End of A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.

I was originally going to get a Alma rape scene pic, but that proved awkward to screenshoot...plus I'm not sure if I'm allowed to anyway

Once again I feel like blogging, and once again I'm stumped as to how to properly start a post. All I remember from high school on the structure of text is to repeat the topic phrase in the introduction, conclusion and basically every paragraph in between as though the reader has the attention span of something with a short attention span (leave me alone, I've never been good at spontaneous metaphors (or similes (jerk))).
So.
Why FEAR 2 makes me wish I hadn't spent money on it.

Now, as I am just typing what comes to mind, I should point out that the various factors that irk me will be in no order and the amount of text dedicated to them will not be an indication of importance; I'm simply going to type till I'm bored, out of complaints, or feeling so bitter and twisted that I have to go and kick a puppy (note: not serious).

Also, let's all pretend Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate don't exist.

First up: the freaking vehicle segments. The FEAR series is your standard twenty minutes into the future setting, so it's essentially the same as today but everything is a little more advanced. This meant in FEAR there were particle beams, lasers, hover drones, personnel cloaking, power armour and even small mechs. With the exception of the lasers, which were far too space opera for the setting, these were all fine; none were commonplace or over the top. This helped to ground you in the reality of the game, which was important as it made the supernatural portions even more surreal and jarring. But FEAR 2 had to up the ante a couple of parts where you conveniently score an unmanned mech and proceed to wreck havoc through the trashed streets. While the FEAR 1 mech was about car sized and packed either missiles or the gay pink lasers, the FEAR 2 mech is several stories tall, very well shielded and comes with both dual chain guns and (bigger) missiles. While joyriding in the mech the player is virtually invincible as few weapons can harm them meaningfully and the carriers of such weapons can be smeared into the ground rather easily.
I should mention that the original mechs do show up in FEAR 2. You encounter one as a boss, which takes far too much firepower to kill (freaking shields), and then later whilst in the larger mech a few appear to slow you down.
'Wait, what do you have against obliterating dozens of soldiers in a giant robot you fag?' You may hypothetically ask, my hypothetical reader. And then I'll respond with something like: 'Nothing, when it's appropriate to the game's style, which it's not you retard.'

Speaking of massive numbers of soldiers, the amount of Replica soldiers and Armacham mercenaries you fight in the game is staggering given the context. There's a battalion (1000) of the Replica soldiers so fair enough for them, but I don't see why there's a seemingly endless supply of mercenaries. Plot-wise they are there to clean up any evidence or personnel that could incriminate Armacham, essentially a private army. What bothers me is why. Sure Armacham is a traditional corrupt weapons research and manufacture company, but why do they need that much muscle? It's not like they regularly send out there black ops death squads...right? While this is a fairly minor point, it is related to a slightly more important one: secret underground bases.

As far as I can tell, Armacham Technology Corporation while being modelled after Umbrella for continued research into inadvisable ideas, they chose to use the Black Mesa School of architecture. In FEAR 1 you go to a water treatment plant they own, their local HQ and a secret underground base where they kept Alma. And that's fine, an evil corporation is expected to have a secret facility. Except, that in FEAR 2, you go to several more underground bases. First there's the one that seems like a normal hospital for the most part, but turns out to be underground (naturally). Then there's also the one under the Armacham controlled school and there's the base which houses the psychic amplifier. And don't you forget about the massive underground train system that connects at least two of the bases to one another.

So far I've complained about fairly trivial and personal things, so let's get into something less trivial (still rather personal). Horror segments, fear effects, supernatural elements; that stuff that puts you on the edge and makes the next gun fight more nerve wracking. Except that in FEAR 2, they've taken what little atmosphere they had and beaten it to death with bloom effects.
Now in FEAR (1) the scary moments were hit and miss; for every gem (such as Alma's shadow behind you when you walk into a dead end) there were duds (like coming across another splattered corpse and having the scare chord play). However in FEAR 2 they are all misses, from getting blinded with an overpowering bloom effect on the HUD to grappling with Alma in periodic quick time events.
Two of the main factors in player based fear are the unknown and personal risk, and once again FEAR uses this adequately whereas FEAR 2 fails.
In FEAR one of Alma's first actions is to vaporise your squad, which naturally puts you on edge and makes you wary of a possible fiery supernatural death. This feeling is reinforced when she does try to incinerate you. After jumping at radio static and little girl laughter for a while the player probably starts to think that it's all illusions and thus harmless, which is true...until about half way into the game. One of the types of horror moments are when you are trapped in flashbacks, usually consisting of the hospital (where Alma gave birth) and/or a fire filled void. These are fairly tame by themselves, but then the Nightmares show up. Suddenly the flashbacks become combat zones where you can barely see (due to the flashback gauze effect), can't slowmo and are under attack by suiciding monsters. Act 3 takes things further (as it should) when Harlan Wade releases Alma from the Vault, so you know that things are going to get messy. As you start to flee the imminent nuclear explosion, suddenly slowmo kicks in and the dozens of Nightmares start coming out of the walls. And they do this basically in every room as you flee the Vault.
FEAR 2 in its incompetence looks at what FEAR 1 did well and manages to lose what it did well while adding things that also fail. The Nightmares have been replaced with the functionally the same but visually different Specters. So instead of dull grey enemies that blend in with dark environments, there are bright and shiny white ones that stand out. Two new enemies are the Abominations and the Remnants. The former are failed experiments that crawl along walls and try to disembowel you. Initially the Abominations are rather unnerving (they also remind me of the fast zombies out of Half Life 2) but this diminishes fairly quickly when you realise how soft and squishy they are (unlike the fast zombies). The Remnants can be rather accurately described as insane zombie puppet masters. Like the Abominations, the basic idea behind Remnants is creepy, but the application of it is not so. The Remnants spend the fight running around reviving enemies as puppets and hitting you with an annoying scream attack if you get to close. And they take a lot of ammo to kill.
Alma and all her illusion based fun naturally get screwed as well. The scares and horror moments, which were already pretty scarce to begin with, are almost nonexistent, especially the subtle ones. Hell, you don't even get radio static anymore. Furthermore, you get visions of a tree with a swing that obviously is of some importance to Alma, just not enough to be mentioned anywhere before this game. In FEAR 1 you the player see Alma as a young girl in a red dress until she gets released from the Vault, and then she's older and naked. This change in appearance marks an important plot point and makes the climax of the first game seem more epic. However, since FEAR 2 consists mostly of events after FEAR 1, Alma is already released so there goes that sense of your ultimate enemy getting stronger, as she is already there. But who likes pacing and events getting more intense anyway.

Well I've prattled on for quite a while without any real sense of order or logical thought and I could probably just keep doing so, but I'm going to wrap this up. Ultimately FEAR 1 and 2 are both flawed games, but I can cut FEAR 1 a lot more slack because it was the first one. When it comes to the first of anything (movie, game, child, whatever) I am more tolerant of its flaw, as the creators had no good benchmark to compare to. This same ideology of mine means I expect any and all sequels to be better. What makes FEAR 2 so frustrating is that it doesn't even manage to be equal to FEAR 1.
In conclusion:
First Encounter Assault Recon: 3/5
Extraction Point: 1/5
Perseus Mandate: 1/5 (probably)
FEAR 2 Project Origin: 2/5

PS: Under my own reasoning, I have got to use this 3 part bitching session as a benchmark for any future posts. Therefore future posts will hopefully: be more concise, follow a more ordered thought and be just more entertaining.

A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. 2: Operation Rant

ZOMG Spoilers.

Well it's Wednesday night, there is nothing to watch on the television at the moment, and my computer is giving me crap whenever I try to run a game; time to bitch about the FEAR series. There's going to be a lot of negative accentuating coming up so let's first look at why I liked the original FEAR game.

Several first person shooters (eg FEAR, Half Life, Prey) go for the total immersion style where you the player are made to feel like you are the actual character, as opposed to some disconnected presence controlling the illusion of a body. This is achieved with several techniques, most noticeably by locking the player in first person view with no cutscenes. You see only what the avatar sees, get disoriented by explosions, and panic when things get right up in your face. In FEAR not only are you always in first person (except for one jarring but minor cutscene), but you have a body of sorts. Your shadow is a constant presence, if you look down your feet are right there and so forth. When I first played FEAR, this was the first time I encountered such concepts, so I was rather wowed.

Now I've just noticed that I've already written a rather large paragraph on one facet of the positive part of this post (which is supposed to be fairly short) so I'm going to force myself to be brief and not go into unimportant details. So, other good elements of FEAR:
-Horror segments;
-Fairly advanced AI;
-Friendly NPCs aren't too irritating;
-Satisfying difficultly level;
-Adequate pacing and introduction of new events/enemies to prevent a grind.

This all said, now I'm going to say what's wrong with these points:
-Constant first person: you know I can't think of anything particularly bad about this so let's move along;
-Horror segments: while there are some rather clever illusions scattered throughout the game, most are either fairly mild (such as seeing young Alma watching you gets old when you realise she's not going to do anything) or dependent on a sudden shock (such as a corpse falling from an above railing). Also, the middle act of the game (also the largest and most tedious part) has very little of these segments;
-Fairly advanced AI: the enemy soldiers can dive through windows and over obstacles. While this is all well and good, they seem to do it in the middle of firefights for the sheer hell of it;
-Satisfying difficulty level: normally I wouldn't think to mention this but FEAR 2 gives me reason to do so;
-Pacing: okay, I'll admit there are some tedious parts where you mow do half a dozen Replica soldiers, go through a few empty rooms and then face some more Replica soldiers, but as with the difficulty above, FEAR 2 warrants that I mention it.

Jeez, look at me prattle on.

Extraction Point time. As an uninspired expansion pack EP doesn't add anything particularly imaginative. The locations are a creepy but irrelevant church, some creepy warehouses, creepy subways, and a creepy hospital. New enemies consist of a goofy looking supernatural monster and an unnecessary new type of mech. The horror setpieces are all the sudden scare type, and none of the more atmospheric subtle scares (although Holiday's death scene is a type of its own: campy). The one decent part of EP is the Alma split personality subplot with young Alma on your side and old Alma on Paxton's. While interesting, it isn't explained in the least bit, has little bearing on the story or gameplay, and resolves itself in the end anyway.

As I said in the last post, I haven't played Perseus Mandate, but I assume its of the same level of quality as EP. I make this audacious statement on the basis that if there was anything particularly awesome or imaginative in PM, I would have heard about it whilst browsering the web.

So we finally get to FEAR 2, and once again I'm going to leave it for another post. What was initially planned to be a short introduction into the type of thing I'd talk (write, type, whatever) about on this blog has turned into a 3 post monster, which is still quite summarised.

To be concluded. Hopefully.

A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.

Manually doing captions for pictures is going to get tedious...

Several weeks ago FEAR 2 Project Origin was released, continuing the first person shooter franchise started with FEAR. I had some fondness for the first one and plenty of dislike for the expansion packs. This in mind I felt rather ambivalent about the sequel, as although my natural cynicism said it would be bad to mediocre, I hoped that perhaps Monolith had taken what they learned from the earlier games and used it to refine the elements of the series I liked.

Then I played FEAR 2. And died a little inside.

Conveniently I've become accustomed to this sort of disappointment, so rather than feel angry and betrayed, I'm just a little sad.
Before I get into the details, let's have some quick background (enough so people who will be bored, and people who don't won't have a clear picture).

There have been four games in the franchise. FEAR, FEAR Extraction Point, FEAR Perseus Mandate, and FEAR 2: Project Origin. Now FEAR and FEAR 2 were made by Monolith, whereas Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate were made TimeGate, due to the fun of developer/publisher disagreements.
In FEAR you play as the silent Point Man of First Encounter Assault Recon, who has a mysterious past and the capability to see the world in bullet time. The scarce members of FEAR and a lot of Delta Force red shirts face off against a battalion of clone super soldiers psychically controlled by Paxton Fettel, who is searching for his mother Alma (think Samara from The Ring except with fire instead of water, and she kills a little more directly). People die, perception is screwed with, Alma turns out to be your mother, and you try to kill everyone with a nuclear explosion. Fun times all round.
Extraction Point follows right after the events of FEAR, and the midden has really hit the windmill; everything you did in the last game has either been undone (killing Paxton), or made things worse (nuclear explosion kills everyone except the target). Following this pleasant turn of events the FEAR team members spend the entire game trying to get the hell out the city and proceed to fail utterly.
Now I haven't played Perseus Mandate, but you are not missing much. Don't worry, my upcoming rant will elaborate.
FEAR 2 has you playing as Michael Becket of the Delta Force (the same guys who spent the previous games dying as much as.....things that die a lot). After getting bullet time you go from one secret Armacham base another for the majority of the game as you search for a clue, and then a psychic amplifier. In the end you try to kill Alma but instead you just get raped.

Literally.

Well that was the 'quick' background, now time for the actual rant. Except that at this point I'm not in the mood anymore to complain so I guess the point for this post will be a post in itself. Ironically enough (or perhaps intentionally) this sort of inconclusive and abrupt ending right up the collective alleys of the FEAR games.

To be continued.