I'll be completely honest you with: I really wasn't prepared for the amount of time which this list would take to write in its completion. I forgot that whenever I do something like this, I go all out by writing little novels for each of our lovely winning titles. Anyhoo, let's have a big round of applause for game number seis in this fiesta of fun.

F.E.A.R. -- Publisher: Vivendi Universal, Developer: Monolith
F.E.A.R. was one of the games that I came into 2005 with high expectations for. I had briefly heard good things about it here and there, but it was the video showing a little girl in a red dress tearing the hell out of soldiers that really sold the deal for me. I had to play this game, it was just a matter of holding out until such a time had occurred. And such a time did, in fact, occur at some time during the early parts of my spring break in later February/early March of 2005 if my timeline is right (which it most likely isn't). You'll imagine my dismay when the first playable aspect of this, one of the few big-budget single-player FPSs of the year, is the damn multiplayer -- talk about disappointment. All the cool hooks of the game that I'd been reading about for months, such as the slow-motion "bullet-time," the horror setting, the intelligent AI were all absent from this solely multiplayer demo. A demo which was quite underwhelming at the time, as it felt like little more than a badly balanced generic FPS. Things were better a month or two later when a second, far more balanced and polished demo was released, but I was still left wondering: where's my single-player?

This question was answered on August 5th, 2005, when Monolith finally released a public single-player demo, and despite the complaints I may have had back in the day, I greatly enjoyed it. There were at least one or two moments in the demo where I screamed aloud like a little girl, forcing my roommate-at-the-time into a situation where he posed the obvious questions concerning my true gender (it's male, by the way, jackass). And although the demo was one of the shortest I have ever played, I still got a solid hour or so out of it; I played through every one of the four difficulties presented in the demo once, sometimes twice, just because I had a lot of fun with the slow-motion melee kills.



Through a heavy helping of miraculous benevolence from on-high, I was able to play F.E.A.R. a bit earlier than the "rest of the crowd," being one of those lucky few who were able to secure a copy a bit early (a massive day or two ahead of the curve), and while I was definitely psyched to play the game throughout the day, I was mildly disappointed when I had beaten the game by late that very night -- I can also not hide my sadness with the realization that the only scream-inducing moments in the game were ruined by the single-player demo. I cannot say that I was really rushing through the game, as I took my time and played through it just as thoughtfully as I do most of my games, but with gameplay lasting a bit under eight-nine hours, it's not hard to beat a game when you have nothing else to do on a dull vacation day. The game is short, I guess, I guess, would be the main bullet point of this presentation.

Something that compounded the ease of which I made it through game, aside from its short campaign, is that it is a fairly easy game. This is a problem with any game which allows a quicksave at any moment (with no penalty for overuse). In my experience I generally hit the save key (F5) repeatedly to the point where I actually get annoyed by my frequent use of it, though its presence is too tempting to stop entirely. The main reason I bring up the easiness of the game, though, is to ask whether anyone else finds the recent influx of games which incorporate bullet-time to be relatively easy, as games go. Don't get me wrong, Max Payne 1/2, Total Overdose, DOOM 3: Resurrection of Evil, and F.E.A.R. are all fantastically entertaining games, but the incorporation of a "slow time" ability in all of them just seems to make the game far easier than it would otherwise be. Perhaps there is a failed attempt to balance to the difficulty accordingly, but thus far I just haven't seen it balanced all that well. Bullet-time, while entertaining, makes an already easy generation of games all the more easy, I guess, I guess would be the central theme of what I'm trying to get across here.



And, despite what I've said in the past about F.E.A.R., it still remains a very enjoyable game to play. The combat, as I've previously said, is simply the most well-done of any FPS to date. Previously, I had disliked the game's weapons due to the fact that, save for the pistol (and some other, very powerful, later weapons), could only be fired in full-automatic or burst rounds as well as the fairly weak audio sounds on a few of them, but as I continued to play through the game, the disdain I had for these particular features waned. I still absolutely loathe the level design because, although it made "sense," the repetitious room design as well as the heavily overused textures got on my nerves quick. And, seriously, how many different sections of this goddamn building would really be under-construction at once?

Despite my, fairly numerous, misgivings with the game, F.E.A.R. truly is a fantastic game that deserves a single play-through from any serious FPS/action game fans. The story is standard Japanese horror movie fare, but I do give the game props for its quality voice acting, as well as its willingness to fully embrace its mature rating. If nothing else, I wish more people would buy F.E.A.R. to support Monolith's decision to be the only developer to finally have some damn gibs in a new-age FPS -- as well as to support the seemingly surge in amount of work that this excellent developer has been getting over the last couple years (it's as if it took an extra long time before publishers realized that games like No One Lives Forever 1 and 2 were actually fantastic).



No, seriously, why the gib-hate, developers?

Let's just pretend I'm posting this is a special region of time-space where it's still January 7th (and not January 8th, at 3:56am like it actually is).