Zillameth on 29/1/2009 at 16:20

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The story in F.E.A.R. was, most of all, skillfully directed. It had the right pacing. Authors knew when to throw a platoon of soldiers at you, and when to leave you all alone in a dark office with a phone ringing.

Generally, "horror" themes don't work in my case. I don't mean to say they don't scare me (they don't, but do they scare anyone at all?). There's just no tension in those stories as far as I can tell.

F.E.A.R. had more tension than I had bargained for. I was interested, but also a bit worried, and even a bit surprised once or twice. Funny how this game uses very old and cliched elements, but manages to do its job anyway.


Edit - I played F.E.A.R. and I played Halo and in my opinion these two games have nothing in common. A few superficial similarities are just that.

gunsmoke on 29/1/2009 at 17:24

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I loved the messages. Readables break the pacing. You can still fuck around in earshot and listen (like the doom3 audio logs).

mothra on 29/1/2009 at 21:43

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there's a flashback in one of the first intervals where I thought
ok, he's certainly my cousin or brother or even father
and a few scares later I thought
hahaha, they never gonna tell me alma's my mother and got retro-fucked or something like that

a few ringu scares later ( and cheesy ghosts that you can shoot with your gun later) I got my ending and a long face. not that I cared, I liked the combat and the atmosphere, that was enough for me. I just didn't get the press for thinking it's original for putting a few lines of text into a video game. the "spirit" world connection and how it was done was the main flaw in Fear's story not to mention I somehow spoiled myself with blindly guessing the ending, you see I watch many, many movies and can sometimes smell how lazy, fat writers that saw the same movies get their food on the table.

Volitions Advocate on 29/1/2009 at 22:06

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I do recall the dev's for fear openly saying prior to its release that Their intention was to make a game that is, and I quote, "John woo meets the Ring"

the guys are honest enough and frankly I think they nailed it.

In any case I enjoyed the game immensely. I had a real hard-on for hating Perseus mandate when It came out, mostly because it made the pointman seem much less important. but when I realized it was non canon I really enjoyed it for what it was.

Fear is awesome. When you look at the time where people kept pumping out sequels to make money because nobody would risk a new IP... monolith was the company keeping it fresh, who cares if they ripped off a crappy horror movie and made it awesome instead of dumb? What a friggen shame that is.

gunsmoke on 29/1/2009 at 23:30

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I could not get enough of FEAR when it was new. I played it through 2 times back to back, waited a month or 2 and returned to play on the hardest difficulty w/no slo-mo. (self-imposed limitation). The game was so awesome that way.