Wow, seems for the last week I haven't been able to blink without seeing or hearing a reference to Dead Space 2 in the background of my day. News sites today had the game front and centre on their main page, not their entertainment or game page mind you, their main news page, flanked by pictures of cricket, floods and Julian Assange. Articles about it being the scariest game ever made (which anyone whose played recent indie darling Amnesia would scoff at, seriously, the game is designed to extract pee from your body) and polls about favourite scary game/film moments abound new sites that normally publish pieces on games being some gate way activity to teen prostitute murdering. Even my mum, who doesn't have the skills to actually play any game from a first person perspective, called me on Sunday night and asked, 'what's this Death in Space game about then?'.

How the hell did EA achieve this epic marketing upper cut?

Now Dead Space uno fell some where between 'pretty great' and 'damn good' in the complicated linguist scale I use for games. It was fun and exciting and made me jump a few times; there were some extremely clever mechanics, a good story and it oozed atmosphere from each rusty space ship panel. But it was also pretty damn predictable and a touch linear. Dead Space 2 I expect to be more of the same. I'm looking forward to it, no question, but I'm not expecting my mother to phone and quiz me on it. And yet she did.

A lot of this is down to the clever 'Your mum won't like it' marketing campaign, featuring real mums having unpleasent reactions to the game. Such as below.

That's just one of a whole series of campaign videos of wincing mums watching gameplay footage. My mum saw one of these ads on TV (I don't watch very much TV so I hadn't seen the ads when she called) and asked about it.

Naturally these sorts of TV ads are a little funny, especially to younger gamers who need to convince their mums to get them the game in the face of over whelming anti-mum sentiment. But it also makes the game a talking point at work and in the media for non games for perceived excessive violence and gore; which we know is just par for the course in most games. It also gives the game a rep as a scary title and that intrigues people, even people who don't like horror and scary themes are drawn by the thought of something that might scare them or gross them out. Most of the internet is built on the curiosity of people for how far they can push their own level of tolerance for the grotesque elements of the world and other peoples imaginations.

Cue my mother calling me, nonchalantly interested in this 'scary game' she's heard about. The people behind Dead Space 2's marketing have keyed into this with superb skill and turned a game that would have been appreciated by most serious gamers but ignored by everyone in the periphery into a demonstration of how to hype a game to the masses. Good for EA I say, the game will deserve the hype based on my experience of the last one, and hopefully this might make other developers a bit more savvy in how they market their games.

Dead Space 2 is on sale the 25 of January and I strongly recommend you grab a copy.