Baud Attitude

Fear was a pretty good FPS.  It was graphically stunning, particularly considering that it’s a few years old, it had a suitably creepy backstory if you took the time to listen to voice mails and check laptops, and the “Penetrator” might just be my second-favorite videogame gun of all time. (Sorry, nothing beats the Land Shark Gun)

It just didn’t pull off the “horror” thing all that well.

You are almost always in control of your environment, and being scared is all about not having control.

The best scare in the game involves a ladder, and it pulls off the scare because, well, when you’re on a ladder, you have almost no control – your weapon is holstered, you can’t jump off the ladder, all you can do is go up to the top or down to the bottom, and getting on and off a ladder is something the game does for you.  You are actually helpless during that brief period, and this is a pretty rare thing in Fear.

There are also a couple of “let’s flash something right in the middle of the screen” early in the game – again, the player is out of control – and those are plenty jump-inducing, but you don’t see them after the first couple of levels.  The game seems to stop trying to scare you after level 3 or so, and doesn’t pick up again until the next-to-last level.

It doesn’t help that the player is a genuine badass.  Special forces, superhuman reflexes, carrying a small arsenal of guns, in an environment dripping with spare ammunition and where you can save at any time… the proper response to any conflict is to shoot the hell out of it and count bodies later, never “run screaming like a little girl.”

In fact, running – screaming like a little girl or not – usually isn’t an option if you want to progress in the story, and neither is stealth.  The game has a pretty neat melee combat system, but getting close enough to someone to bust out your kung fu is a pain in the arse.

You’re going to have to shoot mans, lots of mans, which leads to the next thing I’m going to bitch about.

80% of the enemies in Fear are, if you follow the story, enhanced-human clone soldiers, all connected via a telepathic link to a single uberpsychic general.

This sounds pretty creepy, and it might be, if only they weren’t so damn chatty.

If you’re walking down a dark hallway with your flashlight on, for instance, and it’s seen by one of the clones, he will loudly shout “flashlight!” to the rest of his squad, which alerts you to their presence.  They’ll also helpfully shout “grenade out!” or “fire in the hole” when they’re throwing a grenade at you, shout for reinforcements when they’re down to low numbers, and so on and so forth.

They’re all supposed to be in telepathic linkup, right?  About the only sounds they should be making are footsteps, and maybe involuntary screams.

Now, I get that it would be really unfair if they silently split into two groups, with one group taking a side hallway to get behind you while the first group set up an ambush for you to walk into, but it would also be super creepy, especially if they were smart enough to use air ducts, etc, and you were trying to figure out from footsteps just where an attack would be coming from.

You do occasionally fight a variant of the clones that IS silent and has Predator-style optical camoflauge, and those ARE creepy as all get out, but the rank and file?  Not so much.

I’d been told that the creepy level ramped way up near the end, and this is true, but it’s only really notable because the majority of the game, after an intro that does a pretty decent job of jolting the player, settles down to a straight-up shooty game and stays that way for a surprisingly long time.

It was still a good game, but it left me wanting.  Fortunately, I have Dead Space to try out next, and that looks like it should make me jump a bit.

I try not to be the “tech support guy” for my family’s computer issues.  I encourage self-sufficiency – and if that doesn’t work, I encourage asking my sister.

It’s hard to do that when you’re being fed, though, and this is how I wound up, this Thanksgiving, trying to figure out why Vista kept claiming that my father had installed a new video card.

That turned out to be the least of his problems.

He has an Acer desktop, about a year old, and somewhere along the line it got in a bad way.  It’s not like it was full of viruses or spyware or anything – I think that any self-respecting piece of malware would have looked at this machine, said “look, man, you’ve got enough problems” and refused to install itself out of pure decency – but it proved that it doesn’t take a virus to really mess you up.

The nice thing about Acers, normally – we have two Acer laptops, by the way – is that they’re very much no-frills machines.  They don’t tend to come with a ton of bundled software.  I suspect, therefore, that the multiple conflicting security suites installed were the result of him falling for the “PC tune-up” service sales pitch at Best Buy.

It had two different anti-spyware programs, two different firewalls, and one of those “free for 90 days!” antivirus programs.

I’m leaving brand names out here deliberately because I used to work on antivirus software and I wouldn’t want to be seen as partisan.

Internet Explorer, when I launched it, had three seperate third-party toolbars installed, all of which opened their respective home pages in different tabs.

Watching this thing boot was an education – one company’s firewall complained because the other company’s anti-spyware was trying to update itself automatically, the antivirus program loaded, complained that his subscription had expired, that his virus definitions were nine months out of date, and then started a full-system virus scan anyway, at the same time as yet another package started trying to optimize the hard drive and what seemed like every application on the system started trying to do self-updates.

Should I mention at this point that my parents have a 256kbps – that’s not a typo – DSL line?

It was the single most effectively gridlocked PC that I’ve ever seen.

It took well over an hour to get enough stuff uninstalled to find out another little drain on its performance.

Running Vista with 1GB of memory isn’t recommended, but it can be made to work.

Running Vista with 1GB of memory on a system with integrated graphics that are set to reserve 256MB of that 1GB for their own use is REALLY not recommended.  While I won’t blame Acer for the software issues, this I WILL lay at their feet with a “guys, what were you thinking?”

Fortunately, there was a BIOS setting that allowed me to set the onboard video to only reserve 64MB.  With that extra bit of RAM freed up and all the shovelware scourged off his machine, he has something resembling a useful computer again.

Still, I think I’ll be getting him some more RAM for Christmas.