This is the start of what will hopefully be an ongoing series over the summer. The premise is simple – I pick an old game, play through it, and ask myself "Is this still fun today?"
I’ll also look at where it fit within the context of the gaming industry at the time, if there are any unique or forward-thinking ideas, but my goal is simply to figure out if these games can still hold up today. And now, without further ado…
Before I got all my gaming news pumped to me by a series of tubes, I would eagerly devour every scrap of information in magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly, Tips & Tricks and PSM. For whatever reason, an article I kept coming back to was a PSM walk-through of "Fear Effect," released in early 2000. The game looked like nothing my thirteen-year old brain had ever seen before. Pre-rendered backgrounds, full voice recording, cel-shading back when nobody knew what cel-shading was, swear words, blood and girls in lingerie. Truly, this title must have been a work of art.
I finally came across a copy of "Fear Effect" in a thrift store earlier this year, all four discs in barely used condition, plus an unblemished manual and jewel case. The fateful issue of PSM had long been discarded and faded from memory, but here in my possession was the game I had placed in an ivory tower for much of my teenage years.
What I found out about "Fear Effect," though, was that it was less "the one that got away" and more like your junior high crush – it was cute at the time, but with ten years of hindsight you have to wonder what on Earth you were thinking.
Quite frankly, "Fear Effect" is a prime example as to why games just don’t age well. Technology that seemed cutting edge a decade ago seems pretty ugly today. The cel-shaded characters still stand out nicely; they’re about on par with the marionette people of ‘Metal Gear Solid.’ The problem is the pre-rendered backgrounds (a big reason the game took up four discs worth of space) are so blurry that look like they have swarms of insects crawling all over them. In most cases, the only thing that stands out on screen is your character. This makes it extremely hard to find the next door you’re supposed to enter because everything looks like it’s been coated in the same fuzzy glaze.
And get ready to see those same fuzzy backgrounds again and again and again. You will be backtracking a lot. The game has you constantly switching between three mercenaries, Hana, Deke and Glas. In order to save space for the backgrounds and full voice recording, though, you’re going to be exploring the same handful of locations as Hana, Deke and Glas on each of the four discs, and you’ll probably get tired of having your characters play catch-up with each other about halfway through the second disc.
Exploration won’t be your attention span’s only casualty, though. The shooting performs admirably in this department as well. Let me explain to you the depth of Fear Effect’s shooting mechanic: pick your gun with the most amount of ammo, slooowly turn towards your enemy and then mash the X button until they fall over.
You can try to evade if you want, but you would have to be double jointed, a contortionist, or have some sort of helper monkey to make full use of all of the game’s controls. You have a 180 degree turn, sneak, evade, cycle weapons, shoot weapons and equip/manipulate on separate buttons and there will be some shootouts where the game will want you to use most of these at once.
God help you if you run out of ammo in a fight, because then you’ll need to jam on the square button to find the next gun (and hope you don’t go past it), hit triangle to equip it all while praying that the enemy hasn’t moved out of the way, which would mean you’d have to sloooowly turn to face him again. You could use evade to roll out of the way of gunfire, but that’s pretty much asking to move yourself out of your own firing range, bringing us back to the same problem as above. The game’s static camera angles also discourage movement; I frequently found myself becoming disoriented while fighting, as wrong one step while shooting would take me to a completely different "screen."
The recommended way to hold your "Fear Effect" controller
Alternatively, you might have found you’ve died during the fight and have to reload from your previous save. Congratulations, this is about half the game. There are games where death is a teacher, letting you gain some knowledge so you can learn to play the game better your next try. "Fear Effect" is simply trial and error. It is less a helping hand and more a schizophrenic director. It has a very specific chain of events it wants you to complete, but does nothing to tell you how to go about accomplishing them. A prime example is at the start of a game where Hana needs to climb down a ladder with a guard next to it, but simply climbing down the ladder results in the guard automatically killing you.
Instead, what I had to do was shoot out a window of shack he was standing next to and fiddle with some controls so I could blast him with steam from some nearby pipes. How the game expected you to figure this out without randomly shooting at the windows, I have no idea. This sort of half-baked adventure game logic permeates the rest of the game, too. How does making a doll mimic the dance moves seen on a video in a bordello open a secret passage? Why is the proper sequence to disarm a bomb on a blinking display on top of a skyscraper? And why is the code to a safe literally plastered on a glowing, neon sign?
For all of "Fear Effect’s" flaws, though, I couldn’t help but find myself becoming a begrudging fan. I liked the near-future China setting, the story that blended crime drama with Asian mythology, and the characters (though Glas’ sometimes spacey delivery irked me). This was a very well directed story, it just didn’t translate into gameplay. Heck, if nothing else it made me immediately go to YouTube after I had beaten it to check out the alternate endings and the leaked cutscenes for the cancelled "Fear Effect: Inferno."
What They Said Then:
"It stretches the boundaries and switches around everything you hold sacred in a game, and tortures you into loving it…Frequent deaths cause a kind of skipping record effect. You eventually move on, but not right away, and it’s noticeable…In the fifth year of the Playstation, nothing could have arrived at a better time. It’s a keeper." – Doug Perry, IGN’s review of "Fear Effect," Feb. 18, 2000.
"The constant pulsing video effects make you feel like you’re actually a character in Fear Effect’s filmic world…What holds the game’s graphics back is that the camera angles, while very cinematic, sometimes make it difficult to judge distance… The storyline’s mature tone is refreshing, enough so that it makes you look past the game’s few warts…" – Joe Fielder, GameSpot, Feb. 23, 2000.
What I Say Now:
"Fear Effect" had a lot of good intentions, but was primarily a victim of its times. It was released during a time when cut-scene length, the amount of time you weren’t playing a game, was a primary bullet point on the back of jewel cases. The industry was so enamored with the CD format’s ability to store sound and video that player participation was often sacrificed for directors trying to be the next Hideo Kojima. "Fear Effect" is an interesting footnote in a time when games were growing up and evolving as a medium, but its incredibly unforgiving gameplay means it has hardly stood the test of time.
How many Tomb Raider games did you fund with this, Eidos?
Next up: the first "Splinter Cell," since the Conviction trailer has finally piqued my interest in the series.
*This originally appeared in my 1up.com blog.