Insomniac with The Narrator

Let me begin this by saying there are a few things you need to know about me to understand this post. Much like my name sake I have trouble sleeping. I am a (self-diagnosed) insomniac. To be more specific, I have onset insomnia and if you didn’t guess by the name it means that I have trouble falling to sleep. I know what you’re thinking, get more exercise and chew some valerian root. Well, Edward Norton didn’t take that advice and neither will I.



After putting Thisismynightmare and Thisismydoggy to sleep, The Dogrator and I return to the living room to see what adventures we can have while the rest of the monster community is lying in bed dreaming of Topher Grace. Generally speaking, I spend a lot of time watching bad movies on instant Netflix, playing videogames and searching the internet. The thing about having insomnia is that the time you spend is hardly productive. My mind isn’t very sharp so trying to finish the Master’s thesis that I’ve been working on isn’t really going to happen.



So if you will come on this adventure with me, this is a night in the life of The Narrator.



Around 12:00 AM, I realized once again it would be another sleepless night and since I had nothing to do the next day (thanks to Mardi Gras break), I thought it would be a good night to play through one of my favorite games for the fourth time.



(Side Note: On Playstation 3, there are these trophies you can earn for each game. Some are easy such as open a door and some are really difficult such as beat game on impossible setting. If you are really committed, you can earn all the trophies the game offers, which in turn, earns you a platinum trophy. With this comes bragging rights that you made that game your digital bitch.)



My goal this night was to finally get the Platinum trophy for Dead Space.







Warning: Spoilers



ESRB Rating: M



Dead Space is a TPS (Third-Person Shooter--keep up with the lingo!). You play as a space engineer named Isaac Clark who is en route to the USG Ishimura to fix some future things when your ship basically crashes into the Ishimura’s docking bay leaving you now stranded on the ship you came to fix. I would guess it would be lucky to crash into a space ship in all of space. I would guess wrong because shortly after arriving, it is clear something has gone horribly wrong. These super scary aliens jump out killing the two “Red-Shirt” crew men and you run for your life. So what are these things you ask? Well they are kind of like space zombies in that they are made from dead flesh. Unlike zombies who just want to eat your braaaaiiiinnnnsss these “Necromorphs” want to kill you anyway possible and have giant bone spike arms to get the job done.







There are a lot of scary things in this game. Personally, my most feared space zombie is the Appendage. I just call it the head squid. It is a head that has tentacles it crawls around on if you don’t see it, it will jump on you and if you fail to mash the right button it squeezes your head off to use your body. Here is a clip the “Head Squid” killing Mr. Clark.







The best part of this game has to be that the space zombies’ heads have little importance. They don’t need them in this game. The goal is to shoot off their limbs. You shoot off their legs, they use arms to crawl toward you. You basically have to dismember every zombie until they are a pile of body parts. Being a space engineer, not some hyped-up space marine, you use space tools like the plasma cuter--I guess what the bad ass space engineers use to cut space pipes. You are now using it to cut up the space zombies.



So you spend most of the game being bossed around by the guy who got pushed in the well on 300.







He is like let’s get the trams running, fix the communications array, get the Nav cards, you know space stuff. Eventually he gets totally eaten in front of you, which I didn’t mind because he did not once kill any of these space zombies. So now it’s only you and Kendra this whinny bitch who has nothing to do but complain most of the game. I mean we are all stranded on giant space mining ship filled with all kinds of space zombies. It isn’t like you are the only one having a bad day, amirite?



So fast forward: You learn that if you bring back this marker, an alien artifact, back to the planet it will somehow stop the alien zombies. So you get the marker on a shuttle and you are about to leave when Kendra all the sudden has grown some lady balls and decides to take the marker for experimentation for the government. Joke’s on her, because your paranoid delusion girlfriend (Oh, did I forget to mention you are all kinds of crazy and been seeing visions of your dead girlfriend the entire game) calls the shuttle back remotely and Kendra has to jump out on an escape pod.



You bring the marker to the planet, find out you are in fact crazy and defeat the boss space zombie right after it totally kills Kendra. Good day.



So after I did all of this, my trophy pops up and I have now beaten the game using only the Plasma Cutter which means I now get the Platinum trophy for Dead Space.



In case you don’t believe that I truly stayed up all night, look at the time stamp of the trophy on the picture 6:54 AM.







If you like space stuff and zombies, consider picking up this game. It is only twenty bucks brand new and you probably get it for ten at a game trade-in store. The sequel Dead Space 2 was released in January and as soon as Gamefly decides it is time to send it to me, I’m sure I’ll have a few more nights of sleeplessness in my near future.