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F.airy E.ngagment A.ccidental R.esponse

“Hello there.  Do you have time to talk about how much you could be saving on local calls?”

Well, I eventually got F.E.A.R. 2 up and running. Don’t really know what the problem was. Somewhere in the various installs, re-installs and validations and verifications Steam decided it would let me play the game after all. How gracious.

My favourite part was the install when it ignored the DVD in the drive and decided for some arbitrary reason that I needed to download the entire game content. Needless to say I swiftly cancelled that plan. Nothing like an estimated download time of 6 hours when you already have the game on disc.

So was it really worth all the hassle?

The messing around certainly took the edge of my enthusiasm for the game, and then when I actually came to setting it up I ran headlong in to my pet hate.

Lack of fully customisable key bindings.

Now that is something to be truly frightened of.

How can any game get away with this? No really, I mean I have been playing FPS’s since Wolfenstein 3D  and over that time I have come to settle on a particular configuration.  It is altered obviously, game by game – Dark Messiah needed a lot of pressing of the Kick button so that gets a priority place, some games might have a flashlight, others don’t etc etc. But over time a comfortable basic control scheme evolves, so you can transfer habits and skills from one game to another instead of having to re-train your hand-eye coordination for each title. And though it might mark me as some kind of malformed freak of the gaming world  it just so happens my particular configuration does not include having my left hand on the WASD side of the keyboard.

Unfortunately F.E.A.R. 2 refused to let me assign functions to many of  the keys I would usually use. I won’t go on about this too much, though I could – at length. It really is unforgivable in my book. (Many a game I have abandoned playing all together because Quicksave and Quickload are locked to F6 and F9…)

Then I noticed controversial choice #2.

No save games – checkpoint autosave only.

This never bodes well.  Aliens vs. Predator pulled this trick a while back, giving you only limited saves, citing the same “building tension, real consequences” reasons that the F.E.A.R 2 developers are trotting out, and I didn’t play that game until the power of mass bitching saw them add an unlimited savegame function.

Now I understand (I think) what they are trying to do with this. I am something of a compulsive quicksaver myself, so not having the ability to save my game every time I turn a corner does add a certain edge. But this positive is more than cancelled out by being forced into the frustrating situation of having to  repeat combat situations I’ve already completed over and over to get to the bit that keeps killing me. If this kind of repetition appealed  I’d dust off one of my consoles and play Prince of Persia, or maybe Abe’s Odyssey or even Pitfall on the Atari 2600. The other problem with lack of saving options is that one of the things I appreciate about PC games is being able to save them and shut them down the moment the real world intrudes. A phone call, a knock at the door, a grease fire, an alien craft landing on the roof and I can just press a button or two and then deal with the situation. Even if I’m not back to my computer for a week or so (the alien abduction one ) then I know my precious progress has been saved and I can get back to it as soon as the swelling goes down enough that I can sit on my computer chair again.

Moving on to the game itself, as soon as I started playing I found myself trying to remember the plot details of the original F.E.A.R which I had vaguely enjoyed and certainly completed.  What came to mind was that the title was a laughable and unconvincing backronym, that there was a little girl, that little girls are creepy( as evidenced by the last 25 years of horror films,) that there was a lot of blood, that for some reason you could go Matrix-style slow-mo and that you were some kind of super soldier killing some other kind of super soldier, conspiracy blah, unethical experiments blah, telepathy blah, picking up boring memo’s and reading them in breaks between killing blah blah…

Now I haven’t finished the game yet, probably only halfway through, but it seems to me that F.E.A.R 2 is more of the same. The slow mo gunfight action can be quite satisfying, wheeling out every horror cliche ever put on film breaks up the monotony of gun battles, and your companions are entirely useless and die a lot. Usually just up ahead of you, conveniently too far out of your reach to actually do anything to help them. So come to think of it you are pretty damn useless yourself.

Maybe I’m jaded, or expecting too much from what is still a medium in its infancy, but is this really the best a studio can dish up? Well actually, I know its not, because I have played Deus Ex, I have played Half-life 2, I have played a handful of other compelling titles that didn’t feel empty so I know they exist, that they are possible.

In terms of the story, the world of the game, it seems to me like the writers/developers of F.E.A.R. 2 are just re-hashing whatever they played in other successful titles. Nothing feels at all new, or even interesting, I certainly don’t care about a single character and I don’t need to keep hold of the plot to play the game, I just kill whatever is in front of me.  Which is fine for an action title if that’s what you are going for, but then if that is the case why even bother with the  lame story tying it all together? The emails/PDA notes you pick up in particular read like the developers fed a handful of better 1st person shooters, the scripts from a few late night B-grade action movies and a DVD box set of the X-files into a grinder and then typed up the mushy plot-slurry as it squelched out.

So that’s my verdict anyway. I might finish it eventually, I might not. For the moment its a resounding ‘meh’ and I’m moving on to the next game!

WP out.

“Mmmm…  98% recycled material.”

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Christmas in Easter

Now, the last post I mentioned that I was going to be incommunicado for a while. Not in my wildest dreams did I anticipate it would be THIS long between posts. (Though to be honest my wildest dreams tend to not be about blogging – I’m more of traditionalist – spiders, wailing babies, being stalked through dark corridors, realising I’m naked at school, realising I am naked at school being stalked by wailing, naked spider-babies…)

But I am back. And I have news.

Remember the scavenger hunt-style competition I entered way back?

Well, I won. Yep. 40 free games.  It was even announced in the mainstream media.

So that’s pretty much the rest of my year taken care of.  Did I mention one of the games I won is “World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King”? Well, it is.  So clearly I have no choice but to reactivate my WOW account. But I shall endeavour not to retreat entirely into Azeroth to the detriment of blogging/personal hygiene.

As of this post I have only received a handful of games but PCPowerplay assures me the rest are coming, so I figured I might post some mini-reviews or 1st impressions of the games as I receive them. Many are titles – and indeed genres – that I wouldn’t usually go near, so it should be an education.

Stay tuned!

P.S. During my absence from the blogosphere I also completed “The Witcher” in its entirety. Coincidence? I think not.