suddenly starts to look like a risk from that perspective.

And if, on top of that, the game in question appears to be in trouble, as Kotaku suggested in its report of Visceral's closure yesterday, then risk-averse publishers (which is to say, all of them) aren't likely to wait too long before they take action.

Resident Evil 4’s influence has become immeasurable since its release in 2005. Games like Gears of War and Uncharted owe much to the game that revolutionized third-person action controls. However, one popular sci-fi horror game would look a lot like an entirely different sci-fi horror game if not for Capcom’s reinvention of its seminal series. I got the opportunity to sit down with Dead Space designers Ben Wanat and Wright Bagwell to talk about the early days of development and how Resident Evil 4 helped them shape their own horror series out of another.

"When Resident Evil 4 came out, we were just awestruck by it," Wanat told me. "We were all playing it and we were like, 'Holy shit, this is a really awesome game. They're actually trying to tell a story; they've got some cool cinematics; the gameplay systems are fixing a lot of problems, bringing it into this action realm but keeping this intense horror feel to it. It was this amazing combination and—oh, the enemies were so freakin' cool."

Then Resident Evil 4 came out and we were like, 'Oh. No, this is the shit.'

Wanat didn't shy away from admitting that Resident Evil 4 is one of his favourite games of all time. And it's clear looking at Dead Space that he wasn't alone at EA Redwood Shores (now Visceral Games).

"It's pretty obvious when you play Dead Space, to look at it and go, 'Yeah, it's almost like they decided to make Resident Evil 4 in space,' which is exactly what we were doing."

A shock to the system

But it wasn't always that way. Early on in its development, before Resident Evil 4 had even been released, Dead Space was a completely different game. Rumours have circled around the sci-fi horror game's early days, reinforced by similarities found within Dead Space. During our discussions, Wanat confirmed them to me. 

"Originally, we were pushing around this idea of maybe we could make System Shock 3. And you can look at the Dead Space blueprint and be like, 'Oh, this is kind of like System Shock,'" Wanat said, smiling. 

"To do a System Shock 3, you're really tackling a monumental task, to make people happy with a sequel that wasn't made by the same team as the original," he explained. And while the game didn't make it out the door and live on as the third System Shock, Wanat said that a new entry in that series was the goal they shot for early on.

"It was like, 'Everybody, get your System Shock 2 copy, play it start to finish, and let's figure out what we're going to do,'" Wanat said, recalling the early days of development. "Then Resident Evil 4 came out and we were like, 'Oh. No, this is the shit.'"

However, Redwood Shores couldn’t just change the name of its project and work on something completely new. 

"It was at a time at EA when there was no appetite for original IP. It seemed like everybody else was doing it except for us," Wanat lamented. While Redwood Shores created games based on James Bond, Lord of the Rings, and The Godfather, Wanat said the desire to make something original was fervent within the studio. And Resident Evil 4 was the catapult they needed.

"We were so hyped about Resident Evil 4 and we got obsessed with improving the mechanics," Wanat said. The team truly wanted to develop a first-rate survival-horror game. However, convincing EA to bet on an original idea wasn't going to be easy, and it was something that co-director Glen Schofield, now the GM of Sledgehammer Games, would work on for a long time. Schofield would break the ice on the idea, show some promising progress, and over time, slowly build the confidence EA needed to give the project a thumbs up.

"Eventually everybody accepted it, they saw how cool the things coming out of it were. That confidence continued to grow," Wanat told me. "Having that group there from the get-go and building this stuff without a greenlight was a little weird, but it's probably what got that whole thing working because we could all put our expertise into a pool and make something tangible. 

"And once people saw that it was a real thing, they got it much easier than if you were trying to say, 'I want to make this totally scary-ass thing,' to which they'd look at their portfolio and say 'Nope, scary-ass thing is not in our language.'"

The executives weren't the only people impressed by the Dead Space demos. Wright Bagwell, who was working on another game at the time, played through one of these demo levels and was so enamoured with the experience that he absolutely had to work on the game.

I was like, 'No, I want to work on Dead Space or I'm going to quit.'

"One of the level designers came over and said 'Hey Wright, we're testing this out. I want you to come into this dark room, I'm going to turn the lights off and turn the sound up really loud.' And we played through this demo level, and I remember feeling like I was going to shit my pants," Bagwell said, laughing."I was working on another game that got cancelled, and EA was trying to get me to work on something I didn't want to work on, and I was like, 'No, I want to work on Dead Space or I'm going to quit.'"

So Bagwell joined the Dead Space team, and at this point, it was starting to come together. Controlling Isaac was becoming a smooth experience, thanks to some of the big improvements to Resident Evil’s formula that the team was working on. Wanat specifically pointed out the ability to move while shooting. Despite the relatively simple-sounding nature of this change, it wasn't as straightforward as flipping a switch and letting someone walk around.

"I love in Resident Evil 4, the tension of not being able to move. But it caused a lot of problems for us to put movement in because we were making a new game," Wanat explained. "The enemies couldn't follow the same formula. It breaks a lot of the mechanics. We didn't know it was going to happen until we did it and were like, 'Oh, I think we broke something fundamental about the tension,' so we had to get it in other ways.

"It was like, 'It's a game changer. Let's embrace it and make this the best, polished survival shooter. Let's try to be the gold standard.'"

Space to grow

The move from System Shock 3's first-person view to the over-the-shoulder perspective that we know from Dead Space was something else that Wanat was increasingly happy about, as it allowed players to more easily care about Isaac.

"Even though Isaac didn't have a voice in the first game, seeing him and seeing him get grappled and eviscerated, I felt like there was a better chance to make a connection with the character. And that kinda gives the player a sense of who he is and the place he's in that we could have missed out on if we went the first-person shooter route and—man, we ripped off so much stuff from Resident Evil 4," Wanat stopped himself mid-sentence, laughing.

"But in a way, the modifications we made to the formula gave it its own style. Things like the outer space setting gave us a way to include new mechanics that weren't really available for the time and setting that Resident Evil took place in."

Dismemberment by way of plasma cutter, perhaps Dead Space's defining feature, was one such mechanic that joined the movement system to set itself apart from its Earth-based counterpart.

"It was very interesting to get those two things together and see that something special was taking shape," Wanat said. "But we do owe tremendously to Resident Evil 4. We were really big fans. We had so many of those water-cooler moments after that game came out."

Dead Space released in October of 2008 and was met with an overwhelmingly positive critical reception, in addition to sales of over two million copies. When Dead Space 2 was announced less than two years later, it was no surprise that EA wanted to push the series into a more action-focused direction to appeal to a wider audience. Bagwell moved into the creative director's chair, charged with a delicate balancing act of making sure there were moments of adrenaline-surging panic, but also time for the player to relax among the nameless horrors and dismembered limbs.

Despite its obvious inspirations, Dead Space had become its own thing. The studio was no longer praying at the altar of Resident Evil 4, but Wanat says there were some leftover influences that didn't make it into the first game.

"We didn't really have the ability to do any elaborate cutscenes," he explained. "I mean, we looked at Resident Evil 4, and we thought those were elaborate at the time. I love the intro. They're in the jeep, a guy goes to pee in the bushes, it's this really cool moment. And we couldn't really do those things, but we all wished we could. So in Dead Space 2, you get a lot more character moments and those over-the-top moments."

I think in Dead Space 3 we kinda destroyed what we had because we pushed too far on it.

Like its predecessor, Dead Space 2 garnered high praise from critics and, according to EA, sold nearly two million copies in its first week of release. However, that success wouldn't carry over to the third game. With less positive reviews and significantly less sales, Wanat, the creative director of Dead Space 3, expressed disappointment with how it closed out the series.

"I think in Dead Space 3 we kinda destroyed what we had because we pushed too far on it, but it was a deliberate decision in each of those instalments to make it faster, more relevant to a broader audience," he said. "It's a hard thing to do, to make a horror game have mass appeal. They're two diametrically opposed things."

Wanat and Bagwell went on to co-found Outpost Games, a developer that's currently working on a multiplayer survival game. Not much is known about their upcoming game, but the two designers wouldn't be surprised if Dead Space fans found some pieces of the sci-fi horror series woven throughout it. However, speaking to Wanat, it sounds like he's not quite done with survival-horror.

"Personally, I've got so much of that stuff in my system, that one way or another I will make another survival-horror game because I can't stay away from that kind of creative expression. That's just part of my DNA now." 

It isn't often we see the words "Origin" and "sale" next to each other, but this week is the exception: EA is running a week-long Player Appreciation Sale which discounts some pretty hefty games in the publisher's lineup—titans such as Mass Effect 3, Crysis 3, and Battlefield 3.

Here's the full list of games on sale and their prices:

Battlefield 3 Premium—$25
Battlefield 3—$12
Battlefield 3 Premium Edition—$30
Crysis 3—$30
Crysis 3 Digital Deluxe Edition—$40
Crysis 3 Digital Deluxe Upgrade—$10
The Sims 3 Seasons—$20
The Sims 3 University Life—$28
The Sims 3 Supernatural—$15
Dead Space—$6
Dead Space 2—$6
Dead Space 3—$30
Resident Evil 5—$10
Mass Effect 3—$10
The Walking Dead—$10
Batman: Arkham City GOTY Edition—$12
FIFA Soccer 13—$20
Command & Conquer Ultimate Collection—$15
Hitman: Absolution—$15
Saints Row: The Third Full Package—$25
Assassin's Creed 3—$35
Assassin's Creed 3 Deluxe Edition—$56
Darksiders 2—$18
Dead Island GOTY Edition—$10
Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City—$25


Normal and special editions on sale? And they're big games? I don't want to spoil this rare opportunity to enjoy a good Origin sale with cynicism, but it's hard not to chortle lightly at the convenient devaluing of nearly half the games EA offered SimCity players for free earlier this week.

When EA spoke of a future business strategy where "all of our games" include the dreaded m-word, reactions weren't exactly positive. CFO Blake Jorgensen shared that original statement during the Morgan Stanley Technology conference last week, but he's now used another conference—the Wedbush Transformational Technology conference—to redact that statement. As Gamasutra reports, Jorgensen says he meant microtransactions will figure into all mobile games instead of EA's entire lineup.

"I made a statement in the conference along the lines of, 'We'll have microtransactions in our games,' and the community read that to be 'all games,' and that's really not true," he explains. "All of our mobile games will have microtransactions in them, because almost all of our mobile games are going to a world where its play-for-free."

Jorgensen uses a different term for paid content on the PC and console platforms: extensions. "You're going to see extensions off of products like Battlefield Premium which are simply not microtransactions," he says. "They are premium services, or additional add-on products or downloads that we're doing. It's essentially an extension of the gameplay that allows someone to take a game that they might have played for a thousand hours and play it for two thousand hours. We want to ensure that consumers are getting value."

Though there is some difference between types of paid content, it seems like Jorgensen is mostly just side-stepping the phrase "microtransactions." Whether calling them microtransactions, extensions, or micro-extend-actions, EA (and, arguably, most other big publishers) will continue using whatever works to leverage the popularity of its games and sell additional content.

But enough of my yakking. What do you think?

This preview originally appeared in issue 244 of PC Gamer UK.

Three games in and the Dead Space series has got problems. And I’m not referring to the fact that protagonist Isaac Clarke has cleverly managed to crash-land on an inhospitable ice planet that may hold the horrible secret to the entire Necromorph space-zombie menace.

The problem is the Necromorph menace itself. Or rather, the fact that, after all this exposure in the Dead Space games, it isn’t really that menacing any more. The resurrected space-dead are still pretty ghastly, perhaps, with their spider’s legs, collapsed faces and that nasty ability to sprout tangles of gristle from the least likely of places, but we’ve been looking them straight in their oozing dead eyes for a couple of games now, and over time you can become immune to just about anything.

Example? Early on in the latest Dead Space 3 demo, I was wandering around another abandoned space hulk looking for another way to get past another locked door when a Slasher dropped down from the ceiling in front of me, accompanied by a sudden shriek of sound design. I should have leapt from my chair or watched in horror as my beard turned white and fell out, one hair at a time. Instead, I just took aim at a juddering limb and idly wondered how the thing managed to climb all those ladders with talons in place of hands.



Visceral Games have at least one decent solution to the problem of audience complacency, as it happens, but they waited until a fair proportion of the demo had passed before revealing it. For the first ten minutes, it was business as usual – and business as usual is pretty much the kiss of death when it comes to the production of startles and shocks. I was wandering around an empty ship, collecting ammo and health packs, listening to audio logs left by a deceased crew, and besting the odd toggle puzzle, when I found a door that wouldn’t respond to a smart blast of telekinesis. If the team were building up to a big fright, it had better be a belter.

Luckily, it was. It was a new kind of Necromorph called the Swarm Infector, and while it’s a piddling thing on its own, scrabbling across the floor with tiny tendrils flying, it’s capable of pulling an extremely unpleasant trick. Like the much larger Infector from the previous games, it can reanimate any nearby corpses, sending them spasming into epileptic life. They judder around for a few horrible seconds, then the gristle starts to warp outwards and – presto – you’ve got another Slasher on your hands.

It’s standard Dead Space stuff, perhaps, but combining the Infector with the series’ diminutive Swarmers has resulted in a genuinely unnerving combination. Once again, corpses can no longer be treated as mere set dressing, and there’s something new to squash underfoot.

Elsewhere, if the team has to struggle a little harder in order to scare you, the consolation prize is that Dead Space 3 still looks like an atmospheric and fiercely competent action game. Isaac has clearly been having the futuristic equivalent of Hot Yoga sessions, as he’s generally a little quicker on his feet this time around and can now combat-roll away from danger when things get bad. He’s also joined by a brand new co-op partner, in the form of Sergeant John Carver, an EarthGov super-soldier and all-round grumpy hard nut whose family has been wiped out by the Necromorphs.



Co-op play is of the drop-in, drop-out variety, and although it will open new paths through the levels and even unlock the odd additional side mission, it’s entirely optional. Inevitably, it makes the whole thing even less scary than it already is at this point in the series. Down on the frozen surface of the ice planet Tau Volantis, however, there are suggestions that the developers haven’t completely given up on creating an air of prickly tension. Snowstorms reduce visibility, while nearby science installations are covered with flapping cables and guide wires, encouraging us to waste precious ammo shooting at shadows.

Carver’s presence has also enabled the design team to scale up the enemies, chucking the duo against a vast hairy spider known as the Snow Beast, and a huge out-of-control drill. The latter has a glowing core that has to be shot out using well-timed blasts of stasis while your partner keeps you safe from the crowd of Necromorph monsters and Unitologist soldiers now gunning after you as well. The developers have yet to reveal all of the game’s new weapons and enemies, but with the head count steadily increasing in most battles, it wouldn’t be entirely surprising if the firepower starts to escalate too.

If Dead Space 3 can’t always keep you quaking in your spaceboots, it should at least keep you busy. That’s not the ideal path for a survival horror franchise to take, but it’s better than the alternative – which is generally an accidental lunge towards painful self‑parody.

EA have released about fifteen minutes of in-game footage for Dead Space 3 showing a bit of single player, a bit of co-op, a giant angry drill and an even bigger monster. Dead Space 3 has moved out of the tight corridors of the first two games onto the white wastes of an ice planet. But with no close corners or closets for creatures to use as ambush points, where will the scares come from?

Low visibility storms, apparently, but Isaac isn't too fussed. He's a careful man, the kind of man that shields his face from a snowstorm even when he's wearing a full mask, the kind of man who doesn't instantly hurl up is guts right into his own helmet upon being swallowed whole by a disgusting creature. Watch all that drama in the video below.

If you fancy having your mind somewhat blown, try playing the Mass Effect 2 demo in your browser. Unlike most graphically impressive browser games, this isn't a huge download running via a special plugin: all you need is Flash and Java, which you likely already do, and you'll be playing in a few seconds. The only catch is you need a good connection - about 10Mb/s - and the demo won't appear if you don't.

The service is called Gaikai, and it's live in 12 countries right now. The focus is on letting you into the game with no fuss or sign-up process, so it's perfect for demos. At the end of the Mass Effect 2 or Dead Space 2 demos available now, you get a link to buy the full game.

If the Mass Effect 2 demo link doesn't pop up when you visit the Gaikai site, try the Spore one - it has the same requirements but it'll tell you what's wrong if it doesn't work.



The service has actually been running in a low-profile way for a couple of months. There's a slight lag on interactions when playing on our office connection, but performance is generally very good. Since it's web based, it means you can now play these PC games on a Mac or Linux system. It's set to be demonstrated in full at the Games Developer Conference this week.

Unlike the similar game-streaming service, OnLive, Gaikai doesn't charge for its services and allows users to play in their browser right away. At the moment it only offers some choice selections from EA, but is hoping to move onto including a larger catalogue of blockbuster hits from them and other publishers.

Writing on his blog CEO David Perry explains that he hopes to eventually end up with servers in every major city in the world to stream data from, saying that "if engineers work really hard, they can maybe squeeze out another thousandth of a second from our compression but if we set up in a data center two states closer to your house, we dramatically improve the performance".

The creator of Earthworm Jim hopes to eventually expand the service to allow YouTube-style embedding of demos on websites, and the service will eventually work with Facebook. The aim is to have the embedded demos appear on Facebook, and at the end of reviews, so players can hop straight in and play.

Other demos currently available include Spore, The Sims 3 and, after completing a short survey, Dead Space 2.

Let us know if they work on your connection and, if so, how the performance feels to you.

Gareth Garratt is curled up in his wheelchair, his body secured in a bucket seat while his hands clutch at the side of a desktop. His chin is pressed down onto a Toshiba mouse and he's using that to control a virtual Marty McFly, clambering around the back of a police van. Gareth's chin is the only part of his body that seems to have fine motor control, due to the cerebral palsy he was born with.

Gareth sprang to prominence earlier in the week after a frustrated series of posts on the Overclockers UK forum, as he struggled with EA's Dead Space 2; through this, he's managed to raise the profile of disabled gamers and persuade EA to patch in support to Dead Space 2. We've come to his family home in Leicester, UK to talk to him about the campaign, the difficulties he has with gaming, and the wide variety of support he's received. Due to his palsy it’s very hard for Gareth to talk, so his answers are short and sometimes his mother and full-time carer, Jacqueline Garratt, has to interpret for me.



PC Gamer: The set-up you have here is amazing. There are two huge screens, more DVDs, CDs and hard drives than I’ve ever seen, a good surround sound system, and a top-end custom PC; have you installed this all yourself?

Gareth: “Yes.”
Jacqueline: "I'm his hands. He tells me what to do, and it goes in one ear... he knows what he’s doing though.”

PC Gamer: What games do you play?

Gareth: “I mainly play FPSes and racing games; I’ve been trying to play Dead Space; Dirt 2 was great, and I’ve been trying F1 2010 recently as well. I like Fallout 3 - New Vegas as well. I can play most genres, but it all depends on what options it gives. It's hard. I like to play multiplayer games with friends from Overclockers.”

PC Gamer: You play these with the mouse, and you use your chin to control the mouse. Using custom configurations, you assign walk forward to the right-mouse button, is that correct?

Gareth: Yes, and the fire button on the middle button. I play racing games on the Xbox controller, over there.



PC Gamer: How do you play reaction based games like that?

Gareth: I can use the sticks one at a time. On most driving games there are some buttons that you can’t customise. The Codemasters games are okay. Grand Theft Auto; I can’t change the controls, so it’s impossible to play because you have to use two keys at the same time.

PC Gamer: How did you get into PC Gaming?

Jacqueline: “When he was small, dad started him off on them.
Gareth: “I’ve grown with them; at school, I used a lot of computers there, that's how it started off really.

PC Gamer: What was the first one you played?

Gareth: I think it could have been Sega Rally or something like that. Or perhaps Golden Axe

PC Gamer: That had multiple simultaneous inputs though; is there anything else you’d say, apart from single inputs and key configuration options, that would make it easier for you to play?

Jacqueline: “Add more buttons on the mouse, on the top, not the side”
Gareth: “It's very hard to find a mouse with buttons on the top. All the customisable mice focus on the sides.
Jacqueline: “They’re really for people who can use their hands.”

PC Gamer: Do you have any specialised bits of kit that help you game?

Gareth: Nothing: Everything's off the shelf. We have to fight for it at we get. Nobody helps, or advises us. Since I posted this on Overclockers UKforum, the OCUK community have been giving me good advice and some have offered to help.

PC Gamer: Have you ever tried contacting Special Effect (the UK’s disabled gaming charity)?

Jacqueline: “No, I’ve  never phoned Special Effect.
Gareth: “The things are so expensive; the head-tracking hardware is so expensive. It's hard to afford that kind of money?”

PC Gamer: What do developers do that makes it easier for you to play games?

Gareth: Not much. What annoys me is that they should have it on the back of the box.

PC Gamer: Do you feel that this is something government should be legislating about? A bit like the Age ratings?

Jacqueline: Yes. You pay out for the game, but when you get it back home you can't play it; it's not on the back saying whether it's got customised controls options.
Gareth: And then you can't take it back, because of the no-returns policy. It should be on the back, and it should state if it can be customised or not.

PC Gamer: You’ve paid for all this yourself? If it’s not rude to ask, how much did it cost?

Gareth: Yes. £1,800; no help from government.
Jacqueline: He’s got two monitors. Sky and Freeview. It’s taken a lot of time to get up to this standard. It used to be his dad helped him, but he passed away two years ago and I’m still learning.



PC Gamer: This Dead Space 2 campaign has taken up a lot of your time; were you expecting a response?

Gareth: No. (laughs) I had an email from the Dead Space developers saying they are working on a patch to enable customised controls in the game and they will send me out some goodies. About a year go, I sent an email to Rockstar about GTA IV again; I didn't get any reply back.

PC Gamer: Will you be carrying on your campaign?

Gareth: I’ve only contacted those two before, just those two for now. Yeah, I'll be contacting a lot more people. I’m getting fed up of wasting money every time.

PC Gamer: Do you go to the shops to buy them together? What do you do if you want to return a game?

Jacqueline: Yes, we do, but if you can't play it, you can't take it back. You've wasted the money. Four times we’ve had unplayable games we can do nothing with. It makes you angry, really angry.

PC Gamer: That’s British trading law; who do you blame for this?

Jacqueline: “It's the got to be down to the developer; it's not the shops fault; they're only sellling it. You've got to go to the source of it.

PC Gamer: Do you try before you buy?

Gareth: “A lot of games are not on demos. It's like FIFA 11; I can't play that, but FIFA 10 I can. They removed mouse controls on FIFA 11; I can't understand why they removed it. If it's already in FIFA 10, why take it out? I don't know. It happens frequently. Codemasters is very good at customised controls. EA is reasonably good but just lately they've gone downhill. Rockstar; the second GTA was okay, San Andreas, but GTA IV was bad. Rockstar: Get your arse into gear.   (laughs).

PC Gamer: Do you use remapping programs?

Gareth: People say to you remapping programs and all that, but I shouldn't need to; it should be in the game itself. It would benefit everyone. With remapping programs I can get three buttons working, but I can't get the other buttons working. This Toshiba mouse has two mouse buttons, three extras on the top, and two buttons on the side but I can't use them.

PC Gamer: What would you do without games?

Gareth: I'd be bored out of my head. (laughs)

PC Gamer: Do you get any therapeutic benefits from games?

Gareth: No. It’s purely entertainment.

PC Gamer: Do you think it would be difficult for smaller companies to implement all the different supports needed for all the different types of disabilities?

Gareth: They could include options in the game menu to make it easier for all kinds of disabilities. If the small companies start doing that, then more people will buy their product and then they will grow into bigger companies!

PC Gamer: Have you received any messages of support for the campaign?

Gareth: We’ve been overwhelmed by the support; we’ve had messages from Thailand, Poland, America, and Russia... Lots of people have signed the petition. Another guy (AskACapper - quadraplegic Comedian Chuck Bittner) started the campaign - he did the petition first and then I joined in later. I helped him to get to 40,000 signatures - he’s going to see someone important about it, and now he's got something to take. I think he’s going to meet all of the developers for consoles and PC. At first he was focusing on consoles, at first, now he sees the PC side of it.

PC Gamer: What will you focus on next?

Gareth: I just want all the new releases that are coming out to include the option for customised controls; I'm not asking much. I'm not asking to change the whole game or anything; it's something simple to do, if you do it at an early stage. Everyone will benefit from it instead of using the mapping software.