History Headscratchers / DeadSpace2

*** Ellie also explains in their first encounter that her suspicion is due to the last person she met who like they wanted to help tried to kill her (I don't recall if details about what happened are in the logs). Presumably, it didn't take long for Ellie to realize Isaac did not have sinister intentions--possibly due to his aforementioned willingness to do as he's told--and she was likely more than a bit eager to have company again.

*** Adrenaline rush. Ellie probably just fended off whatever killed off her party of 30 something people, including a few friends who'd have most likely been turned into necromorphs against her. Ever been in a particularly intense fight? The adrenaline rush tends to blind you to common sense. Literally 5 minutes later the rush comes down, and Ellie finally gets a few moments to think "maybe it would have been a good idea to get help from the guy with the gun, armor and knowledge of how to kill these things".

* This is just a guess but at that point all of the soldiers that would have been protecting the facility were either busy being eaten by Necromorphs or dead. So, Issac may have been unable to use the gunship to go straight to the Marker as the soldiers would have shot him down for trying it. After he distracted them with a massive Necromorph attack might have been a different story. So, there may have been no "need" to move it somewhere safer. Also, Tiedeman had initiated Operation Endgame which appears to amount to "Return to Base and wait it out in our impenetrable Fortress complex". To be fair, this is a perfectly sensible plan as it seems to have been working up until the point Issac cut the power and let the Necromorphs have at it. The plan to deal with Issac seemed to be cut off all his routes of escape and let the Necromorphs deal with him. It would've worked if Issac weren't an Engineer, which might as well be a superpower by this point as it literally makes him the strongest fighter in the entire game with enough smarts to out-maneuver Tiedeman's attempts to kill him.

* Why do RIG:s belonging to Riot and SWAT give bonus damage to weapons that lore wise are originally engineering tools?

* Where did Tidemann get his security personnel, at the bottom of a cereal box? When they all point their guns at you and tell you to drop your weapon, you have to duck in a door to the right, which leads to a bathroom. Ok. But then they freak out and, according to comm chatter, start sweeping the area with search teams as though they have no idea where you are. In spite of the fact that about 15 of them had just seen you duck into a doorway to a bathroom with no exits, save for an access crawlspace. Why didn't they just barge into the bathroom, instead of freaking out and saying that they had no idea where you went.

* Isaac and Stross being necessary to the EarthGov for Marker creation. It would makes sense to extract information implanted by the Marker from them IF the Marker on Aegis was an alien artifact. It makes non sense whatsoever to extract that information when it turns out that that marker was man-made. What do they need their information (from an imperfect Marker that caused a necromorph infestation no less) for? Did they lose the schematics that they used to build the red Marker? Confused.
** Actually, that's exactly what happened. The original marker on Aegis VII was made ''centuries'' ago, and when they had an outbreak of their own the whole place was sealed up and declared off limits. Likely, all the data on the project was kept in the facility, which was destroyed. Now EarthGov has a renewed interest in studying the Marker, but now the only instructions to make one are in Isaac's and Stross' heads.

** Greed. Which is not far-fetched at all. Humans are greedy. And a lot of greedy humans that sit in EarthGov - a lot of planet cracking. Therefore a lot of material used up, which in turn require even more to be salvaged. And yet they don't want to harm our asteroid belt. Maybe because they're nostalgic? Or they know something about gravitation fields of our belt... that prevents them from salvaging it. How about it?

** I found it odd that when Isaac said, Jesus, the subtitles said, "Jeezus, instead." Whether or not Christianity still exists is besides the point. Terms like "man" and "jeez" still exist. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if people still called others "bros, dudes, and John Doe."

*** We don't know when the elevator was broken. There are two corpses at the bottom of the elevator shaft. There's air there and they don't look too rotten. Maybe they broke it a few hours before you arrived and were killed by the tripods. One of them is missing a head and limb as I recall. Though that doesn't explain how the Necromorphs used an elevator. Maybe they slaughtered people who got on the elevator, but there's no blood in there... The only really plausible explanation is that people used escape pods to get up there, but they were intercepted by the tripods. Such desperate people may have brought their children with them...

*** Funny you should mention that. As i recall there was audio-log stating that (You find it in Church) due depressurization - candles blew out, later followed by eardrums blowing out. .... Therimte?!

* At the end of Chapter 5, in a particularly CrowningMomentofAwesome, you detonate a fuel tank of a gunship, destroying it and and the local boss in one stroke. The force of the explosion you generate throws you through a window into a residential district, filled with your usual Unitology graffiti and candles. However, because you enter a window, the place decompresses, yet the candles are still lit somehow. Why? Are these space age candles, fueled by magical fire that never goes out? It seems rather jarring, considering Visceral did their research for all other types of fire in this game.

** If you follow the many audio logs in the production section of the game, you find out that out of a group of about thirty or more people, only Ellie manages to survive. Watching friends and a potential love interest be slaughtered or sacrifice themselves to give the others a chance to escape and survive. When Isaac encounters her, she is now suddenly alone, having fought for survival in the nightmare and may have dealt with a few crazies in the process. Traumatized, paranoid, just finished fending off a wave of necromorphs does not make a person very trusting of random strangers.

* How did Ellie and Stross get Isaac's phone (rig?) number[=/=]radio frequency? Isaac never got a chance to give either of them a way to contact him.

** It's highly likely you can search for [=RIGs=] in your general area - the military talk about tracking Isaac's, for instance. She probably just synced his rig number when they met.

** It was trying to do so the entire game by sending Necromorphs after him. All that's required to "make us whole" [[spoiler:and start Covergence]] is for Isaac to die. Isaac accessing the Eye Poke Machine ''was not part of the plan''. The Ubermorph shows up to kill him immediately after he uses it, for Pete's sake. [[spoiler:The Marker]] clearly wanted him dead badly at that point.

*** I think that since Isaac had managed to fight his way past legions of necromorphs to get that far, [[spoiler:The Marker]] wasn't very confident that the Ubermorph or Teidemann would stop him and feared that Isaac would find some conventional way to destroy The Marker (such as overloading Titan Station's reactors) and so [[spoiler:it]] had [[spoiler:Marker-Nicole]] show him how to use the Eye Poke Machine as part of a last ditch effort by to make him susceptible to [[spoiler: a direct mental attack]]. The level of trust [[spoiler:Marker-Nicole]] gained with Isaac from the act was probably intended to increase the effectiveness of this attack. Risky, yeah, but [[spoiler:The Marker]] was getting desperate.

* How was Stross able to survive on his own up until Ellie started babysitting him? The guy was unarmed and crazy, he should have been easy picking for the necromorphs.
** Stross' back story has him on the O'Bannon when an outbreak on that ship occurs. He is part of a group that manages to get through the ship alive and hiding in an engineering deck for a long period of time until help arrives. So he probably knows how to avoid the attention of the necromorphs. Many people on the Ishimura managed to survive the duration of the outbreak on the ship unarmed and only armed with knowledge of the ship.

** This is actually kinda funny since when you meet him the second time, at the apartments, you can see all the necromorphs chasing people in the background (especially funny if you have benny hill playing) while all of them conveniently ignores Stross. The fun part comes in where you can kill these same necromorphs, meaning there is ''literally nothing between them and Stross''. The only possible explanation is that Stross is not being targeted by the Necromorphs.

* At the end of Chapter 5, in a particuarly CrowningMomentofAwesome, you detonate a fuel tank of a gunship, destroying it and and the local boss in one stroke. The force of the explosion you generate throws you through a window into a residential district, filled with your usual Unitology graffiti and candles. However, because you enter a window, the place decompresses, yet the candles are still lit somehow. Why? Are these space age candles, fueled by magical fire that never goes out? It seems rather jarring, considering Visceral did their research for all other types of fire in this game.
** I wouldn't be surprised if the unitologists invented technologically superior candles for just those kinds of situations. Self-lighting wicks, built in oxidizers, internal fuel reserves, the works. Those Unitologists ''love'' themselves some candles.

*** It has been a while since I played, but it always appeared to me the candles were in a container of some kind. Of course, I never looked too hard at the lanterns as there were always those friendly necromorphs just wanting a bite to eat. This one could probably be explained that with the candles snuffed out, it would have destroyed the atmosphere at that point. If nothing else, Thermite Candles!
*** Funny you should mention that. As i recall there was audiolog stating that (You find it in Church) due depressurization - candles blew out, later followed by eardrums blewing out. .... Therimte?!

* Who's the person narrating the opening? On the " previously on dead space", the first game and backstory are described by someone. An actual person too, because he mentions himself as a former unitologist. It sounds like nobody you've encountered before, yet is aware of the covered up Ishimura incedent and the current whereabouts of Isaac. Seriously, I would have expected to meet this person.

**** The Black Marker, the one you were refering to, was likely an Alien Artifact. The glyphs on the side of markers are instructions to make new markers, and Earth Gov made their original copies from that Marker. In ''Martyr'', Earth Gov got enough blueprints to make their own, but events occured so the lab in which the marker was contained was sunk to the bottom of the ocean, and then a seafloor was collapsed on top of it. At this time, Earth Gov considered it easier to extract schematics from Stross' and Isaac's heads than to unearth billions of tons of rock for the ''same instructions''. In all likelihood, Dead Space 3 is going to be about Isaac stopping Earth Gov from unearthing the original marker.

**** And why doesn't he 'act' like a mid-forty year old man? He's not exactly in a typical situation most people in their fourties are going to face. Mid life crisis' don't usually involve horrific monstrosities devouring everyone in sight.

** Isaac has no problem killing necromorphs and based on the early part of the game does genuinely care about other people. He tries to save the patient stuck on the operating table, and seems genuinely upset with what happens to the guys in the beginning. Not to mention they are unarmed, the back story for him from the two games is that he was raised well by his parents thus having great determination and a moral compass. If they were armed and trying to harm him, he probably would have retaliated.

*** The thugs hid on either side of the door and ambushed him while Daina distracted him, and he wasn't expecting an attack. He thought Daina was going to help him. Isaac is badass but he's not psychic. How exactly is Isaac supposed to use that plasma cutter on them with his arms restrained? His armored rig is tough but it doesn't boost his physical strength. Also, are you sure the thugs were unarmed? At the least they had stasis modules and presumably would have used them if Isaac had put up more of a fight, and I have a hard time believing they could have stayed alive that long on a necromorph infected ship without weapons.

*** We don't even know if they would have actualy succeded in holding him in place. If the gunship wouldn't have turned up Isaac could have just aswell freed himself with either his armored boots, his weapon or stasis module, without killing them. He most likely was just still shocked over the turn of events or wanted to still try to reason with them.

** The clear implication from later on in the Government Sector is that the necromorphs were already tunneling through the walls and spreading through the rock. It seems to have just been a matter of time

** Yeah, I thought the single unprotected power cell required to open the security door was really lame too. They could have at least thrown in a hack minigame to release the cover and made you pull out 2 or 3 power cells, would have made it a bit more believable. Also, how exactly does turning off the power open the door?
*** When you remove the power cell, you can hear some of the soldiers say something about the "kinetic restraints" holding the door closed. There was probably a whole horde of necromorphs banging on the door after Isaac got through, and once the power cell was removed, they just forced the door open through weight of numbers and charged through.
**** Considering that roughly 30 necromorphs plus the Ubermorph enter within seconds of power being lost, this seems the obvious answer.

** It's highly likely you can search for RIGs in your general area - the military talk about tracking Isaac's, for instance. She probably just synced his rig number when they met.

* Are RIGs cybernetic augmentations or equipment worn over the clothing?

** What really puzzles me is how is it possible to tell how much health you have? RIGs can do that, but shows no injuries. What.

* How did Ellie and Stross get Isaac's phone (rig?) number / radio frequency? Isaac never got a chance to give either of them a way to contact him.

* Why do RIGs belonging to Riot and SWAT give bonus damage to weapons that lore wise are originally engineering tools?

*** McNiel is a Police in Aegis that can tamper with circuitry in DP: Extraction, giving credence to the above. Weller usually relies on him to do it, but it is entirely possible that either it is a required ability for the job or that McNiel taught Weller a thing or two, years ago.

** It's literally mining InSpace. The gravity tethers they use to lift the chunk of the planet is simulating gravity, so it's not a physical pulling action (which requires the ship to brace against something. This is more like magnetic attraction). The whole action probably mines from the most mineral rich, but unstable part of the planet, so it yields more usable ore per load, but has the unfortunate side effect of causing tectonic shift. On a planet you actually want to live on, this is a baaad idea.

*** WordofGod is that they retconed the first game's Marker, due to inconsistencies. However, there's a better answer: The Black Marker (Original Marker) works as intended - It wards people away from the infection its supposed to be guarding. However, because it is alien in nature, much of what it tries to do to ward humans off is counter-productive, and it fails. Later on, the Red Marker (DeadSpace) is constructed by humans. It too tries to ward off the infection, but because it's imperfect, it does an extremely poor job of it. The Golden Marker (DeadSpace2) is a copy of a copy, and is so miserably broken that its actually attempting to propagate the virus. It's also possible that the marker may inherit something from its creator - The Red Marker does a piss poor job because whoever made it didn't fully understand its function, and the Golden Marker actively attempts to spread the virus because that's what Isaac thinks the Red Marker was doing.

[[WMG: Government Sector Gunship]]
Why is there a fully fuelled, armed and functional gunship docked near the entrance to the Government Sector, unlocked and ready for the taking by anyone that knows how to pilot it? Why didn't Tiedemann have his men hunting down Isaac in it, or at least move it somewhere where Isaac couldn't find it and use it to bypass literally all of his defenses? Seriously, if Isaac wasn't overcome with guilt and a HeroComplex he could have flown that gunship directly to the marker, just as Ellie does at the end of the game.

** The death animation was explicitly refered to as critical error on the monitor, if Isaac should fail. Likely all the chaos (like a convergence event) going on around it, some energy fields would screw up calibrations and make it become a EyeScream Dispenser should everything not line up perfectly.