Perhaps listening to a constant string of answering machines in the dark sounded like a good idea on paper, but someone in that brainstorm should have remembered that usually, when video games expect you to put down the controller and, you know, watch, they give you something to look at. So until you've merged FDR's fireside chats with Seaman or made an FPS of Lake Wobegon, lets have some text, okay?
I don't read poetry, biographies, or non-fiction essays. I skip forewards, and afterwords, and notes about the type. I'll reach for my DS before a New Yorker or Max's copy of Lucky Jim on any given commute, but that doesn't make me illiterate.
Reading may not be rumble or motion-compatible, multiplayer-enabled in any traditional sense of the word, and you don't even earn achievement points from it, but it remains the fastest way I know to assimilate and comprehend complex strings of data. Except Excel, of course.
Bottom line is I can read quicker than listen, and the quicker I hear what you have to say the quicker I get back to killing people. Bioshock understood this. Why don't you?
okay you get a point for the word "assfuck."
That brings your grand total to...one.
F.E.A.R.: Reading is fundamental. Also efficient.
F.E.A.R.: I might be scared if I weren't so fucking confused
Okay, so it turns out that the other crazy dude was my crazy dude's brother and our crank ho mother was fifteen when she gave birth to us in some defense contractor's haunted genetics lab before getting locked up, naked, in an observation chamber to gnaw on chicken bones for the next twenty-odd years while her estranged sons pursued careers in civil service.
One guy within the company felt the aforementioned "project" could bring about unfavorable media coverage if made public, or perhaps cause one of the crazy dudes to take telepathic control of the company's highly-trained clone army in search of vengeance, so he called about 27 of his closest work associates to express his concerns. Unfortunately they'd all left work early to enjoy the long Labor Day weekend and didn't get the message. But, fortunately, this also caused the building to be deserted of innocent bystanders when crazy evil dude's clone army stormed it that Monday...all except for some frigid ladder-climbing-bitch-with-no-life-outside-her-career and a sys-ops coordinator who was taking advantage of the company's T3 connection to play World of Warcraft.
Tell me to read the fucking manual again. Go on. See what happens.
I was a little confused about F.E.A.R.'s storyline at first, but the game's final stages set me straight, thanks to a string of well-placed answering machines and non-password protected laptops with very impressive battery life. Taken all together, it actually made for an interesting premise. I just hesitate to say whether 15 minutes of story-related dialogue crammed into the end of a game can be called a "plot."
F.E.A.R.: half baked.
Just when I thought no game could possibly make any less sense, one comes along to prove me wrong. As far as I can tell, F.E.A.R. is about some crazy dude with low latent inhibition and a hand-cranked flashlight chasing some other crazy dude whose controlling an army of clones around some poorly lit industrial park office building and checking people's voicemail. And every now and then, for reasons I don't understand, the little girl from Schindler's List appears. Also occasionally there are robots. And ghosts.
Oh god no, it's Anne Frank!
