Dead Space

Bad Company 2's prefab destruction collapses buildings on an arbitrary count. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 builds buildings from prefab pieces that each swap to a destroyed version, then plays a canned collapse after enough pieces break.

Brown finds that arbitrary next to Red Faction: Guerilla, which checks whether each layer's strength exceeds the weight above it.

Battlefield and Medal of Honor are cited as glorifying war. Grouped with Call of Duty as shooters that cast American intervention as necessary and war as heroic fun, where a token moment of horror rationalises the rest of the gameplay.

IMVU beat The Sims on perceived quality with a cheap teleport hack. IMVU users complained its anchored avatars felt claustrophobic compared with The Sims, so an engineer shipped a hack that teleported avatars; surveys then rated IMVU more advanced than The Sims.

One customer noted that in The Sims you wait for the character to walk around. "In IMVU, when you want to go somewhere, you teleport."

Lenny's Podcast▶ 35:30

The remake built its pillars from feelings, not features. The Dead Space remake used three pillars: sci-fi horror, unbroken immersion and creative gameplay.

Feeling-based pillars let developers rework how a game plays without changing how it feels.

The score was redone because heroic music undercut the fear. EA first asked composer Jason Graves for a standard sci-fi score of electronics and drums, but it made players feel heroic instead of scared, so it was changed.

Brown's rule: "all the elements have to sing the same notes to make the impact strong."

Jedi: Fallen Order makes puzzle hints opt-in by button press. Players who want help request it, while puzzle lovers are left alone.

EA released accessibility patents, including Apex Legends' ping system. EA released five accessibility patents to spread good ideas, and it publishes its games' accessibility options online so players can decide what to buy.

Putting the HUD on Isaac's suit kept players inside the fiction. Health and stasis sit on Isaac's suit, ammo on the gun, and even the inventory appears as holographic projections.

Use Automated App Ads to test a new app broadly and cheaply. Kwong calls it the easiest, cheapest way to test creatives and geos and see if users come in cheap enough for a target ROI or CAC. Test broadly, then relaunch campaigns only on audience clusters that hit KPIs.

The trade-off is little visibility: no placement data and little demographic data, so geo and creative are the main levers. Playable ads can't be tested there.

App Masters

Launch with 10 to 20 creatives and refresh them weekly. Up to 50 assets are allowed, but hold some back because fast results burn through creatives; static images can beat video and are enough for a small team.

Refresh at least every two weeks, ideally every week, and make images show clearly what you want users to do.

App Masters

Start at a couple hundred dollars a day and scale only on ROAS. Kwong, a self-described very conservative tester, runs a couple hundred dollars a day per campaign, per platform, across one or two geos or US versus worldwide. New campaigns optimize for installs, then purchase, with no target CPA.

Value optimization with a minimum ROAS target needs more data than a new campaign has. "I never advocate testing, like huge budgets in the beginning because you really just don't know."

App Masters

Set up an MMP and data pipeline before spending. Facebook is a self-attributing network, so its numbers always look better than MMP data. Real-time postbacks plus Looker, Tableau or internal queries tie new users, revenue and retention to each campaign.

Setup can take a few weeks without a dedicated engineer. Run a small test campaign first to confirm the MMP and Facebook talk to each other.

App Masters

Titanfall 2 caps run speed so momentum must be earned by chaining moves. Plain running tops out at 22 km/h; wall-runs, wall leaps and slides boost it temporarily, and the slide-hop and grapple keep speed going.

Momentum carries a built-in skill check, since faster means harder to control. "The very best Titanfall 2 players are the ones who are always thinking about ways to keep the momentum they've built up."

Its grapple gives analogue control instead of a fixed animation. Unlike Zelda's hookshot on one path, Titanfall 2's grapple latches anywhere, steers while retracting, boosts with a jump and cancels any time.

Walls and gaps become challenges rather than barriers, so the space turns into a traversal playground.

Jedi: Fallen Order patched in a QTE toggle after criticism. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order launched with good, customisable subtitles but no way to skip button-bashing quick time events; a later patch let players turn them off.

EA released accessibility patents, including Apex Legends' ping system. EA released five accessibility patents to spread good ideas, and it publishes its games' accessibility options online so players can decide what to buy.

Jedi: Fallen Order patched in a QTE toggle after criticism. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order launched with good, customisable subtitles but no way to skip button-bashing quick time events; a later patch let players turn them off.

Unravel's short, low-hang jump feels heavy. Yarny barely hangs in the air and has a short jump that feels leaden, unlike Celeste's Madeline, who jumps about three times her height with enough hang time to line up landings.

Mirror's Edge made first-person platforming work, but Catalyst locked a basic move. Mirror's Edge used a wider field of view and responsive full body animation. Mirror's Edge Catalyst put Faith's leg tuck behind an upgrade, though it was available from the start in the first game.

Apex Legends uses landing loot as luck so uneven players can compete. The loot you find on landing shifts win odds, adding luck that reduces the edge of pure skill.

The Sims lets players stop time to look around and think. Pausing gives players room to assess the scene and decide what to do next without hazards moving.

Mirror's Edge made first-person platforming work, but Catalyst locked a basic move. Mirror's Edge used a wider field of view and responsive full body animation. Mirror's Edge Catalyst put Faith's leg tuck behind an upgrade, though it was available from the start in the first game.

Titanfall 2 offers full console remapping and fine aim tuning. It allows remapping on console, one of the most requested accessibility options, and exposes response curve, dead zone and ramp-up time for aiming.

Battlefield games replace held buttons and fixed colours with options. Battlefield 4 lets you press once to aim down sights and again to return. Battlefield 1 lets players swap squad, enemy, team and opposing colours.

Red and green clash for deuteranopia and green and blue merge for tritanopia; blue and orange work for all three major types.

The mechanics deliver exactly the fantasy the trailer sold. Titanfall 2's trailer sells a nippy trickster soldier with gadgets and a mech, and the gameplay makes you feel like "the bloke on the box."

Battlefield games replace held buttons and fixed colours with options. Battlefield 4 lets you press once to aim down sights and again to return. Battlefield 1 lets players swap squad, enemy, team and opposing colours.

Red and green clash for deuteranopia and green and blue merge for tritanopia; blue and orange work for all three major types.

Mirror's Edge left gameplay-relevant background dialogue unsubtitled. The cops in Mirror's Edge have spoken lines with no subtitles, an example of games skipping ambient talk.

A new idea in nearly every level kept the campaign fresh. Titanfall 2 swaps between firefights, platforming, titan battles and story, and the time-travel level Effect and Cause removes its mechanic before it gets stale. Brown finished it but not Doom, whose long high-intensity stretches got exhausting.

Its tropes and big-box arenas still push players into cover, and only the opening Gauntlet fuses wall-running with combat.

EA chased mass appeal with Dead Space 3, and the series ended. Frank Gibeau said EA needed "audience sizes of around five million" to keep investing, although Dead Space 2 had sold roughly two million, more than the first game. Dead Space 3 moved further into action with co-op, microtransactions and competitive multiplayer, got the series' worst reviews and sold under a million at launch.

Visceral's Ben Wanat called horror and mass appeal "two diametrically opposed things" and admitted: "In Dead Space 3 we kinda destroyed what we had because we pushed too far on it." EA went back to sports games, movie tie-ins and sequels; Visceral made Battlefield Hardline, then worked on Star Wars, and most key creatives left. Mark Brown's takeaway: "it's sometimes better to create a game that you know a few people will love."

Universal ammo and crafting made the player too strong to fear anything. With universal ammo and plentiful supplies, Brown sometimes carried over 1000 bullets, so ammo never shaped which gun he used. Crafting let him build one assault rifle and rocket launcher with acid bullets and boosted damage, reload and clip size that made every other gun pointless.

New enemies lost their purpose: feeders, designed to react to light and noise and push stealth and kinesis, just got shot, and the regenerating enemy became a minor nuisance. Weapon decisions moved from the battlefield to a safe menu screen, so the game leaned on jump scares.

Easier aiming and cover removed the awkwardness that supported the horror. Dead Space 3 swapped the first game's off-centre camera, which made perfect shots tricky, for the centred reticule of other shooters, and added a cover system, a combat roll and automatic weapons.

Head shots and limb shots became easy to land, and the opening plays like a cover-based shooter with fights against humans in office buildings.

An action game still carrying horror-era systems satisfies neither audience. Dead Space 3 kept the slow inventory, level pacing and monster designs of a methodical horror game, so it played as a weak action game. Its back half spends about five hours in three research rooms, then four in three temple rooms.

Long repeated spaces add oppression in horror but grate in an overpowered shooter; Brown holds up Dead Space 2's varied levels as the better template for action. Games built purely around shooting crowds with overpowered guns do it better.

The icy planet section showed the survival horror game Dead Space 3 dropped. For about 20 minutes after the crash there is no objective marker and no contact with other characters, body temperature keeps falling so you move between heat sources, and in the blizzard you can only hear enemies.

The cold works like the series' oxygen management and riffs on John Carpenter's The Thing. It ends once Isaac gets a warm suit, and even here a stalker bursting from the fog is simply shot.

Co-op worked best where one player's task gave the other a job. In co-op with John Carver, one player defends while the other solves a puzzle, and some puzzles were reworked to need two people.

A second gun nearly doubles firepower and makes the game less scary, and the promised asymmetric dementia barely appears. Single player gets oddities like doubled items and Carver popping into cutscenes.

Varied puzzles and a real-feeling station still lifted the pacing. Alien language locks, Tetris-style cargo manipulation and shifting alien body parts break up shooting. The research station can be explored with objectives done out of order and optional missions that carry some of the best story.

Original writer Antony Johnston, who skipped part three, defended variety: otherwise "you'd just have the same game on a different ship each time". The plot itself turned absurd, with Isaac kissing Ellie about 20 minutes after executing her boyfriend.

Sales that missed expectations pushed the sequel toward action. EA Games head Frank Gibeau said Dead Space and Mirror's Edge had "some degree of success" but "didn't quite meet our expectations". The sequel added a stronger story and multiplayer and moved from horror to action.

Brown's verdict is that Dead Space 2 is a pretty good game that "just about threads that needle" between new and familiar: "Expectations must be met, and exceeded, at the same time."

Nonstop pacing made the game startling rather than scary. The 9 hour linear campaign jumps from combat to set piece to cutscene to minigame with little rest, while the first game built tension with quiet stretches and atmospheric sound.

In the gothic church, spooky exploration cuts to a cutscene with gunship fire, a monster, a window crash and a barrel explosion in space, then straight back into a creepy corridor, so the mood never rebuilds.

Enemy mix and room size decided whether fights felt tense or frantic. Specialty monsters like the pregnant and the divider gave way to packs of slashers and leapers, and the new pack of child-like monsters dies in one shot even on Zealot mode. Many fights happen in elevators or on a giant drill with no room to move.

The twitcher was dropped because most enemies already sprint at Isaac. Swarm panic is scary like Left 4 Dead, but it is a different fear from the first game's worry about a creeping army with little stasis and few ripper blades.

Plentiful ammo and fewer frictions made good tools and threats irrelevant. Upgraded kinesis, which pins enemies to walls, went underused because ammo was rarely short outside the harder modes. The map was removed and stasis got its own reload button, so the inventory was never needed mid-fight.

The regenerating enemy arrives at the very end, when the player is armed to the teeth, and is "about as threatening as a puppy."

Stalkers kept tension by turning quiet standoffs into bursts of chaos. Stalkers fight in groups, hide behind boxes like Jurassic Park raptors, peek out, then charge to knock Isaac down.

Loosening the weapon economy got players to try more guns. In Dead Space 1 players rarely switched after buying four weapons, since money went to ammo and health, upgrades were locked into one gun and ammo dropped only for guns held. Dead Space 2 handed out power nodes freely, allowed respecs and dropped ammo for guns you don't own.

New tools included a trip-mine detonator, a javelin gun that electrifies its last harpoon and a seeker rifle that is impractical in close combat.

A voiced Isaac and heavy lore traded the first game's mystery for exposition. The first game had no HUD and a mute hero so players stepped into his shoes; the sequel kept the in-world interface but gave Isaac quips like "a second rate Nathan Drake". Lore the first game only hinted at gets over-explained, including a museum about it.

The genre shift was justified by Isaac's growth but undercut by a scattered tone. Like Ripley from Alien to Aliens, Isaac is now a confident fighter, and a PTSD-style flashback to the Ishimura replays old scares cleverly. Gore, jump scares and an exploding baby crowd out that idea.

Items drop only after a final stomp on downed enemies, which rewards brutality, and the marketing line was "Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2".

Dead Space came from EA's push to make original games. EA was seen as only making sequels, sports games and movie licenses, so it launched Mirror's Edge, Skate, Rock Band and Mass Effect within three years. Redwood Shores, known for The Godfather and MySims, made Dead Space.

Making limbs the weak spot turned every shot into a choice. Dead Space took Resident Evil 4's recipe of undercutting the player and added strategic dismemberment: body and head shots barely hurt, cutting legs slows a foe and cutting arms disarms it.

Isaac can move while aiming but loses Resident Evil 4's quick-turn. Designers could build enemies whose limbs are small, moving or periodically hidden.

Teach enemies one at a time, then combine them into decisions. The first half introduces slashers, lurkers, infectors, exploders and dividers through organic tutorials; the second half mixes them so you prioritise exploders and infectors and pick between stasis, dismemberment or repositioning.

A four-gun cap forces a balanced loadout across the plasma cutter, line gun, contact rifle and pulse rifle. Sticky floors, dark rooms, zero-gravity and zero-oxygen areas with silent enemies add more layers.

Scarce ammo and competing purchases made scavenging matter. The same money buys ammo and health or weapons, suits and power nodes. In the second half Brown ran out of ammo, sold weapons, hunted credits, threw objects with kinesis and dodged enemies while scavenging.

Long tension and fake-outs before the real shock make scares land. Enemies play dead, lights fake a failure, pick-ups bait you, and when one enemy leaps out in front a quiet one often spawns behind. Interconnected chapters with backtracking bring skipped enemies back and lull you before a jump scare.

Necromorphs bursting from fans make players nervous of every fan. The ship creaks, moans and whispers, each weapon "kicks like a mule", and the exploder has a distinct sound because it matters most to locate.

The regenerating hunter broke the rule that cleared rooms are safe. Before him, enemies sprang from trip wires and cleared rooms were safe; the hunter gets back up and chases you room to room through vents.

He is borrowed from Resident Evil 4 and anticipates Alien: Isolation, and killing him twice brings real catharsis.

Repeated errands and look-alike areas dragged the pacing. Hammond and Kendra keep sending Isaac on jobs, and the satellite arrays, medical bay and botanical garden blur together over roughly 12 hours.

Spacewalks, boss fights, an asteroid-shooting section and the hunter are the main breaks. Hammond eventually asks, "Will this never end?!"

Power works best as a release valve after prolonged dread. Dead Space lets players feel strong only after tension, fake-outs and anxious ammo hunting, so fighting back feels like relief.

It softens horror's disempowerment with dedicated health and gun buttons and checkpoints alongside a real-time inventory and typewriter-style save points.

A new idea in nearly every level kept the campaign fresh. Titanfall 2 swaps between firefights, platforming, titan battles and story, and the time-travel level Effect and Cause removes its mechanic before it gets stale. Brown finished it but not Doom, whose long high-intensity stretches got exhausting.

Its tropes and big-box arenas still push players into cover, and only the opening Gauntlet fuses wall-running with combat.