Tag Archives: Xbox 360

F.E.A.R. Too

Ahhh, F.E.A.R. 2. As I mentioned in my F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon overview back in May, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin was what really drew me into to finally getting into the series. I thought it looked awesome, with its semi-forced first person perspective and much more detailed environments. When I started to research more about the F.E.A.R. series I was surprised to find that most of its fans didn’t view Project Origin all that positively, and even those that did often still regarded the first game as superior. After completing F.E.A.R. 2 I think I actually agree.

“Just hanging around…”

After playing the first game I was still quite skeptical about its supposed superiority over its sequel, after all it left a lot of room for improvement and F.E.A.R. 2 seemed to address a lot of those issues. Well it does indeed address them. First of all, it certainly looks good, with a more detailed, modern art style and improved animation. The story, for what it’s worth being mostly a retelling of the first game’s already confusing plot, is told with much better presentation overall. Also the environments are way less repetitive and monotonous which is a well known criticism of the first game. Unfortunately, for the most part, these improvements only serve to raise the game to the level of “average.” That is, while the environments might not be repetitive anymore, they’re also not that much more interesting or engaging. In some way, that actually makes them LESS interesting than those in its predecessor.

“Your squad, who your character is still inexplicably splitting up from constantly.”

That’s kind of the story of the game, really. Many things seemed to get lost in translation to this new engine. The lauded gunplay of the first games doesn’t “feel” quite as good. For the first third or so of my playthrough I was actually actively underwhelmed by it. I eventually settled on my two favorite guns and got used to them, warming up to the game overall, but for a while I was considering not even finishing it. The unique AI from the first game feels stripped down and while the enemies still do cool things on occasion it’s not quite as noticeable or dynamic. I did like the addition of iron sights on guns and ability to “cook” grenades (despite killing myself an embarrassing number of times from cooking them for too long.) Oh, and the slow motion power is still awesome and those mech stages? Sweet.

One oddity about the combat is that I sometimes found myself pining for a cover system of some sort. Perhaps F.E.A.R. 2’s nod to newer style cover mechanics (by being able to flip and move objects to use as cover) also included some additional tuning to encourage cover use, for one the engagement distances were often quite a bit longer than the almost exclusively close quarters fights of the first game, but without a good, ACTUAL cover system I felt overly exposed almost all of the time. Even the ability to lean would be a welcome return. *sigh* I did like the way the health and armor system worked though, keeping me in a near constant state of walking the line between having a good supply of armor and health packs and being moments away from death.

“Iron sights, yes!”

Something else that gets lost along the way are the horror elements. Yes, they’re still there, and no, they aren’t terrible, but just felt a little “by the numbers”. I was happy that I had a flashlight that stayed on and that the environments weren’t pitch fucking black, but the jump scares and Alma scenes were mostly total misses for me. Perhaps the fact that the levels were so much more linear and much more consistently paced than in the first game meant that those scenes were more expected when they showed up. Oh, and I also found F.E.A.R. 2’s soundtrack to be totally unremarkable, which is a huge letdown given how surprisingly great the creepy soundtrack of the first game was.

“Time for a brief MechWarrior break.”

F.E.A.R. 2 is still a fun, well made shooter, and by the time I completed the game I had warmed up to it a bit and was even tempted to try the well reviewed but (somehow still) overpriced expansion DLC. I guess my overall take is that the improvements are largely only skin deep and do very little to advance the series in any meaningful way. I’m glad I played it, but after just playing its somehow more captivating predecessor it just didn’t hook me quite as well as I hoped it might. I almost feel that if the best parts of both games could somehow combine together you might have an absolutely stellar game. F.E.A.R. 3, perhaps? Apparently not. The reviews of that one ensure that I’ll be giving it a miss entirely, unfortunately.

(As an aside, the tomes and tomes of PDA text that attempted to further flesh out the fiction really surprised me. I can’t believe anyone thought this was a good idea. They TOTALLY ruin the pacing, and I’m not sure what would compel me to have to stop and stand there reading these dry “intel” texts every few minutes instead of trying to complete my mission.)

Back to the Grind

I mentioned back in May that I planned to play F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin next but I decided to take a bit of a detour. You see, I came home from running some errands one otherwise beautiful day to find that my house had been broken into and a small assortment of my stuff had been burgled. They took all kinds of heartbreaking and distressing stuff, but as far as the scope of this blog is concerned, luckily the thief only took the few Xbox 360 games that I had out at the time, including F.E.A.R. 2. Much worse, they took my Xbox 360 itself which means I lost years and years worth of old saved games, some of which I had hoped to use to play some of the many sequels collecting dust in my backlog, but I digress. I wasted little time tracking down a decent second hand copy of F.E.A.R. 2 but still being quite bitter about the whole thing I decided I really needed a palate cleanser first: fresh off of my Xbox Live Arcade backlog, Jet Set Radio HD!

“Beat performing and impressive and pointless trick.”

Jet Set Radio (or Jet Grind Radio for us Americans) was a first party Sega Dreamcast game and a total classic to those of us who got into it. The game featured a colorful, semi-open world full of graffiti painting, rollerblading gangs realized in a unique cel shaded graphical style with a bizarre, fun soundtrack and a quirky Japanese sensibility about the whole thing. It’s a hard game to describe in a way that really does it justice. Liking extreme sports, graffiti culture, weird music, and quirky Japanese style myself, the game struck a chord with me and I found myself making my way through to the end of it and coming out on the other side quite a fan. Furthermore, the game’s sequel, Jet Set Radio Future, was one of my main justifications for buying an original Xbox.

This HD release of the game does little more than “up-res” the game to widescreen HD and add a couple of minor enhancements such as slightly better camera control. The models aren’t any more detailed, nor have the textures been improved, but this works fine as the simple, cel shaded style running in HD looks pretty much how you’d remember the game if you played it originally and conveniently forget that it was (probably) running in standard definition on a blurry CRT TV like most of us tend to do when we remember old console games. Really, I have no real complaints about the port itself, and I still love the frantic, crazy soundtrack, the unique graphics, and the weird, almost Katamari-like world, but the gameplay… ugh, the gameplay!

“Gum, getting up!”

Its sequel, Jet Set Radio Future, was an interesting game because it was almost as if Sega took all of the original design documents for Jet Set Radio and simply handed them to a different development team to interpret. In some ways it feels like a remake of the first title – the same characters, though re-designed, similar levels, but again, not quite the same, the plot feels very familiar too, but the gameplay is where the game turned into something else entirely. Jet powered rollerblades and graffiti? Check! Except JSRF was about skating and grinding around quickly and cleanly, and exploring, platforming, and collecting in huge levels. The original JSR, on the other hand, was more of an arcade experience. The levels were small and predictable, and despite the time limits and constant harassment from enemies (who couldn’t be defeated, you just had to deal with them) it wasn’t all that fast. Your score was supposed to be a big deal, and you were always having to race against the clock and your lack of spray cans. Oh and in case it doesn’t sound like it already, it was also, at times, fucking frustrating.

“Actually one of DJ Professor K’s more sensible lines.”

I definitely had some nostalgia blinders on and I hadn’t really recalled how much I felt like I had to force my way through it until playing it again and those old, buried annoyances came rushing back up to the surface again. The biggest source of frustration is that the controls feel slightly less precise than what the game requires of you to execute and, when combined with some of the related skating mechanics feeling like they could use a little more polish, made the challenge feel just a little unfair at times. It’s subtle and hard to really pin down, which really only adds to the frustration. To think, we were playing it with a Dreamcast controller to boot! While JSRF, being a 3D platformer, had plenty of frustrating moments itself, the more refined controls, the increased sense of speed, and the lack of time limits and invincible enemies, made it all feel like a much more enjoyable experience. Indeed, a lot of the memories I had of Jet Set Radio turned out to have actually been from Future. Oops! It should also be noted that I suppose that statement puts me on the JSRF side of a very divisive debate among fans. *shrug*

“Cube skating through Brok… err, Bantam Street.”

So, the game wasn’t exactly the comfort food I was hungry for, but it was still a fun experience once I got used to some of its quirks and annoyances again, and goddamn if I don’t have Super Brothers stuck in my head just like it was 2000 all over again. That said, please Sega, release Jet Set Radio Future HD!

One really cool thing about this HD re-release is that the series is now available on PC for the first time, which is why I managed to steal such good screenshots for once.

Fear of the Dead

Somehow I never played Monolith’s F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon despite being super into PC games, especially online first person shooters, right around the time it came out. In fact I specifically remember a couple of my old Planetside clanmates playing the online only “F.E.A.R. Combat” pretty hardcore for a time. I suppose I was too into military and sci-fi shooters and snubbed F.E.A.R. for it’s whole supernatural/horror angle, which is odd since F.E.A.R. has arguably more in common with military and sci-fi shooters than most games, but I honestly don’t recall my exact rationale at the time.

Fast forward to 2009 when F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin was released and somehow it really caught my attention. Some of my friends evidently picked up on that and got me a copy for the Xbox 360 version for my birthday after it had very quickly hit the bargain bins despite generally favorable reviews. You guys know me and my massive backlog by now though, right? Yeah, I never played it though it has been in my “play this” stack since then. Several years later I was aimlessly wandering around in a random consignment store when I happened across a lone copy of the first F.E.A.R. game for Xbox 360 still shrinkwrapped for under 10 bucks. I hadn’t really planned on playing it on the 360 since I was more familiar with it as a PC game, but I figured what the hell and picked it up.

“John Woo’ing out with a slow-mo powered firefight.”

Given that F.E.A.R. and F.E.A.R. 2 are both relatively short single player experiences and, apart from a few excursions into some really old games it feels like it has been ages since I played a traditional-ish first person shooter, I decided to bump them up on my backlog.

F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon (ugh, that acronym!) has you cast as the newest member of a secret special operations group tasked with confronting supernatural threats. Imagine if Fox Mulder had his own, dedicated SEAL Team at his disposal and you’re not too far off. As the newbie to the squad you’re of course assigned to be the point man, you know, the guy who gets to scout ahead in front of the rest of the team by himself. I like to imagine that this is some sort of elaborate vetting process by which only the very strongest new F.E.A.R. recruits survive being pelted with anvils by angry poltergeists over and over again to be promoted to full-time members of the team. I mean, none of the other characters in the game seem to think there’s anything all too unusual about sending “the new guy” out to investigate a small army of heavily armed clone soldiers and mech suits lead by a physic cannibal, armed only with a submachine gun and an inability to speak. I digress…

“Remember back when nail guns were a thing in games?”

While F.E.A.R.’s mechanics feel more than a little aged to me, remembering 2005 rather fondly it’s easy for me to imagine how this game’s take on Rainbow 6 like semi-realistic first person tactics coupled with a unique enemy AI was actually probably a small but important stepping stone in the evolution of the FPS genre. The noticeably not-completely-linear design of the levels and the occasional focus on gimmicky feeling Half Life 2 style physics puzzles and scripted events were a little jarring to me. Being able to slow down time is neat though, and the Monolith guys went kind of crazy with the destructible objects and particle effects to make an already cool looking effect look totally fucking awesome. From what I’ve seen these effects are a little more subdued in the Xbox 360 version I played, but even there they were eye catching and intense at times, especially against the often incredibly dark spaces in the game. Seriously, this has to be one of the darkest games I’ve played since Doom 3 or perhaps Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. Unfortunately the rest of the presentation is a little lacking – environments are mostly empty with far too little variation over the course of the campaign. It feels like I spent half of the damn game in the same office building but come to think of it, maybe I did?

So you’re exploring these extremely dark, often repeated factory corridors, office spaces, and warehouses taking out these clone soldiers who do all kinds of wacky flanking and just generally don’t seem to behave like most FPS foes, when all of the sudden the face of a mutilated corpse flashes on your screen and all of the shit on the shelf you just looted for ammo comes flying off behind you. *gulp* Then you walk a little bit further when all of the sudden you swear you just saw a creepy ghost child in the corner of the room as you swept your flashlight across it, but now your flashlight’s batteries are drained. It’s not until after you empty your entire magazine into said corner that your flashlight is finally charged up again and you can verify that you were, in fact, just shooting at nothing like a total idiot. Ahh, that’s where the horror stuff comes in! Neat.

“Alma fucking with me… again.”

Honestly, while at first I was a little anxious as I made my way through the levels I suppose I got so used to that tension that I found myself pretty much unphased by the vast majority of the jump scares and other horror elements the game threw at me. It wasn’t until the very last chapter that I felt truly creeped out and even that probably had more to do with the fact that I knew the plot reaching its climax than all of the freaky ghost shit that was going down. One nod I’ll gladly give the game in regards to creating an atmosphere of “horror” though, is to the soundtrack. Wow, what a fucking soundtrack! Dark, foreboding, atmospheric? Its rare that a game soundtrack stands out to me while I’m playing it but this one certainly made an impression.

So did I like it? Eh, yes. Probably not nearly as much as I would have liked it back in 2005, but like I implied, it at least feels like a relic of its time that, along with something like Half Life 2, can easily be enjoyed in a vacuum for what it is. The good parts of the game (the sometimes frantic, sometimes almost tactical gunplay against interesting enemy AIs, the dark, spooky soundtrack, and the other weird horror stuff, mostly) didn’t elevate it beyond that for me, but they do have me very curious to finally play F.E.A.R. 2 next.

Oh hey, speaking of short single player experiences! I also noticed that Telltale released The Walking Dead: Michonne and I immediately hopped on that, and I just wrapped up the third and final episode. This is probably the first time I’ve ever played a Telltale game’s episodes as they were released and while I probably still prefer playing them back to back, overall it was a cool way to digest a campaign.

“Remembering the not-so-good old days.”

Now, I liked The Walking Dead quite a bit, and The Walking Dead Season 2 maybe even more so, and by and large this Michonne centered spin-off is largely the same quality. Good writing, a cool graphic novel inspired aesthetic, excellent voice acting, and interesting choices. It was short and didn’t necessarily go anywhere too interesting, especially considering how little time we’re given to invest anything in most of the new characters we meet in the game, but it was still a fun little side-story and shed some interesting light on Michonne’s past. It almost felt like an expanded take on the style of side stories we got with the 400 Days bonus episode from the first season in that respect.

That said, I have to say ONCE AGAIN, that Telltale REALLY needs to scrap their aging engine. Maybe this has to do with playing the Xbox 360 build of the game rather than a version for a more modern platform, but this has to be the jankiest of Telltale’s games yet: freezing, major hitching, audio desynchronization and muting… bah! The otherwise polished presentation of the game was utterly let down by this piece of shit engine, especially as action heavy as the Walking Dead games can sometimes be. Again, I’m sure playing this on the now positively ancient Xbox 360 probably didn’t help, but I’ve played much better looking games that ran silky smooth so I can’t really excuse it. I mean, if they didn’t want to put the time into making the game AT LEAST reasonably presentable on the system then they shouldn’t have bothered releasing it on it at all. I’m hoping when I go back and play The Wolf Amongst Us and the Game of Thrones game soon they won’t have quite the same level of problems as this poor game has.

If you’re playing it on one of the current consoles or, better yet, PC, and liked the previous Telltale Walking Dead games I’d say it’s an easy recommendation.

Now, time for some F.E.A.R. 2…