I could have sworn I did a review of Dead Space, but I could not find it in my archives. What I do remember about it was that it was horrible. I was not a fan of the slow gameplay or the controls. However, many people online have said how awesome it was, and one friend in particular mentioned that the final game was better than the demo. Now, I needed to have a game in from Gamefly to last me until AVP comes out, and I decided to try Dead Space. So far, I have not been disappointed.

The game is a classic space-survival story. A crew is sent to work some routine maintenance on a large spaceship, and arrive to find that the crew of the ship are missing. It becomes a game of survival as you and your small crew must survive a creature manifestation aboard the large ship.

The gameplay is pretty awesome. Its a third-person shooter, and you have an array of weapons and melee moves at your disposal to eliminate your adversaries. However, one thing I did not like was that the main character (Issac) takes up a large portion of the screen, kind of like how it was with Batman: Arkham Asylum. The movement controls are still kind of slow, but a bit quicker than they were in the demo, and are more fluid. Within a half hour I was used to them and enjoying the game.

As I said, the main gist of the game is killing creatures. However, these creatures can take many a shot to the chest. Thus, it is essential to carefully aim your shots and shoot off their limbs. Using the default plasma cutter, you can shoot out their legs so they fall to the ground, but they will continue to crawl towards you. You will then have to shoot out their arms or head. However, a head shot is not always a one-shot kill, as sometimes the bodies will continue to blindly come at you without a head.

The sounds of the game only add to the creepiness of the creatures. There is rarely any background music, so the only sound you hear is the environment. This includes the creatures, as they scamper above you on grates or suddenly pop out of a wall or doorway. Both the visual and audio aspects of the game give it an eerie feel, and I havent been this creeped out by a game in a long time.

There is more to the game, which I will get into when I do a full review. However, the first hour in was a blast, and I am looking forward to getting more into it, including getting some game time in at night, to enhance the creepiness. As of right now, I think its definitely worth a rental to check out.

This morning I checked my Gamefly queue, and sure enough they had not noted that they had received Dragon Age: Origins, which I mailed back Thursday morning. I thought it was taking a long time, but then I came to the realization that it is indeed Gamefly and they sometimes take forever to receive mail.

So I get home from my college class, and waiting for me in the mail is my next Gamefly game, The Beatles Rock Band. I was extremely perplexed. Not only had my queue not mentioned this this morning, but I never got an e-mail informing me that they had shipped the game. I went to my queue, and sure enough Dragon Age was now marked as being received via the “Fast Return”, and that The Beatles had been shipped. Mind you, this was not the case this morning. So within one day they changed my queue to acknowledge that the post office was in the process of returning Dragon Age, and that they had shipped out The Beatles…all on the same day I received the game itself!

Now Im not complaining one bit, but Im just perplexed at this. Basically Gamefly received my old game, shipped out the new game, and I received the new game all within four postal days (Thursday I sent it in, Friday, Saturday, and then received the game Monday). That is a new record, and Im pleased as punch! I just wish that I was more informed so I knew what was going on…

So Gamefly has been successful in perplexing me once again. I had an open queue, and I decided to wait and snag Fairytale Fight, which had a release date of 10/27 on Gamefly. So I waited, and the day came and went and I got no message telling me it shipped. So I looked on the site, and the release date had changed to 10/29. So I said “ok, fine I’ll wait til then.” Then on Thursday the date changed to 10/30, then yesterday the release date changed again to 10/31. Then this morning I went on there, and the current release date is 11/3.

As I was constantly waiting for this game to ship, I received an email informing me that WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2010 (which had an availability of very low) shipped. Im pretty happy…Ive been dying to get my hands on the new SvR game and see how it is. So I’ll be getting that in next. Im hoping it gets here by Monday so that I can spend all Tuesday playing since I’ll be home from school thanks to Election Day. We shall see.

Morale of the story…Gamefly is a very confusing and frustrating system, yet I love it!!!