Nothing is scarier than a well-armed mindless clone army being commanded by a cannibalistic psychopath. Unless we’re counting little girls.

I’ve appreciated everyone stopping by in the last few days, and I hope I haven’t bored you too much with my rambling. My intent with this record was to be somewhat less obtrusive in my interactions going forward, so I’m going to try to muzzle my impatient solicitations for more feedback and just appreciate what comes in. I did take note in the last couple days that two of you who were too shy (yes, I’m calling you chicken) to leave comments saying: “The posts are awful lengthy. I was intimidated by all that text, and ran away from my computer and found a place to weep softly. It’s like you have nothing better to do than sleeplessly haunt your own apartment in the constant artificial glow of your TV and then write rambling missives with little to no editorial sense. Also, all your talk about Japanese TV is scaring everyone, and alienating those of us who don’t have a creepy obsession with countries full of short people. It hurts my head and makes me want to go to Burger King to eat fries, support really unsettling mascots and buy video games just to restore balance to the world.”*

If you’re sympathetic to such sentiments, this post is for you. I’ve been playing F.E.A.R. on the XBOX 360 lately. It’s good. It’s good because it’s a solid, graphically impressive first person shooter with a reasonably interesting (albeit derivative) story. The only real complaint I have so far is that, when playing while using a surround sound setup, your own footsteps seem to be localized behind your actual position, rather than where your feet ought to be. But that might be on purpose to creep you out, since the game’s supposed to be scary. And it is pretty scary. I know a guy (let’s call him Andy) who would scream out loud like a little girl playing this game. More than he would just walking down the street or having a conversation with me about the most intense emotional pain I’ve ever felt, even. Speaking of little girls (yes, I’m the segue master, don’t step to me or I’ll put you down, son**), the game’s most frightening vision is a creepy little lass (pictured above) who is obviously inspired by Sadako from Ringu, or at least inspired by Samara from The Ring. She whispers things, melts flesh off people and when you shoot her, she seems affected only in that it makes her a little cranky. Now, everyone has their own particular fears, but these things spell spooky to me. Now, if I pee my pants, I can blame it on playing F.E.A.R. instead of admitting that I’ve become so apathetic and lethargic that I can’t even bother to get up and walk ten feet to the bathroom.

An FPS with J-horror influences is pretty much a game made just for me, if I hadn’t cut down my habit of single-player gaming so significantly. In the past, I might have obsessively played this to completion. Now, I haven’t finished the game and I’ve owned it for almost a month now. It’s not too hard, and it’s not too lengthy. It’s just not impossible to put down. It’s very good, but maybe if it had some clowns like Dead Rising or shaky-camera-running like Gears of War, it would be even more compelling.

* These are not actual quotes. They’re not even remotely accurate paraphrases of quotes. They’re the loosest, most liberal of interpretations of things I think were said to me.

This entry was posted by eugene on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 4:45 am and is filed under american, games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.