F.E.A.R.
VU Games
PlayStation 3
When F.E.A.R. (First Encounter Assault Recon) was first released for Windows PC back in 2005, it was easily one of the best shooter games of the year — perhaps even the best. Combining a psychological and physical horror story with conventional first-person-shooter game play, along with a modicum of tippy-toe tension and tactical stealth — plus a whole lot of wickedly vicious artificial intelligence (AI) — F.E.A.R. was (and remains) a tour de force. An expansion pack (“Extraction Point”) and a free version of the game’s online multiplayer component (called F.E.A.R. Combat”) has kept “F.E.A.R. at the forefront of the PC’s best shooters.
A year after its PC release, F.E.A.R. came to the Xbox 360 and similarly rose through the ranks of (too) many 360 shooters to sit righteously as one of the 360’s better games, with Xbox Live’s perfunctory multiplayer modes keeping it relevant to this day.
Now new again on the PlayStation 3, F.E.A.R. is naturally similar to the Xbox 360 version of the game — same story, characters, weapons, same freakishly clever enemies (plus some tacked-on content exclusive to the PS3 version), but, oddly and sadly, it’s actually worse in many respects, starting with pokier, hazier visuals, passing through excruciatingly long load times and ending with clunkier controls.
In fact, like the 360’s controller, the SixAxis controller seems ill-suited to the task of maneuvering, swapping out weapons, shooting, kicking into bullet time, etc, because it’s a handful trying to wrap keyboard-and-mouse conventions into a single game controller. It’d be passable, except the SixAxis’ squishy, bulbous shoulder triggers make the hard-boiled gun-blazing feel a little limp, squishy and slippery. Worse still, there’s a noticeable lag between squeezing a SixAxis trigger and actually firing a gun in the game, which is actually a frame-rate issue, but it feels like faulty control.
The previous generation of consoles saw many good PS2 games making a half-hearted transitions to the Xbox. This time, it seems the other way around.
Still, if you only own a PS3, not an Xbox 360 or a decent gaming PC, F.E.A.R. is one of the PS3’s better shooters … not the best, however, and that’s too bad, because, to date, there are only two shooters for the PS3 available.
Tetris Evolution
THQ
Xbox 360
The only thing more remarkable than the longevity of Tetris — the mother of all puzzle games — is the number of its iterations. The latest, Tetris Evolution, does little to change the basic premise of geometrically shaped blocks (two-dimensional tetrominoes comprised of four pixel-like squares) falling downward. You rotate and route them along the way to have them land at the bottom in the hope of creating at least one contiguous line that will then disappear, making room for the unrelenting stream of new blocks coming down.
It’s still addictive as all heck in this Xbox 360 version, but no more so than the various cheapie and freebie versions littering game-store bargain bins and casual-game Web sites around the world — except the visuals are exceptionally striking and there are eight different modes of play, though each offers just a scant twist on the basic block, drop and vanish shtick.
Even the online multiplayer mode does little to change the fundamentals of the game, save for the ability to dump pieces on an opponent. It’s no big thing.
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