You will be.
5 Aug 05

I mentioned Blitz: The League briefly in my talk about football. I have concerns about it, but remain optimistic. Gamespot has an article up Here listing the Midway advertising sites where they're giving out (or hiding) information about the game. Also on the football front, there are rumors that 2K games and the Visual Concepts team are working on a Football Legends type of game using retired greats from the past to man the rosters. Perhaps we'll have options after all.

The F.E.A.R. single player demo came out today. If you haven't tried it yet, I can recommend it. You can find it at the Usual Suspects. It does have a slower, tactical feel to the movements. The graphics are stunning even on my aging rig. I'm sure a lot of people won't have the horsepower to play it at their preferred resolution with all the bells and whistles. It certainly seems to be holding its own with the likes of Half Life 2 and Doom 3.

Excuse me while I break off on a side rant for the moment. FEAR (periods assumed) borrows the flashlight from Half Life (& 2). Why do these high tech teams build flashlights that have to be turned off every 30 seconds? If you don't want players running around with their lights on all the time, why don't you punish them logically within the context of the game? If you have your light on all the time, you attract more attention, bad guys get hit bonuses on you, etc. /rant

The game gives you three weapon slots. That's one up from Halo. You still have to make choices about what weapons you carry, but it doesn't feel quite as restrictive. The demo shows you a pistol, sub machine gun, assault rifle, armor penetrating rifle, a combat shotgun and a particle gun. Forgive me if I missed anything. The particle gun was clearly the star of the demo as it had a nice range on the scope, cool firing effects and turned enemies hit by it into charred skeletons reminiscent of Mars Attacks. The sub machine gun seems kind of worthless unless you use it in bullet time when it's nice to have lots of bullets to spray.

Did I mention the bullet time in the demo? At its heart, it's a fairly bare bones implementation, but they have a wonderful effect where enemies are given a slight sheen or glow during bullet time. This makes picking them out and targeting them easier without breaking immersion the way a stark outline would.

The enemy AI certainly made the demo fun. They wouldn't attack the same way twice. I did see them jumping over and crawling under obstacles, providing cover fire, using realistic and accurate chatter, and making intelligent use of grenades (while responding well to my grenades). I hope the teammate AI stacks up as well. The game is supposed to be about you being the junior member of a special ops team, but the demo was completely solo.

They only put a few freak out moments in the demo. They did a good job messing with you. The music did its job conveying that something wasn't right. They could still go a lot of ways with it. If they do it right, it will be an instant classic. The demo was certainly good enough to get this game added to the radar. If you're on broadband, be sure to check out the demo if only to see where graphics are headed. If you're not on broadband, well the demo weighs in at about 650 MB. You probably don't have that kind of time.

Jason