I don't really like RE, the only one that was fun was RE4 Wii and that's mainly because of how un-Resident Evil it was. I grew up with friends who played the heck outta RE 1, 2, and 3 and it never clicked with me. Maybe because I was already playing games like Fallout, Tribes, and Descent.
I love Dead Space for the same reasons I love the "casual" RE4... it's a horror game for casuals like me. This came out a year after Bioshock and I thought it blew it out of the water. The game has excellent setting, music + sound design, monster design (both visually and in terms of gameplay variety), generously nodding to the schlocky 70s and 80s science fiction.
Dead Space also came at a fleeting time when i thought developers were gonna actually use the physics/graphical advancements of the hardware (silly me...), so to see it all mostly come together in Dead space with the gravity gun combat, 360* movement in space, tons of destructible/shootable boxes/barrels, positional sound design, dismemberment of enemies, cohesive melee and QTEs, menu-less experience... again, this was in 2008 when combat in 3rd person games was Batman Arkham Asylum or Gears or Uncharted. It's not a 1:1 comparison but I also got strong System Shock vibes when I originally played through it, something that Bioshock didn't really live up to. I'm not saying DS was perfect, and neither was DS2, but I (naively) felt like Dead Space was really something special, pushing the genre forward by bringing various pieces together.
I regularly replay my PS3 copy. It's a great game.
also
@brap name a single male character -- hero or villain -- in Resident Evil who isn't a simp... ya dun goofed. At least we get to see Isaac torn to shreds in more creative ways