Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Nothing To F.E.A.R. But...

Well, I've officially completed the vacation requirements as set out by the Staycation Advisory Board.

1)Read a book (check!)
2)Go camping (check!)
3)Visit with family (check!)
4)Clean basement (check!)
5)Ride your bike (check!)

and tonight I completed the final requirement of my Staycation.

6)Beat a videogame (check!)

Now I can wander around Acton with Garrett for the next few days before I have to go to work on Thursday night. All hail the extra long vacation!

As for the game, I picked up F.E.A.R. last fall (in the special Director's Cut DVD edition, no less) and hoped against hope that my aging computer would run it.

Suffice it to say, it didn't. F.E.A.R. was one of the games I had in my collection that I had really wanted to play when I upgraded yet after my upgrade it got lost in the shuffle for a while. I dug it back out last week and spent most of my free gaming time making my way through it.

It's a pretty cool First Person Shooter (or FPS, as we l33t d00ds refer to it). It was billed as a cross between the visceral firefights of Half-Life and the creepy Japanese horror stylings of movies like Ringu or Dark Water. On the firefight side of things, F.E.A.R. didn't fail to amaze. The enemies were pretty intelligent and you never really felt like you were a walking tank, unlike a lot of other FPS's. You had to really react fast and think about the environment to find cover and avoid getting chewed to pieces. The addition of a slo-mo function (or reflexes, as the game refers to them) helped to level the playing field between your lone commando raid and the army of clone soldiers you mowed down as you made your way through the various levels.

So the gunplay element was top notch. How about the horror, you ask?

Well, it wasn't nearly as scary as it could have been. There were definately a lot of very creepy elements and even some of the soldiers were somewhat sinister, especially the invisible ninja robot soldiers. The scripted sequences definately helped set up some of the tension but unfortunately there just weren't enough of these horror elements to really build an atmosphere of terror.

The game also suffered from having an exceedingly long section in the middle where you fought through an office tower. While this is somewhat cool in theory, after the 3rd or 4th hour of slogging through essentially identical cubical farms and corner offices, you wanted to jump out one of the virtual windows and fall to your death in slow motion. Again, the firefights were a lot of fun in these sections but it just seemed to go on forever. And while the game really pulls out all the stops in the final act and starts to live up to the promise of its horror roots, it ends all too abruptly, although I have to say that the final scene will probably stick with me for a while.

So, am I happy that I finally finished off F.E.A.R.? Yes. I probably would have waited for a used copy had I known how repetitive it got in the middle section though.

Oh, and while I love having the entire game on one DVD, I wish I hadn't had to pay the premium price for it last fall. The extras are kind of neat, but like most collector's editions, it doesn't really add much for the difference in cost.

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What I'm Reading: Ilium
What I'm Playing: Trapt, Final Fantasy IV Advance
What I'm Watching: What It's Like To Be Alone, Daily Show & Colbert

Mahna Mahna *doo doo de doo doo*

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