Thursday, January 31, 2013

More than two decades later, I still remember a particular episode from Nickelodeon’s Doug, wherein the school was abuzz with chatter about a horror movie. Everybody had the cojones to sit through the flick except for him, or so the titular character thought, and the punchline of the arc was that nobody had actually managed to look at the screen long enough to see the climax. Only Doug, with the help of his faithful canine buddy, was able to keep his eyes open to see how low-budget and tame the movie really was, in some overwrought lesson about facing your fears.

It’s been a while since I’ve braved this genre of gaming, but with Dead Space 3 set to release next week, I somehow got it into my head that replaying the prior episodes would be worthwhile, never mind the psychic toll they exacted the first time around. Those scars have since scabbed over, though, and when the draw of narrative continuity proved too strong to resist, I descended into the dark once more.

Perhaps, I thought, I need to approach this with eyes wide open. Those horrific sequences I remembered? Likely exaggerated versions of what truly unfolded on-screen. It’d be better if I faced them head-on, right? Nope! Nope. Sorry, Doug, but whatever wisdom you were peddling was horseshit, frankly, because I stared fully into the face of horror and it was even worse than I remembered. I’m about halfway through the second one, so I will overcome. The third one brings something new to the table: you can experience the terror with a buddy, which means on Tuesday, we will ascertain the proper social etiquette for screaming like little girls.