Let's accept it. Electronic Arts isn't actually recognized for putting out genre-significant games. In reality, EA is recognized for precisely the contrary: enept games which were one time considered as certain market leaders.

For Holiday, 2008, however, EA may very well have the premium release of a pristine and fresh name in its contemporary record since becoming an almost-monopoly.

I'm talking about Dead Space, a survival horror game like no other.

Really, there have been survival horror games previously. Alone in the Dark, of course, invented the genre. Resident Evil and its many installments refined and perfected this niche. The Silent Hill cycles took it for a spin and pioneered the notion of psychological horror, which was sent to the advanced stage by games like Fatal Frame.

So what maked Dead Space any special?

Firstly, Dead Space doesn't happen in an old abandoned mansion or a city raided by newly-made zombies.

Dead Space happens in, where else, space.

Imagine Alien. Imagine Sigourney Weaver being pursued by the brood in a rocketship that has been sucked of living. Imagine this mechanic honed to a tee.

Imagine possessed,mutated, and downright wicked crew associates substituting aliens. Imagine authentic, untouched vileness coming from the bowels of hell. Imagine a sole navy having to fend of these repulsive entities. Imagine grotesque entities and even more grotesque situations.

It's the foreboding alienation and the rroubling dread that makes Dead Space the next revolutionary march in the survival horror genre.

Of course, we shouldn't failt to remember the gigantic, powerful guns, the abundant supply of brutality, and the diversity of dismembered body parts.

Dead Space is said to be so fiece that it had to go be subjected to several mendings only to get an acceptable M rating from the ESRB. Its planned box art, a picture of a dismembered body part soaring in space and a tribute to the dismembered finger that was used in the billboards for the flick Saw, has been faced with so much disapproval that an alternate box art is being created.

With the release of Dead Space, the survival horror type will never be the same again. As the introductory statement in Star Trek goes, "to go where no man has gone before."

Well, Dead Space will go where no survival horror game has tried venture before.

And we'll be there for one hell of a ride, plainly speaking that is.