Top 5 Badasses in Video Games
Written by: Adam "ManKorn" Korenman, CC2K Video Games Editor
3) Isaac Clark – Dead Space
Thank god nothing bad ever happens in space. To infinity…..
Pop Quiz: You awake on the Event Horizon, and monsters are literally crawling out of the walls to come and kill you. What do you do? Go native like Sam Neil? Run away like Joely Richardson? Or do you charge headfirst at the darkness like a thermonuclear Lawrence Fishburne?
You might remember this from your nightmares
In the Dead Space trilogy, nightmares from Stan Winston cutting room floor try to slice, stab or crush you to death. These abominations are called Necromorphs and seem to be calling upon the spirit of John Carpenter’s The Thing as they hunt you down.
But Isaac doesn’t only contend with monsters. His very mind is the enemy, shattered from the loss of his girlfriend and, of course, the fact that he’s had to re-murder the crew of various space vessels. Throughout the campaign, visions of the macabre haunt our hero and plague his every step. There’s no time to stop and take an antidepressant, however, as scythe-armed zombies chase you through the blood-soaked halls on your way from room to room.
And Isaac lacks the normal weaponry associated with alien slaughter. His foes are not so easily dispatched, and so Isaac must make do with the tools of his trade: laser saws and plasma cutters that literally dismember his enemies to death.
His badass moment comes at the end of the series, when Isaac and his friends manage to track the source of this intergalactic scourge back to a frozen planet named Tau Volantis. As it turns out, the moon of this planet is the true monstrosity. Worse yet, its brethren–moon-sized aliens–are preparing to attack Earth.
At this point in the story, Isaac has already fought beasts as large as skyscrapers, but a planetoid is something else altogether. Using a kinetic power that allows him to hurl debris at the behemoth, Isaac manages to disable the creature and kill it. A lesser hero would probably balk at the notion of a noble sacrifice, but none of Isaac’s fucks were winter-proof and are thus useless to him at this moment. He goes down with the moon as it crashes into the planet, destroying the Necromorph presence and saving the galaxy.
This is why we can’t have nice planets
Or so he thought. Isaac awakens from his immense fall and realizes the “brother moons” are on the warpath. Commandeering a ship, Isaac and his crew return to Earth and find the not-so-heavenly bodies are there to destroy all life. As the music rises to a crescendo, Isaac prepares for a final showdown.
If EA had gone through with Dead Space 4, we may have had to move Isaac up a few places on this list, but as he survives his encounter, he is in no way eligible for the most badass awards to come.