you say "get over here and play your video games"

meet isaac clarke, your new favourite hero

computer games are amazing. that's something we need to agree on before we continue. not all of them, of course not, but the concept is genius. from pong to the last of us, it's been an exciting rollercoaster of distraction and discovery. i was a nerdy little shit when i was younger; chubby and wasting my hours playing my mega drive, playstation or gameboy advance. until recently, i lost interest and nothing got me hooked like it used to. then i bought a ps3 and EVERYTHING CHANGED

yes, i know, i'm late to the game. i thought the ps3 was relatively recent until the next gen stuff came out and i realised i was basically ten years behind the times. but, keeping with my new and improved "every cloud" persona, it gave me a lot of choice in terms of titles and massive discounts on successful releases. one series which is criminally cheap and has grabbed me by the balls and not let go is "dead space".

pretty sure i bought "dead space extraction" for my wii when i was considerably younger and fatter. ultimately confused and terrified, i left it alone after about ten minutes. since then, there's been a nasty taste in my mouth when it comes to anything dead space. i didn't have a ps3 so couldn't understand these rave reviews. i never braved another attempt or researched it and shame on me because it's fucking good. 

"what the fuck is that like?"

it's fucking good. the games are best described as a hot mess. beautiful to look at, smooth and striking, with a gameplay that is easy to pick up but hard to master. the characters are realistic, the plot is fresh and the setting is terrifying. oh god, the setting. 

very very long story "short", you're this mute bloke (he finds his voice later in the series) called isaac, sent to find a ship that's lost contact and is floating through space. oh also, it's hundreds of years in the future. skip to the end, they've been destroying planets to harvest energy but one had a fucking great erection (thank YOU) on it which people started worshipping and, unforuntately for everyone involved, it kills them and then turns corpses into necromorphs, these horrific bastards with scythes for arms and lots of wiggly bits that shoot acid or tear you apart. 

it's really messed up but in a great way. exploding babies, screaming men absorbed into walls, fat mutants with alien squid in their stomach. and to top it off, you have to cut their limbs off to kill them. after years of being told to perfect the headshot, it's become redundant in this series and that's what makes it all the more terrifying. 

i could talk for eternities about these games but really, i'd just love for you to play them. they're wonderfully terrifying, wholly immersive and genuinely rewarding. it's a game of opposites - you'll spend half your time walking down abandoned ship corridors, holding your poo in and the other half shooting every bloody thing on the screen, still holding poo in. 

the first one is iconic, the second one is flawless and the third one is really good too.

GO GO GO