Dream of Waking Ne Cede Malis

#19 – TimeShift (PC)

I don't know how I made it through this one. I'm going to gloss over the technical details so I can get to why this game really pisses me off.

It's visually competent even though everything has a plasticky look. All the weapons sound weaker than they should and halfway through you get a crossbow that kills every enemy  in one shot. Combined with the ability to slow and pause time, this is basically god-mode. Even though it starts out kind of rough (lots of enemies, weak weapons), this one weapons eliminates nearly all difficulty in the game. There's four types of enemies. In the entire game. Everything takes place in dirty brick buildings. This is the most mediocre first-person shooter I have ever played.

This brings me to the crux of my disappointment in this game; its blatant disregard for the materials it centers itself around. This is a game where you play a nameless guy in a prototype time-travelling suit. Your boss takes off with the first prototype to go back to 1939 (???) and use his advanced technology to install himself as a Hitleresque fascist dictator. You take off through time after him only to have your prototype time-travelling suit damaged in the landing, which results in your quest to track down the big bad guy to get a piece off of his time-travelling suit to send yourself back to your own time. Along the way you help the local resistance overthrow their oppressors through your localized ability to pause, slowdown, and (sometimes) reverse time.

Okay, brain surgeons. When the bad guy, aptly named Dr. Aiden Krone (are you fucking serious?), takes his time-travelling suit to some random point in the past and radically alters the timestream that lead to the creation of his time-travelling suit, he creates a time paradox! Let's ignore that though.

So you have been building another suit through which to travel time. I guess if one time-travelling suit is good, two is better! You're violently thrown through time, and while you manage to mystically avoid reappearing in the timestream in a location free of materials dense enough to kill you outright, you're tossed like a rag doll into a wall that damages your time-travelling suit to the point of stopping you from further jaunts through time. From then on your suit is unaffected by bullets, rockets, exploding crossbow bolts, jolts of electricity, and balls of weaponized plasma.

In fact, your suit can still slow, pause, and when gameplay allows, reverse time! These are the skills you will absolutely rely on to survive your adventure to find Dr. Aiden Krone! These too, inexorably, damage the timestream and create paradoxes! When you reverse time to put yourself in a position you wouldn't be able to get to without reversing time, congratulations! You've just created a time paradox!

The story about what happened before Dr. Aiden Krone took off with his time suit is dribbled out in short (like 10 seconds) cutscenes that (often) interrupt the gameplay and occur with increasing frequency as you get to the end of the game. Apparently the nameless protagonist has been sleeping with one of Krone's female lackeys who has been leaking information on Krone's time suit to him. In the opening cutscene Krone disappears through time but not before he's planted a bomb in his old lab. The bomb explodes and you see the female lackey engulfed in flames and almost certainly dead.

Now spoilers follow but I guarantee I am doing you a favor if the story is the reason you're playing this. When you find Dr. Aiden Krone, he's piloting an enormous mechanical spider. Seriously. To destroy the spider, you have to blow up the plasma turrets on it's back and underside. With your guns. Once it comes crashing down you're treated to a cutscene of the nameless protagonist blasting Krone's brains out and taking the vital piece of the his time suit needed to return to his own time, which was helpfully taped to Krone's wrist. He returns to his own time with just enough time to see his lover destroyed, only to reverse time, disarm the bomb, and save her. In the absolute game's final slap to the face, the wrist computer on the protagonist's time suit flashes "PARADOX CREATED" and he flashes out of existence. WHAT??? In terms of the time-fuckery that this game commits, this is a relatively small infraction!

So here it is, don't play TimeShift. Especially if you've ever put a single brain cell into thinking about time travel. If you absolutely must play a first-person shooter, you can do much better but this will give you a weekend of "entertainment". Right now I'm trying to reverse time to prevent myself from buying this in the first place.

#18 – F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (PC)

I don't know why I waited so long to play this one. I love the original F.E.A.R. so you'd think this would've been a no-brainer.

F.E.A.R. 2 takes place concurrently (only for a short time) and during the aftermath of the first F.E.A.R. You play a SFOD soldier named Becket whose team is grabbed by Armacham, juiced full of experimental drugs, and then sent on a mission to stop Alma while chasing down leads on the how and the why of it all. You get the gist of the story in radio communications and in-game cutscenes but all the details are in logs scattered throughout the levels, similar to the first game but there's a lot of more of them this time.

F.E.A.R. had amazing graphics at the time and Project Origin doesn't disappoint. The effects are similar to the first game with lots of sparks and dust when the bullets fly. The best looking effects come when you're having hallucinations. Colors fade, return, your view goes blurry and sharp, lights flash on and off. It's impossible to describe effectively.

A big complaint about the first game was the lack of variety in environments. It was a lot of offices and industrial areas. Personally it didn't bother me much, but Monolith took it to heart. Of course there's more offices and industrial parks but there's also a school, a medical facility, research labs, and the destroyed streets of Auburn. You never feel like you're walking the same corridors over and over and no one environment really overstays its welcome.

F.E.A.R. 2 also has the same fantastic gunplay that the first game had. Enemies are quasi-intelligent in dropping for cover and flanking your positions. That said, on normal difficulty, the game never gets too hard. I don't think I died a single time. Between the abundance of armor and health packs, the whole game is just a little easy. The only nuance that threw me at the beginning is that when you hit the slo-mo button on and off, there's a little bit of a spin-up and spin-down. It was basically an on-off switch in the first game so having a second of delay really threw me off at the beginning.

My favorite part of this game were the areas where you get to stomp around in the elite power armor. It isn't just for the amazing amounts of firepower the elite power armor brings, or the carnage of the fights you get into with it, but the effects while you're in it. As it takes more damage, alarms scream, the screen gets distorted, and warnings flash manically. It's a hell of a lot of fun and really makes me clamor for Monolith to make good on the easter eggs it's put in recent games and make a sequel to SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division, a mech game they made a decade ago.

There's no easier way to put it: F.E.A.R. 2 is an awesome first-person shooter. I played through it all in a single day, which is a task I don't think I've ever done. It's basically amazing.

#17 – Star Wars: Dark Force 2 – Jedi Knight (PC)

Jedi Knight is one of those games I would've been best off leaving in my memories of it. To say it has not aged well is an understatement. Some of these levels that I fondly remembered are absolutely godawful, in particular the last three and early Jedi levels. Though you get a lightsaber in this iteration and it does become your primary weapon through most levels, reflecting blaster fire with it simply doesn't work early in the game and late in the game it's still easier to use Force Pull to rip the weapon out of your enemies hands before you get shot up too bad than it is to reflect shots back at them till they die. The last boss was a total pain in the balls and left me with this sour feeling. I don't think I'll be playing Jedi Knight again anytime soon.