OK, so I know Eurogamer's actual birthday was two days ago, but as is our style, the Eurogamer video team is once again Late to the (birthday) Party.

Over the past three years, we've been introducing each other to our favourite (and/or least favourite) games from yesteryear as part of our Late to the Party series. During that time we've shared our love (and/or hatred) for over one hundred and fifty different games and thanks to this, we've been able to make a compilation episode of LTTP that features one game from every year that Eurogamer has been alive.

In this video, Aoife, Zoe and I are joined by some friendly video team faces from the past (who?!) as we play our way through the 20 years worth of games, including 1999's Dino Crisis, 2006's Gears of War and 2017's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Basically, if you want a healthy dose of nostalgia (or just want to feel rather old) this is the video for you!

Read more

Dead Space is 10-years-old today.

EA Redwood Shores' (later known as Visceral Games) sci-fi horror came out on 13th October 2008 for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and was praised for its stunning visuals, tense atmosphere and alien design.

In Dead Space you played Isaac Clarke, an engineer who found himself fighting for survival on the Ishimura, a spaceship infested with horrible aliens called Necromorphs.

Read more…

When it comes to Dead Space, what dies doesn't stay dead for long. Dead Space 3 launched in February 2013 and EA has said nothing since to indicate it's ready to revive the science fiction horror series. We've already explored the Dead Space 3 the developers wanted to make, but what about Dead Space 4? It turns out Visceral had ideas - some properly exciting - for a fourth game in the series. Unfortunately, Visceral never got the chance to turn them into reality. After Dead Space 3 flopped, EA put the studio on the Battlefield series with spin-off Hardline before assigning it a Star Wars game that was eventually cancelled. Now, Visceral is no more.

Visceral is dead, but those early ideas for Dead Space 4 live on in the mind of Ben Wanat, who was creative director of Dead Space and is now creative director at Crystal Dynamics. We spoke with Wanat to find out more.

By the end of Dead Space 3, humanity is facing its doom. It's in this hopeless situation that Dead Space 4 was to be set. The idea came from the flotilla section in Dead Space 3, and had the player scavenge supplies in order to survive. "The notion was you were trying to survive day to day against infested ships, searching for a glimmer of life, scavenging supplies to keep your own little ship going, trying to find survivors," Wanat explained.

Read more…

EA's classic sci-fi horror game Dead Space is currently free on PC via Origin.

For those poor souls unfamiliar with Dead Space (no judgement - it did come out ten years ago, after all), it's an honest-to-goodness big-budget, single-player horror yarn - the kind that pretty much never gets made any more. It follows the exploits of unfortunate space engineer Isaac Clarke on the stricken USG Ishimura - a vessel with a rather serious... infestation.

What transpires is a genuinely nerve-wracking third-person horror escapade, which tonally lands somewhere between the straight-up terror of Ridley Scott's Alien and the gleefully gruesome haunted-house-in-space hijinks of Event Horizon.

Read more…

The environments of massive open-world games, particularly in recent years, have been rightly praised for their representation, scale and design accuracy. However, there are some gems at the other end of the spectrum - environments that make you feel cramped, tense and desperate for a break. This is an approach to environment design utilised in our real-world, from gardens to architecture, and is mirrored excellently in some game environments, creating areas that trap us in cramped, claustrophobic conditions.

The underground tunnel network of the Metro series, adapted for human life but traversed with trepidation and tension, nailed its own post-apocalyptic look and feel, and had claustrophobia, discomfort and fear oozing from its design. These spaces successfully evoke real-world design principles of landscape mazes and labyrinths, such as dead ends, twists and turns to cause doubling back and elevate desperation, fluctuating size and scale of spaces, and a continuous and monotonal finish (a symphony of grey in Metro's case) that makes every surface and area look the same, but also makes for an unrelenting and repressive aesthetic.

Often, the spaces are not only characteristic of uncomfortable mazes and tunnels, but their disrepair and crumbling structure means they have a constant feeling of pressure and weight about them: the feeling that, at any moment, the space could collapse on top of Artyom's head. The tunnels are also powerful spaces as they are a believable and familiar environment to us; adapting a real-world, recognisably claustrophobic environment makes for a powerfully uncomfortable virtual space.

Read more…

The live action Dead Space movie still exists and will happen, its director has insisted.

"We're working on the story," director D.J. Caruso (I Am Number Four, Disturbia) told AreaGames (via Joystiq).

"We had one attempt of trying to do a prequel, but the story didn't quite work out as well as we wanted it to. But if we can capture how - I don't want to say, I guess, how scary or horrifying it would be to play that game because it's really, really fantastic - it'd be fun to make that into a movie."

The Dead Space movie is a collaboration between EA and Twilight producers Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey.

In January Dead Space developer Visceral Games insisted the live action movie will not be "just a cheap cash-in", but "something really worthwhile".

A number of animated films, books and comics are already available, extending the Dead Space universe beyond the games.

Video:

Sales of Dead Space 2 have been double those of the original, but it won't be until the release of Dead Space 3 that the series will really take off, EA said.

Guess that means Dead Space 3 will probably happen, then.

Speaking during the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, CEO John Riccitiello said: "Right now we've got strong, growing franchises including Madden, FIFA, Need for Speed, Medal of Honor and Battlefield.

And "Mass Effect, Dragon Age and the one that's sort of not proven that's coming later in our fiscal year, Star Wars [The Old Republic]".

"That excludes Dead Space because I think it will probably take Dead Space 3 before we get into that five million unit cadence versus say three, four."

He added: "It's the best IP portfolio in the industry and the history of our company."

Visceral's Dead Space 2 launched last month to critical and commercial success. EA chief operating office John Schappert said Dead Space 2 was outpacing sales of its predecessor by a factor of two to one.

Following comments from EA exec Frank Gibeau last year that the original game "didn't hit expectations" at retail there was a sense that this was Visceral's last chance to get the franchise to stick.

Developer Visceral, however, is sure to answer the call should it come. Last year executive producer Steve Papoutsis told Eurogamer he hoped Dead Space 2 would be successful enough for EA to ask for a third game.

Video:

Mirror's Edge, EA's 2008 parkour-flavoured FPS, "fell short" of the publisher's expectations.

EA Games boss Frank Gibeau told Develop, "First-person parkour across buildings is fun, but to be blunt, Mirror's Edge's' execution fell short."

"What I learned from Mirror's Edge is that you have to execute, you have to spend more time on a game to ensure it's polished, and you need to have the depth and persistence of an online game," he explained.

"There were issues with the learning curve, the difficulty, the narrative, and then there was no multiplayer either."

"The key learning from us was that if you're going to be bold with that kind of concept, you need to take it as far as it can go in development."

We'd say Gibeau needs to easy up on the DICE-developed title. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but it was certainly one of the more interesting new IPs of the last few years.

Eurogamer's Christian Donlan gave it 8/10, saying, "For those who can shrug off the contradictions and the limitations, ignore the tearing cityscape and lingering qualms about value for money, this will shove you so deeply into the experience of being in someone else's body, and taking it on a terrifying, breakneck joyride, that nothing else will matter."

Gibeau didn't stop at Mirror's Edge though – Visceral Games' largely excellent Dead Space also came in for a bit of a pasting.

"It made money for us, but didn't hit expectations. We felt like we had an IP that struck a chord, and one that hit quality, but again it missed multiplayer modes.

"So when we re-worked Dead Space [for the upcoming sequel], we looked at how to make it a better idea, how do we make the story more engrossing, how do we build Isaac as a character, how do we make this game a success online."

Dead Space 2 is out on 25th January on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but what of a Mirror's Edge sequel? "One thing I will say is that we won't give up on those IPs," promised Gibeau. "A new idea obviously has a lot of risk attached to it, but if you get it all right it can be huge."