I’ve started playing F.E.A.R. (which stands for First Encounter Assault Recon which is awful but never mind.) It took me the best part of a week to be able to even get to the main menu because the DVD is copy protected using Securom. A bit of searching shows that this has caused a lot of controversy and Monolith, the developers, have taken a lot of flack over this.

Essentially it meant that, although I have totally legit software and have a ridiculously application free system (I am not geek enough to even know what a disc emulator is!), I still got an error message saying “Cannot authenticate disc.” I ended up updating my DVD-ROM firmware (I am, however, geek enough to know how to do that), patching the game, replacing the exe with a Securom patched version (because Monolith were damned if it was their problem) and ended up uninstalling the game and re-installing it before it finally worked. The Securom patch I used may have been for a more recent version of the software (1.05 or 1.06) than I patched the game up to.

I’m detail this because if this post ends up being Google friendly, it might help someone more than the official knowledgebase helped me.)

Anyway, I can play the game now and it’s a doozy! The enemy AI is very reminiscent of the troops in Half-Life - using cover, throwing grenades (and hiding from the grenades you throw) and even jumping over railings to a lower level. They duck, drop to the floor and, if you hit them in the leg, limp around. One even tried to crawl under a tipped over shelf (which wasn’t very intelligent as I could stand over him and put bullet in his cranium - at least he had the decency not to beg for mercy!)

But, again like Half-Life, one of the best aspects of this game are the scripted sequences. F.E.A.R. is quite creepy. (When I say “quite”, I mean “very”). I suppose there’s a clue in the game title that there are some scares to be had and these are all done in a very cinematic way. The story is some gubbins about psycho paranormal cloned soliders or something and you’re a bit “special” (being marginally psychic and prone to visions and also having super fast reflexes which is simply an excuse to use a “bullet-time” Matrix-esque capability to slow down time and take out the bad guys). But one of the characters is a creepy little girl called Alma.

Alma pops up from time to time - sometimes running past a door way, sometimes behind a door, once she appears exactly where you were standing before you descend a ladder. In good old creepy girl style, she’s got long dark hair (Ringu) is wearing a red dress (Don’t Look Now) and brings to mind the best creepy little girls there have ever been (The Shining, The Exorcist, The Haunting of Julia, Wednesday Addams, Shirley Temple).

The scene above was a great moment where I jumped down and in front of me was Alma. The room suddenly caught fire (Charlie McGee?) but, captivated as I was, I figured it was just a hallucination. Uh uh! It didn’t take long before I flatlined and had to reload to figure that his was a cunning trap. (Actually, once again, there’s a moment in Half-Life that I remember being similarly impressed by - you’re crawling along a pipe when the end opens and a soldier chucks a satchel charge into the pipe. As you go backwards as fast as you can, it explodes and you see the flames coming towards you. Classic!)

Scripted sequences are often accused of taking you out of a game experience but to me they’re a very good way of providing immersion and of driving the narrative. One of the things I didn’t like about Doom 3 (and, for that matter, Quake 4) was the occasional cut-scene they threw in whenever they introduced a new monster. As such they took you out of the characters viewpoint and broke the immersion. F.E.A.R. goes a little further than Half-Life in that it introduces ‘visions’, as if your consciousness is being interupted but you see it from the characters viewpoint.

And let’s not forget that it’s got dissolving ghosts that I keep shooting at in a blind panic!