02/05/09
F.E.A.R and Comics in Canada
Alright, well, there is't a comic this week. This is due to some bizzar computer issues, and a lack of motivation.
However, I have had time to review the F.E.A.R Project Origin demo, and you all get to listen to it now.
So here is the first ever Demo Men artical, and I swear if you read it in a Zero Puntuation style rant, I will beat you to death with my intellect.:
So I'll start by saying the most important part of any survival horror game (Hell, in any game, even) is Atmosphere.
Some get it totally, totally right, like Bioshock, and others try to substitute atmosphere for straight out action, like Resident Evil 4, which is still incredibly atmospheric.
If you're gonna go for action you could do a lot worse in a horror game than Resident Evil 4. You could pick up Alone in the Dark.
But for a mediocre horror title, I lukewarmly suggest downloading the Demo for F.E.A.R. Project Origins. Actually, for a mediocre title, it's fairly competent.
It starts off where all horror games do. Incredibly thin pretense for why you're doing whatever it is you're doing. In this case, you take the role of a special forces operative of the First Encounter Assault Recon unit named Michael Becket who wakes up in a still burning war zone. Apparently this ties in to the end of the first game, but I never played the first game, so I have to take Wikipedia's word for it.
So you start off as someone I immediately dislike purely because I have no attachment to him. Seriously. You don't even know the guy's name until some chick calls you on your radio. Until then, I imagined I was Peter Venkmen as written by Cliff Belinski.
So, you wake up in the street with everyone'sfavorite blur/bloom filters on the camera, and you start to follow a young girl...
And then you're not. You fall into a broken corridor and you realize you have no weapons. That is, until you watch some... guy... kill another... guy, and take his weapon in order to kill the first guy.
It's not really explained. Or maybe it was in the previous games. But like I said, I didn't play the previous games, so I guess I'm fucked for the story and I'll stop trying to follow it and I'll jump right into game play.
The first bad guy I ran into I thought was on my team for 5 whole minutes before he notices I was wearing different clothes than him, and he thought the polite thing to do was to ram a hundred bullets up my ass.
Not that it mattered, cause the gun he was using only fires small bits of candle wax, and I managed to walk right up to him and punch in his face.
This was when his buddies came round the corner and tried to shred my ass with their incredibly weak semi automatics.
The game then realized that I was doing incredibly well and granted me the power of bullet time.
So now my character is Peter Venkman as written by Cliffy B starring in the matrix, but that's fine because I was having immense fun slowing the world down and shooting faceless soldiers with my shotgun (Which suddenly does massive amounts of damage since I pinched it from the bad guys and loaded it with something other than crayons) and watching a curtain of blood stay suspended in the air.
So a sort of stop-go gun fight started. Walk through a few rooms, shoot
the enemies, walk through a few more rooms. I was getting bored.
But suddenly, my beloved atmosphere took hold of me. Lights flickered,
the radio came on and my teammate started going on about a woman crying.
I entered the next room and started hearing it!
Lights go off.
FUCK!
There's a ghost there! Shoot it!
Gah!
Now I'm excited! There's something I'm looking forward to! Trying to escape the room before this turns into a scene from 13 ghosts.
So I exit the ghost room after finding out that my shotgun can scare away the poltergeist, but does little else, which make me raise the question as to what good this team even is.
I walk up the stair to find a bunch more baddies waiting for me.
* sigh *
Alright. I will quickly dispatch these guys, and hopefully find the part that interests me again.
Except I can't. It took me 5 attempts to get past these blighters, because suddenly they discovered they could use their guns to KILL ME.
Kill me in increasingly bullshitty ways, no less.
So I finally work through the bewilderingly difficult troops and the pathetically easy... erm... armored troop... and plunge into total darkness.
Perfect. This is what the game promised to be!
I start mashing all the keys on my keyboard looking for my flashlight.
I can't find it.
Finally the game took pity on me and told me how to turn on the flashlight, which I found to be a huge problem. I know I can swap around any of the keys by spending a few minutes in the options menu, but fuck that. It should be obvious! I still don't know how to switch between grenade types, and excuse me for expecting ctrl to be crouch like in ANY OTHER GAME.
So there's more ghost sequences and a few more stop and go gun fights and I am almost ready to put this in my “Buy upon Release” folder, but then the silly yet interesting game shits itself with utter ridiculousness.
What looked like yet another ghostly appearance sparking from the ground turned out to be some kind of Mech assault type walker.
Balls...
I climb inside, walk a little ways and the demo ends.
No. You've managed to fuck yourself over, F.E.A.R. I don't like you.
I know you didn't pride yourself on being subtle, but honestly I don't want to play a mech assault game. I want to walk around in narrow corridors chasing a small ghost child. I want the walls to bleed and... and terrible moaning noises to come from the other room. I want to feel completely hopeless and desperate to try to escape with my life.
I hope you're happy with yourself, F.E.A.R. You started with something actually interesting, but pandered to the masses.
Which makes you a hooker.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Scud a dull boy.