I’ve got over a year’s worth of logfiles to peruse, so let’s get to it, shall we?

Since the last time I did this, certain corners of my blog have gotten a lot more popular. For instance, there’s a particular post about fixing slow WebDAV performance that draws a ton of visitors each month and has been linked to around the Internet, including in documentation and software wikis, even though I was merely reprinting a solution that I’d found elsewhere. (Guess I better make sure I never delete it or change its permalink.) As a result, my search logs are stuffed with dozens or even hundreds of these types of queries each and every month.

I’ve mostly discarded those keyphrases for the purposes of this post, but there’s still plenty of zany fodder in the search logs beneath all of that unfunny relevance. Whether it’s a particularly amusing query for an otherwise sensible topic, or a search that is apropos of God only knows what, I’ve collected what I hope will be an entertaining selection below.

• apple slice soda
• faygo honeydew mist
• recipe for bill knapps chicken fricassee
• keebler classic collection chocolate fudge sandwich cookies
• keebler french vanilla creme cookies
• discontinued keebler fudge cookies

Yes, people are still searching for these antique and long-unobtainable foodstuffs, despite the fact that I first (and last) wrote about the subject back in 2006. One guy even knows that his fabled cookies are discontinued! My search logs are filled with these kinds of queries every month. Excepting the seekers of Bill Knapp’s top-secret recipes, I’m not sure what people are expecting to find — someone with a thirty-year-old stockpile of Apple Slice and Keebler chocolate fudge cookies in his Soviet-era bomb shelter? Good luck. But as long as we’re waxing nostalgic on the subject of cookies, anybody remember Keebler’s other stroke of cookie genius from the ’80s? They were called Magic Middles, and they were delightful.

Moving on…

• oddball automotive new mexico

I’m not sure whether this is a mechanic’s shop, a car dealer, or what. I’ve run a search for this query and turned up nothing conclusive. Nothing except my own site, that is.

• do i need a tivo sunscription if i have comcast?

Maybe it’d help if I knew what the hell a “sunscription” was. Beyond that, how does paying Comcast for cable in any way obviate your need to pay TiVo for their guide data? You gotta pay both, so far as I am aware.

• tenchu z hairstyles

This showed up because of a review my friend (and ocassional Oddball contributor) wrote of this game in 2007. But why hairstyles? What the crap? I realize that your character’s aesthetic attributes, including hairstyle, were customizable, but is the hairstyle choice a hallmark feature of this game or what?

• vegas style games xbox

Hee. It’s a legit query, though not really for this site. What’s funny is, I bet I know why this came up.

• star trek online how to take a seat

Seriously. You need to ask how to sit down? In truth, the ability to “take a seat” — or perform numerous other actions, such as the fabled Picard Facepalm Maneuver — are fairly hidden away in Star Trek Online. What’s amusing to me is that it was so important for somebody to know how to sit down that they searched for it. And trust me, it wasn’t just one person, either.

• apple we’ll be back soon font

I think it’s called “Marker Felt.”

• mrs oddball

Hey! Leave my wife outta this!

• star trek online i bought the bundle but it still costs money?

For some reason, I saw this query as being almost lyrical. Kinda like Jerry Reed’s song: “She got the goldmine and I got the shaft!” But I’m not surprised to see this query; I had nothing but problems the one and only time I attempted to buy something from the Star Trek Online store, to the point where I eventually gave up empty-handed.

• oddballs nurse porno

A Google logic failure illustrated. This is a lurid combination of my blog name, the title of the review I wrote of the Thai horror film Sick Nurses, and…porn, which…this site doesn’t feature. Seriously, what the fuck.

• how to listen my radio i install in my gto

This had me rolling, and not just because of the incompetent grasp of the English language. How can you possibly operate a motor vehicle, let alone install a car stereo yourself, and not know how to turn the radio on? Surely that means the windshield wipers and high beams are also well beyond your understanding. This query is scarier than Sick Nurses.

• excellent affinity for destruction intact shepard

Haha, nice. It didn’t take long for this to make it into my search logs from this month, proving that someone else enjoyed Mordin Solus’ quip from the Mass Effect 3 demo as much as I did. (Incidentally, speaking of Mordin, did you know that he has a different voice actor in the latest game? I couldn’t tell, judging only by the limited lines he had in the demo.)

• skip blitzball games

I sympathize, truly I do. But you can’t.

• blitzball simulator

Conversely, here’s a brave soul who enjoys Blitzball so much, he wants a simulation of it. Like a team management game for Blitzball or something. (Maybe he should play Final Fantasy X-2, since I understand that’s more what Blitzball is like in that game.)

• mass effect questions annoying

Renegade Shepard: “I am sick of this reporter’s annoying questions! Garrus, grab a gat and shut her ass up!” Apparently, judging by the number of times some variant of this query appeared in my logs, numerous people find Mass Effect’s conversations really annoying. I guess that’s why the latest installment has the new “Action” experience mode that turns the interactive convos into cutscenes.

• what accent is the man from cradle of life

I think it’s a dialect of Incomprehensible, commonly spoken by natives of Mumbleyville. Seriously, if you mean Gerard Butler, it’s Scottish. And I couldn’t understand him either, if that’s what you were getting at, though given the movie in question, I don’t think we’re missing anything.

• on being an oddball

I mean, I guess I would know, right?

• webdav fucking slow

Out of all the hundreds of queries I get each month for WebDAV issues, using every combination of terms imaginable to describe the problem, I like this one the best. The guy really boils it down.

• why does the display button on my jvc head unit work

If I understood you correctly, you’re asking why the display button…is working properly? Who asks questions like this? “Holy shit, why does everything work RIGHT? This stuff is doing what it’s supposed to and I can’t TAKE IT!”

• skyrim too few voice actors

Jesus, yes. JESUS, YES.

• how can i get an illegal cable card for my tivo

Oh, that’s very good. This is like that one I had a few years ago where some guy was Googling for the best place to buy illegal drugs. You might as well just search for “where can I steal a TiVo from” while you’re at it.

• tahmoh penikett kotor

It looks as though somebody else made the same connection that I did. (I admit that this is an assumption, but I cannot imagine why else they would have searched for this.)

• horror movie nurse with a trunk 70s

A horror movie about a nurse…with a trunk? From the ’70s? Huh? I have no earthly idea what this query is on about, but I’m envisioning an old slasher shot on Betamovie featuring a tarted-up evil nurse who lugs around a huge trunk and…I dunno, beats people with it while funky guitar licks play. My imagination is odd. (Annnnnnd that’s why this site is named what it is…)

• odd ball the game

Oddball: The Game. That’s awesome. If it actually existed, I imagine it would be an awesome adventure about my incredibly pedestrian life. Sadly, it does not exist, so I have no clue what this idiot was looking for.

Oh…wait. It does exist. And it looks like it sucks, too. Oh well. Probably because it’s not an awesome adventure about my incredibly pedestrian life. If it were, it would have sucked much, much harder.

• i am playing a year and a nice christmas

This sounds like something that a state hospital inmate might run up and say excitedly to you if you accidentally went down the wrong hallway.

• oddball truck driving jobs

Because it’s not hard enough being a truck driver, you want the oddball truck driving jobs. What would those be, anyhow — transporting alien corpses from New Mexico to Mulder’s office or something?

• i knew it would work

I’m so glad to hear that. Why you searched for this phrase, however, continues to elude me.

• i might busy from weekend until next week

*pulls hair* Seriously, what is with people who search for these conversational non-sequiturs? WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO FIND? Are they song lyrics? Movie lines?

• always bet on duke broussard

While I know that “always bet on Duke” is a famous quote from Duke Nukem creator George Broussard, the way this query was structured makes me envision a character named “Duke Broussard”: a big, ponytailed programming guy with a mega-arsenal who kicks ass by coding and snarking aliens to death.

• tomb raider underworld coastal thailand boobs

It seemed like a perfectly legitimate query, until suddenly there was “boobs”. I guess boobs from coastal Thailand are what the searcher would really like to see. As opposed to, say, Valhalla boobs or Arctic Sea boobs. (All of these are locations from the game, and I guess you could technically say that there are boobs at all of them, since Lara Croft travels there. Ba-doom-boom.)

• commander-in-chief bugged out on everyone

Which commander-in-chief is this? What is this in reference to? I may be the Chief Oddball, but I’m not bugging out on anybody, let me assure you.

• roxio burn crap

Another amusing search for what I guess is a crappy product, wherein the searcher doesn’t really want answers, they just want validation that Roxio burns crap. Sounds like a pretty cool slogan, actually. “Roxio: We Burn Crap.” That can’t smell too good, incidentally.

• freedom force boring

Somebody apparently agreed with Pooch’s ye olde review of this game, written back in B.C.E. 950. (I mean, 2004.) He thought the game was so boring, the word even makes its way into the title of the post.

• darfh

Hey Pooch, I think Scott may be looking for his old PS2 memory unit.

• knight rider it’s a bomb code red

This is awesome. Somebody else must think this scene is iconic enough to search for, because there it is — the famous airport security guard’s line from season four’s “Sky Knight.” The guy sees a bomb trundling through the baggage X-ray, exclaims to himself, “It’s a bomb!” and then leans into a microphone and drones generically, “Code red.” Wow! I’m sure that’s proper FAA/TSA procedure for reporting the presence of explosives!

• apple slice soda fermententation

Ignoring the fact that the guy G.W. Bush’ed the query with one too many syllables (“fermen-ten-tation”?), I can only imagine someone would search for this if they had (or were looking to buy) a case of classic Apple Slice left over from the 1980s and were worried about how the stuff might taste after all this time. Maybe it’s the person I alluded to above, who’s got a line on a source of this discontinued food stuffed in somebody’s Soviet-era bomb shelter. Hey, look at it this way: if the Slice actually is fermented — which I doubt, because there is likely no trace of actual apples in that stuff’s apple flavoring — it might be a good way to get drunk.

• thank god i’m not in high school anymore.

You and me both. I don’t know why you searched for this, but I raise my glass (of fermented Apple Slice) to you.

• ted spindler jewish

Ted Spindler may be many things, including the man who spilled instant Quaker oatmeal on the Ventana Nuclear Power Plant’s control console in some crazy fiction of my own invention, but as far as I know he’s not Jewish. …Oh. You mean some other Ted Spindler.

• young nurses are dunking in hospital with doctor

Another one of those bizarre queries that sets my imagination afire with mind’s-eye visuals of a doctor and group of nurses merrily dunking their heads in a pan of water in the basement of some hospital somewhere. Seriously, I’d love to know what this person is really looking for with this.

• chevrolet watchamazon

Is that the name of a new model they’re going to release next year? The “Watchamazon”? Perhaps they can sell it alongside the GMC Sumpinorudder and the Buick Thigamajigiba.

• aztek pontiac raider tomb

I think whoever searched for this is dyslexic. If you read the query backwards it almost makes a bizarre kind of sense. Except it doesn’t, because to my knowledge there was never a “Tomb Raider” special edition of the Pontiac Aztek (although if there was, given the time that vehicle was in production, its pointy nose would have borne a striking resemblance to the pixelated visage of ancient low-poly Lara Croft).

• phony 1080i transmission by some satelitte networks look like poop

Hee hee. He’s absolutely right, but I just love the fact that he searched for this. This. Not a question (“Does it look like poop?”), not a solution (“How do I make this look less poop-like?”), but a statement of fact. More Internet validation-seekers, it appears.

• highly compressed vampire game

So are you looking for a game about vampires that has been compressed (i.e., with 7-Zip or RAR) with maximum possible efficiency? Or is this a game about highly compressed vampire midgets who just crawled out of a trash compactor?

• pictures on the internet i dont want

If you don’t want them, why on earth are you searching for them? Or are you looking for pictures from that “Do Not Want” meme? Because if so, you’re doing it wrong. (Oooh. Meme-mixing.)

• is it wrong to ask someone to do as they are told

Not if you’re their superior officer or paying them to do a job.

• jack dunworth haunted

“The Jack Dunworth M…” …is haunted. I guess.

• pastor john c mills

This is the guy who recorded a whole litany of those Faith Bible Hour “tape cassettes” that my late grandfather left me. I have no idea where Mr. Mills is now.

• i am 51 and dont want to use the internet

Yet, here you are. Using it.

• is jin from fear dead or not

I see somebody else is confused about the F.E.A.R. canon contradictions where Jin Sun-Kwon dies cheesily in the Extraction Point expansion pack and then shows up in F.E.A.R. 3 alive and (mostly) well. Answer: Extraction Point is not canon and should be disregarded (even though it is a higher-quality F.E.A.R. experience than F.E.A.R. 3…).

• i feared that i would run into a last night.

Well, I fear that I will one day have to engage somebody with your mental capacity in conversation.

• i signed a contract with nozzel nolan do i have to honor it?

Isn’t that the definition of signing a contract? But really, what I’m here to snark about with this search log entry is the unmitigated hilarity (and unfortunateness) of a company name like “Nozzel Nolan”. I looked them up and they seem to be a pest control company. Yet all I can think of when I hear that name is “the nozzle” gag from The Venture Bros. “Please do not be alarmed. We are about to engage…the nozzle.”

• toyota commercial oh yea this is serious stuff

“Oh, yeah! Toyota…that’s serious!” Seriously boring. (I assume this was a tagline from a commercial of theirs or something.)

• hello i want a big mac mcdlt quarter pounder

Bahahahaha! I assume this is a reference to the old McDonald’s Menu Song from the ’80s, but what really gets me laughing is the errant “hello”, which was not part of the song. It makes the query read like somebody just walked up to you, said “Hello!” and then started reciting the McDonald’s Menu Song. (I guess we’re back in the wrong hallway of that state hospital again…)

• my mom havebeen loving

Wait…what? All this makes me think of is that guy from Shawshank: “I had your momma! She wasn’t that good!”

• wolfenstein 3d project totengraeber xbox download

As the creator of Project Totengraeber, I think it’s cute that somebody hopes it’s been ported to the Xbox…somehow. (How would I do that, exactly?)

• cablecard fuckery

Ha! Another one that really sums it up. Dealing with CableCARDs is probably one of the worst experiences you can have with a cable company, and given that they’re, y’know, a cable company, that’s really saying something. “Fuckery” indeed.

• thaigirls inn koh samuie

Only one word of that query escaped being misspelled, sadly enough. Since Koh Samui is in Thailand, I’d say it stands to reason that there would be Thai girls there. But if we look closer, it seems that perhaps the searcher is looking for the “Thaigirls Inn”, which I can only assume is a brothel. Either way, have fun getting around with such poor communications skills.

• acura all ugly

At this rate, that might as well be the name of Acura’s next model. The “All Ugly”. Because undoubtedly it will be. (Seriously, though, I should give these guys some credit. They’ve been trying to fix their rampant uglification lately.)

And finally, here’s the last query, which I can only assume was spurred on by my multi-week (sometimes multi-month) absences from posting on this site:

• what happened to the oddball guy

At this moment? I’m right here. But in case I should disappear again, I’d like to present you with a revolving assortment of excuses for it, which you can choose from at random:

• Preoccupied with the baby
• Got sucked into a sidework project that has brought the level of cursing at Oddball Headquarters to new heights
• Too busy bitchslapping Reapers/monsters/Belltower agents in Mass Effect 3/Silent Hill/Deus Ex
• Went to Zimbabwe for fun and profit
• Fell off the back of a truck
• Invented an automatic necktie straightener and quit my job due to sudden financial windfall
• Fell asleep at keyboard

Till next time.

Sony Vaio F Series

As with everything these days, I tend to buy the best equipment that I can afford and make use for it for as long as possible, until it either just plain craps out or my needs significantly eclipse its capabilities. Today’s purchase was no exception, as I decided to choose a loaded-to-the-hilt Sony Vaio F Series, a 16.4″ Core i7 beastie that I optioned with enough equipment to stave off obsolescence for a good long while. What’s perhaps most significant about this purchase, for me, is that it’s the first laptop I’ve ever bought from someone other than Dell.

Excluding the first laptop I ever owned — a 486-powered Canon Innova Book — which was a gift, I’ve only purchased Dell Inspiron or Latitude systems for myself. The quality of these machines got progressively worse; the Inspiron 3200 was a solid (literally!) notebook, but the 8600 that came next was creaky, flaky and hot. Worst of all was the Latitude D620 I bought in 2006 for business use, which turned into a complete heap of slag in two years’ time. Its LCD backlight became dim and uneven, the lone monaural speaker blew out, the battery was reporting imminent end-of-life within six months, and the system gradually slowed to a molasses-laden crawl that even a full reformat and reinstall of Windows couldn’t cure. (This makes it all the more ridiculous to read my glowing impressions of the D620 on my first day of owning it…I shall endeavor to remember this and temper my review of the Vaio F accordingly!)

Although I have since heard that 2006 was perhaps a perigee for Dell and that the quality of their current line of notebooks is much better, I honestly just can’t stomach taking the chance. For the last few months I’ve been quietly looking at various notebook manufacturers, from Sony and HP to Lenovo and Asus, searching for the perfect configuration for my needs. I kind of expect my laptop to do it all: It needs to have a high-resolution screen for my design activities, sufficient RAM for heavy Photoshopping, dedicated graphics for gaming and video playback, a great keyboard for speed typing when I’m writing, and good thermal management so it doesn’t turn into a furnace beneath my wrists. Try finding all of that in a notebook, and at an affordable price — it’s not easy.

I think I’ve managed to do it, though. Although Sony’s Vaio F series isn’t without its problems — the screen isn’t LED backlit, the audio output from its built-in speakers is nothing special and it sucks a fair amount of juice — it’s got literally everything else I needed both for work and play. Thanks to a “Back to School” promotion that Sony’s running (I never thought that I’d actually enjoy a back-to-school sale!), I was able to spec it out with the following:

• 1920×1080 screen that provides plenty of real estate for Photoshoppery and web development
• Intel Core i7-740QM quad-core CPU with Hyper Threading (for a total of 8 threads)
• 8GB of DDR3 memory
• 256GB solid-state hard drive (SSD) to further reduce heat, noise and slowdown
• Blu-Ray writer
• LED backlit keyboard with a full number keypad
• Extended 9-cell battery (provides about 4.5 hours of runtime, not bad for an i7)

Topped off with Sony’s 12 months interest free financing, it was a deal I couldn’t match anywhere else. Sony’s online chat representative even upgraded me to express shipping (2-day service, I think) free of charge.

So why go with the Vaio over, say, the HP Envy 17 or the Lenovo ThinkPad W series? In truth, those machines were my other two top choices. Although the HP’s EyeFinity three-monitor system made it a strong contender for my needs, I was spooked royally by HP’s worst-in-class reliability rating (according to warranty supplier Squaretrade’s reliability study) and the reports that the machines suffer thermal management issues and poor fit-and-finish. The price was also several hundred dollars more than the Sony, with only a 6-month no-interest financing option available. Lenovo, meanwhile, has some great graphic design machines in the W series — that W7xx is amazing with its built-in Wacom tablet and color calibrator — but the price for the configuration I needed was approaching $4,000, and that’s just ridiculous.

And no, I never seriously considered the MacBook Pro — although it would have made a fine computer, it was way too much money, and my job is incompatible with OS X. Who wants to run Windows on a Mac full time?

Sony, meanwhile, offered the most features I needed for a price I could afford, coupled with good reliability rankings and financing options. Also, I was able to actually lay my hands on a Vaio F at the local Best Buy, which really sealed the deal. Yes, I would have preferred an RGB-LED screen, a beefier sound system and multi-monitor support, but these were all things I was either willing to sacrifice or can add later (in the case of the multi-monitor support, via Matrox’s Graphics eXpansion Modules). There simply wasn’t anything else out there that would do the job for the price I could pay — well, maybe from Dell, but I don’t touch them anymore.

Speaking of Dell, I wrote all of the above on my Dell Inspiron 8600 notebook, the one I mentioned back there when I was lamenting about the company’s declining quality. By the time I reached the previous paragraph, the keyboard was so hot that it was uncomfortable to touch and nearly a full second of lag had developed between each keystroke and the corresponding character’s appearance on the screen. When the machine finally started flashing its “battery charging circuitry malfunction” lamp as if the universe was about to explode, I shut it the hell off, unplugged it and went back to my desktop workstation. Screw you, Dell — I am so over you that it isn’t funny. (And I was such a rabid fanboy of yours in the ’90s — what happened? If you ask me, I think you got too close to the cow’s consumer-oriented rear end!)

Anyway, I’ve got about 10-14 days before my new Vaio F gets here. Assuming everything checks out OK with it, I’m probably going to round up all the old Dell laptops I still have languishing around and either donate or recycle them all before we move to Texas. No sense in lugging dead weight halfway across the country.

Believe it or not, rabid posts screaming about the new computer I just ordered are a bit of an Oddball Update tradition. You can go way back into the archives and find tales of my gadget-fueled hysteria from the 1990s, which are seriously laughable when you see what kind of hardware I was getting all worked up about and compare it to today’s standards. Now, because I like nostalgia-fueled histrionics, here’s a selection from the Oddball Archives written fourteen years ago this month — July 17th, 1996 to be precise — in which I listed the specs of the latest Dell desktop rig that I was lusting after:

• 200MHz Pentium Pro With 256K Integrated Processor Cache and “Venus” Chipset
• 64MB Parity EDO RAM
• UltraScan 17HS Trinitron Color Monitor, 15.9inch Viewable Size
• #9 Imagine Series 2 PCI Video Board With 4MB VRAM
• 4.2GB EIDE Hard Drive
• 1.44MB Floppy Drive
• US Robotics V.34 Sportster 28.8 Data/Fax Modem
• 8X IDE CD-ROM
• 1.6GB/3.2GB Travan Tape Backup
• Microsoft Windows 95

It was basically a server-class machine (I mean, parity EDO RAM?) that I outfitted for gaming and design activities. It was certainly up to the task, but in retrospect I probably should have waited until the launch of the Pentium II the following year.

Perhaps the funniest part of all from that historical entry is this overwrought bit of expository text at the beginning:

Remember the good old days? Summer, 1993? The Dell Dimension 486 DX-2/66 had just hit my desk and I was up at right around this time of night, playing Wolfenstein 3D, and basking in the glow of that hot new power system. Now here we are, almost exactly 3 years later, and that once hot-to-the-touch configuration is dead. NOW, we are tracking the computer industry’s most advanced new system on the market, complete with more super-upgraded components than even Bill Gates could shake a copy of Windows 95 at.

Oddball Update Archives from July 17, 1996 / 12:19 AM

There are so many anachronisms in that paragraph that if you turned them into a drinking game, you’d pass out.

Anyway, I’ll undoubtedly post an update here when I actually receive the new Vaio F and have a chance to assemble my impressions of it. Assuming all goes well, I’m definitely looking forward to using it during upcoming travels. With specifications that significantly eclipse my desktop, it should certainly be a capable mobile workstation.

Back in November of 2005, I reviewed the original F.E.A.R., then a PC-exclusive title that was on the cutting edge of not only graphical and audio gaming goodness, but also featured some of the most engaging and challenging enemy AI yet seen. More importantly to a player like me, who appreciates the tense atmosphere of story-driven survival horror games, F.E.A.R. was dripping with paranormal spookiness, and featured that peculiar combination of modern military might vs. unstoppable supernatural forces that I love so much. It netted a 97% on the Oddball rating scale (a scale which, amusingly, never appeared again).

Not including the two expansion packs for the original F.E.A.R. (one of which actually continued the story from the first game), the sequel, Project Origin, was a few years in coming. When it arrived it was a cross-platform endeavor available for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Since most of my gaming these days revolves around the Xbox 360, that’s the version I’m reviewing herein.

In the F.E.A.R. franchise, Monolith has created an unusually deep series of expository events and backstory behind the actual games themselves, even going so far as to put together a 62-page “Field Guide” that was offered as a preorder bonus to purchasers of the sequel. In short, a very large, very old and very arrogant defense contractor known as Armacham Technology Corporation (ATC) has gotten itself into deep shit. Back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Armacham was commissioned by the CIA to participate in some of that agency’s “super solider” development projects. As part of the ethics-bending experiments of the day, Armacham created the concept of “replica soldiers”: mass-produced human clones meant as cannon fodder for military use, equipped with instant tactical training built right in.

Quick, find a refrigerator!

Not content to stop there, Armacham also concocted the idea to produce telepathic controllers — specially-gifted men who could control entire armies with their minds alone. The circumstances around which they achieved this, however, were about as macabre as you can get. Suffice it to say, they involve school children, secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace, and, in the end, a mushroom cloud.

Ahhh, Armacham. Another company in the long list of greedy entities who failed to realize that when you fuck with nature, nature fucks with you.

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin puts you in the shoes of Michael Becket, a United States Delta Force soldier who is part of an elite squad known as “Dark Signal.” In a series of events that overlap with the last thirty-or-so minutes of the first game (I really liked this narrative overlap, incidentally — it makes for a near-seamless experience if you play the two games back to back), you and your team are sent in to take Armacham president Genevieve Aristide into custody. But things don’t go quite according to plan. You’re just beginning to realize that the situation is far more complicated than it looks, when suddenly all hells breaks loose: Across town, the secret Armacham vault facility has just self-destructed in a nuclear fireball (events that coincide with the finale of the first game). You and your entire team are knocked unconscious by the shock wave, and when you come to, you’re in a deserted hospital room.

Oooooh, hospital.

Yes, it’s no secret that I have a very special and creepy fascination with hospitals, especially old and abandoned ones. The facility in which you awake isn’t old, but it certainly appears to be abandoned, and as you scour its corridors in search of your missing teammates — some of whom you can hear chattering over your comlink — it becomes more clear than ever that something is seriously wrong about this place. The moment that you see the hospital facility for what it really is was one of the more memorable “holy shit” moments in my gaming career.

Something's not right about this hospital...

From there, F.E.A.R. 2 takes you on a rollercoaster ride of set pieces, from a frighteningly familiar elementary school and a ruined post-nuclear city, to abandoned subway tunnels and top-secret Armacham laboratories housed in the base of an abandoned nuclear power plant’s cooling tower, of all the awesome shit. The locations are far more varied and interesting than those of the first game, which basically took you through a never-ending maze of industrial areas and office cubicles in alternating fashion. And of course, the graphics have been dialed up several notches, with some pretty impressive architecture, supernatural effects, and loads of atmosphere.

The popular “bullet time” slow-motion system introduced in the first F.E.A.R. is back again, and it’s revealed that Michael Becket (the player character) has the same sort of enhanced-reflex abilities that the Point Man had in the first game. It’s not until part way through the second chapter that his psychic senses are fully awakened, though, and as the game progresses, you come to understand just how you fit into the whole mess — and just how many pies Armacham Technology Corporation had its evil fingers in.

There is also, once again, some entertaining chatter between the other members of Dark Signal that you’re a party to (either willingly or unwillingly) through your comlink earpiece, although once again your character never utters a word. (“Why do I have to get stuck with ‘Bucket’?” gripes Redd Jankowski after being paired up with you for a part of the first mission. Don’t worry, he dies later.) You’ll also get some help in the form of comm chatter guidance from a man calling himself “Snake Fist,” who is later revealed to be none other than F.E.A.R. 2′s equivalent to Norton Mapes.

As far as combat goes — and this was one of the high points of the original F.E.A.R. — I can’t help but feel like the AI has been dumbed down somewhat this time around. I recently started up a fresh playthrough of the first game, and was impressed at how often I found myself getting flanked, with enemies doubling around behind me and attacking me from all sides. F.E.A.R. 2, by contrast, mostly makes itself difficult by throwing lots of enemies at you who can all take an ungodly amount of rounds before they fall. The battles become frenetic because you’re likely to have the last of your health blasted away the minute you try to reload. Never was this more apparent than during the cargo tram fight close to the end of the game, which was largely an exercise in frustration. (I should also note that I was playing on the hardest difficulty setting.) The enemies feel (and act) fairly stupid, or at least fairly average. And there’s a group of enemies called “abominations” that are of the “small, insanely fast and ridiculously damaging” variety that will make your teeth gnash in abject rage.

Power armor combat in full swing

That aside, the combat is mostly satisfying on the hardest difficulty, though you’ll never get close to running out of ammunition. There are a wide variety of weapons to be found — more than in the first game — including some high-powered fun sticks like the Shark FL-3 laser that can cut enemies into pieces (and which warns you to throw it down and run away if the overheat light starts blinking, as “the weapon may explode”).

In perhaps the most entertaining addition to your arsenal, Monolith has included several segments where you’ll play from within a gigantic set of “power armor,” essentially a human-piloted mech with enormous vulcan cannons for arms and missile launchers on its shoulders. While the power armor is almost impossible to destroy and its ammo supply is conveniently unlimited, these segments provide a much-needed break from the tense atmosphere of the game and allow you to really let ‘er rip, so to speak, giggling like a kid as you completely destroy the environment around you. If the power armor gameplay was meant as a “test case” for a proposed sequel to Monolith’s 1998 mech combat game, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, then I consider it a success. More like this, please! (Providing perhaps further evidence to that effect, there’s a character in F.E.A.R. 2 who can be seen wearing a “Shogo 2″ T-shirt.)

I’d also like to make a special mention of F.E.A.R. 2′s musical score, composed by Monolith sound guy Nathan Grigg. The creepy ambient / industrial synth sounds that I loved hearing in the first game are back again, with perhaps 75% new material and some new mixdowns of previously-heard cues. As before, there are lots of eerie sounds, plenty of heavy percussion, and even a pretty cool Metallica-style “Snake Fist” theme that plays beneath one of your more destructive battles near the end of the game. Nathan Grigg is also the same guy who composed the whimsical, retro lounge-style music for Monolith’s No One Lives Forever games, proving that he’s as versatile as he is talented.

Here are a few samples from F.E.A.R. 2′s soundtrack:

Penthouse

School Suspense

Lunchroom Fight

The score couldn’t possibly fit the game any better. Considering that Grigg is in-house talent with Monolith (as far as I can tell, anyway), this continues ‘Lith’s tradition of full-circle development — they have a history of building all of their games from the ground up, from engine to sound design.

In the end, while F.E.A.R. 2 represents (in my opinion) a slight step back from the tactical prowess of the original, it continues the story’s grand tradition of creeping you out and making you crave more juicy details of ATC’s malfeasance at the same time. It’s chock full of cool new environments to explore, some fairly disturbing imagery (and concepts), and some pretty entertaining gunplay. Although the ending is a bit bizarre, I’d frankly be happy if Monolith churned out a F.E.A.R. 3.

Somebody had a bone to pick with the security guard.

Whether or not a third entry in the series ever materializes, I should point out that there’s a single player expansion pack available for the second game that puts you in the shoes of one of Armacham’s replica soldiers. It’s commonly known as F.E.A.R. 2: Reborn. I’ve purchased it but haven’t yet played it — I may post back with my thoughts on that once I finally get through it, but if it’s anything like what I’ve already seen in the main game, it’ll no doubt be worth the investment.

I was on such a F.E.A.R. high after completing the main storyline (including finding all reflex injectors and intel throughout) that I went in search of my very own Armacham T-shirt. (Yes, they exist. Cafe Press sells them, incidentally.) Coolest fictitious company since Union Aerospace, bishes.

If you’re as obsessed with the F.E.A.R. backstory as I am, you’ll find more fuel for your compulsions at the official F.E.A.R. Wiki.

Oddball Verdict: Recommended

The subject of today’s Retro Game Review is 2003′s Ghost Master by Sick Puppies Studio, a small UK developer that was a division of Empire Interactive Europe Ltd. This somewhat unique strategy game casts you in the titular role of a Ghost Master, whose job it is to command a squadron of spirits as they haunt various locales in the town of Gravenville. You’ll hand-pick a team of ghosts for each mission you’re asked to undertake, and use them to accomplish your objective — whether it be to free a trapped spirit, punish a mortal for meddling in the supernatural, or simply scare everyone away.

The map screen lets you choose your next locale to haunt.

I had fun with Ghost Master when it first came out, but eventually I got bored of it and forgot about it. While waiting for the release of the new Ghostbusters video game on PC and consoles this past month, I was inspired to retrieve my Ghost Master disc from the closet and give it another spin. This time I’m having even more fun with it, and in just a few days managed to get much further in the game than I had before. It was such a good time, in fact, that I was inspired to write this post about it.

When you first start the game, you’re quickly thrust into the world of “supernatural politics” that reminded me a lot of the spirit bureaucracy of Beetlejuice (and do you realize that’s two Beetlejuice references in two consecutive reviews on this site? One more and Michael Keaton will probably show up). Before embarking on your first haunting, you’re assigned a small cadre of ghosts who will do your bidding on the assignment. The map screen lets you select which part of Gravenville you want to haunt next, although at the beginning you’re guided into a tutorial mission to start you off.

Next, on the Team Selection screen, you can choose which of your ghost team you want to accompany you on the mission. You’ll be presented with this same screen before each haunting, where you can either choose your own ghosts or let the game recommend a team for you. I typically find the recommendations sound, especially when you’re trying to free trapped spirits from the next level — more on that later.

Here's where you pick your team of haunters before each mission.

The meat and potatoes of the game’s presentation is very much like that of The Sims. You’re given a three-dimensional view of your haunting locale, and the freeform camera controls let you use the mouse to rotate, zoom and pan around, as well as move between floors (in the case of haunting multi-story dwellings). In each locale is anywhere from a small handful to a large group of mortals — everyday humans to you and me — whom you will usually be instructed to scare away in blind terror. As you progress, the simple “clean house” objectives give way to more complex missions, some of which ask you to lead mortals into a trap you’ve set, or get them to perform certain actions at your behest.

Actually haunting, of course, is the fun part. In order to manifest one of your spirits in the mortal world, you have to bind it to a “fetter.” Think of a fetter as a particular place or object to which your ghost is attached. To make things more interesting, each ghost can only be bound to certain types of fetters. The mischievous Boo, for example, can haunt anywhere indoors, but cannot go outside. Cogjammer can only infest electrical appliances. Other spirits, particularly those who met a violent and unnatural end, can only be bound to a corpse, or perhaps a “murder” or “violence” fetter. These fetters can be identified within the game world by a pale green outline; if you hover over it, you’ll see what kind of fetter it is. To make it easier, hovering over a particular ghost in your “army” will also highlight the fetters it can be bound to.

Once you’ve bound a spirit to the mortal realm, you can unleash its powers. It’s here where Ghost Master really shines, because each spirit has a “banded” power system and a complex hierarchy of orders they can be given which, when combined, make for some pretty interesting effects. But you have to be careful, because using your powers spends “plasm points,” which you only earn by scaring mortals. If the mortals aren’t scared by your silly chain rattling or electric sparks, you’ll find yourself rapidly running out of energy. But if you can figure out the subconscious fears of your prey — each mortal has one — you can strike it like a chord and gain massive plasm points as you watch them shriek, faint or even go mad with terror.

If you want to get more hands-on, you can use the “orders system” to give specific instructions to each individual member of your haunting team. You can ask a spirit to pick on a certain mortal, roam freely, or even use only a particular power (and then only when a certain type of mortal is nearby). This becomes very useful later when you have more detailed instructions to carry out, and can also aid you in the task of freeing trapped spirits.

You can find several trapped spirits in each locale - like Tricia here, who's trapped in a mirror.

Speaking of which, each locale you haunt is home to anywhere from one to four trapped spirits, which are bound permanently to some part of the map unless you free them. You’ll have to figure out the particular action — or chain of actions — that will free each spirit, although if you talk to these ghosts first, they’ll usually give you a few clues. If you succeed in freeing a spirit, it will join your team and become available for you to use throughout the rest of that haunting, and in any future haunting as well. The more spirits you can free, in other words, the more well-equipped your hauntings will be.

The locales are pretty well varied and creative, and most of them pay homage to a classic film in the horror or sci-fi thriller genre. There’s the backwoods cabin that’s reminiscent of the one in the Evil Dead series, the “Calamityville Horror” house (whose inspirations should be obvious), and the farm town of Spooky Hollow, complete with its headless horseman (whom you can hire onto your own squad). Even your own Ghost Headquarters is very well-done, and provides an arena for you to spend “gold plasm points” earned on missions to teach your ghosts new powers that they can use in the field.

In another parallel to The Sims, the mortals themselves don’t speak in recognizable voices, but instead use an unintelligible brand of gobbledegook that sounds like a cross between the infamous “Simlish” and KITT speaking Cantonese. (Ghosts don’t understand English, I suppose.) Although they sound like harmless insects, these mortals have their own nefarious schemes as well, and as the game progresses, they’ll call in witches, warlocks and even Ghostbreakers (named Ramis, Ackroyd and Murray, I might add) to banish you from their realm. Of course, if you know how to play the mortals’ game, you’ll beat them at it every time.

Wendell, busy ruining another sorority girl's evening.

The game isn’t without it’s bad points — no game is — and you likely won’t feel any of them until you get close to the end of Act II. It’s occasionally buggy throughout, with sporadic issues involving AI, some of which can become a headache. One mission in particular was tough to complete because the mortals would get stuck and wouldn’t leave the house, meaning I couldn’t meet the objective of scaring everyone away. The worst instance of the insipid mortal AI came later, during a mission where I had to surreptitiously guide a group of mortals to a cabin in the woods. These idiots wouldn’t follow me, resisted my obsession powers and then got stuck on the level geometry when I tried to herd them down the correct path. Eventually I won the mission, but not without a lot of grousing and complaining.

Ghost Master was Sick Puppies’ swan song (Empire Interactive didn’t think the game performed well enough, and disbanded the team a year after its release), which is a shame because this is actually a very well-made game, AI bugs aside. It received mixed reviews upon its release in 2003, although several outlets in the mainstream gaming press gave it very high marks. PC Gamer in particular said that Ghost Master was at “the head of its genre” and gave it a 90 out of 100 score. As for me, I’d take it over The Sims any day of the week — or any year of the decade, as might be more apt for this Retro Review.

If you see Ghost Master on the used software shelf of the local game shop or in a bin at somebody’s garage sale, I’d advise that you pick it up. It certainly runs great on today’s PC hardware (hell, it even runs fine on Apple’s five-year-old laptop!), and if this review has intrigued you, you’ll almost certainly get a few days’ fun out of it.

Oddball Verdict: Recommended

I’ve been revisiting several classic PC games lately. Whereas in our last Retro Gaming Month I featured titles from the late ’90s, this time around I’m into newer stuff — vintage 2003 or thereabouts. The first title I’d like to celebrate is Vampire – The Masquerade: Bloodlines, an FPS/RPG mix by Troika Games, which sadly went bankrupt and dissolved last year. Similar in mechanics to Deus Ex, Bloodlines casts you in the role of a vampire in modern-day California, where you become embroiled in the secret underworld of vampire politics and intrigue. Seriously, it may sound goofy, but it’s quite engaging — and very entertaining.

My friend Pooch got me Bloodlines as a Christmas gift a couple years back. Back then, the game pushed the limits of my computer, and in fact ran a bit choppy in many areas. I played the game a little more than 50% of the way through before putting it down and never returning, although I’m not sure of the exact reasons why I gave up. Well, a few weeks ago, I was surfing through an online message board and saw a discussion about good games of the past three years. Several folks mentioned Bloodlines, which reminded me that I should give it a whirl again — especially with my brand new computer in the house.

The experience this time — from a technical standpoint — was totally different. Gameplay was fluid throughout, the graphics were excellent and the atmospheric gameplay really sucked me in like never before. I decided I was going to finish the bloody game this time, so I download a strategy guide from GameFAQS to use in case I got stuck, and then set to work.

As I mentioned, when the game starts, you set up your character. You get to choose which vampire clan you want to belong to, which gives you different abilities and weaknesses. You can also outfit your character sheet any way you see fit. Along the way, you’ll gain experience points which you can spend to upgrade your skills, like a traditional RPG. There’s also four basic forms of combat in the game: Brawl, Melee, Firearm and Special Powers (like vampire magic, sorta). During my original playthrough, I focused heavily on melee and ignored firearms and special powers, and as a result, I ended up in a tough spot later. I made much smarter choices this time around, focusing initially on Brawl and then improving all the other skills equally as I gained experience. I also chose a character from the Tremere clan, so I could make people puke all over themselves on command. Funnnnn.

The game takes you across a landscape of various cities in California — Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Chinatown, etc. — as well as some special locations, like a haunted hotel, a really disturbing mansion, a museum, and so on. The level design is excellent for the most part, and the background music is haunting and mysterious — perfect, in other words. Combat is more mechanical than immersive (more RPG-like than FPS-like) but it gets the job done. The AI is actually quite stupid, but it doesn’t really matter. You play a game like this for the story and the intrigue, not the mindless combat. And there is plenty of the former to be found.

Bloodlines uses the Source engine, the same that powers Half-Life 2. It does not, however, make much (if any) use of Source’s advanced physics processing, which is a let-down. Despite that, it does utilize Source’s excellent character modeling, facial expressions and lip-syncing features, and I have to tell you, the NPCs in the game are some of the most lifelike that I’ve ever seen. Even just the passing pedestrians on the street are so realistic, occasionally you want to just stop and check them out. Like the chick in the screenshot above. Every time she walked past me on the streets of Hollywood, I swear she would steal a sideways glance at me, like I creeped her out on some subconscious level. (I am a vampire, after all — maybe she senses it!)

In fact, the NPCs in the game are nothing short of a pleasure. There are all sorts of wacky, creepy, seductive, sadistic, and otherwise unique characters to be encountered — nearly all of whom have some darkly humorous or macabre story behind them, in keeping with the game’s theme. For example, there’s the twin sisters who own a nightclub in Santa Monica. At least, you think they’re twin sisters — in the end, you discover that it’s just one woman who suffers from a multiple personality disorder! The important NPCs all have unique appearances, too — there’s even a police officer who looks like Jerry Seinfeld. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

My favorite NPC was Yukie, the katana-wielding Japanese schoolgirl who’s hunting monsters in Chinatown. The whole thing is ridiculous, but all kinds of funny. I only wished Yukie’s voice actress sounded less like an American trying (and failing) to read Japanese words properly off a cue card, but the character herself somehow manages to be a straight-up anime cliche that you actually feel something for, and want to help to complete her mission. Troika Games seemed to like dishing out J-pop fanservice, in fact — at the Hollywood Internet cafe there’s a computer account belonging to a Japanese exchange student, and you can read the emails she’s received from her friend back in Japan, complete with horrible Engrish that had me howling.

While the game has light-hearted moments like this, it also has a very serious side. My favorite mission of all was the one where you are sent to the mansion of Dr. Grout, leader of the Malkavian vampire clan, in order to find the missing doctor himself. The Malkavians have a peculiar trait: they’re all quite mad. Ironically, Dr. Grout — in his former life as a regular human — was a prominent psychiatrist at one of the large state mental hospitals of the 1940s. He was “sired” (converted to a vampire) by a vampiric inmate at the asylum, and since vampires have eternal life, has been trying ever since to find a “cure” for the condition. Since the rest of the outside world thinks he is dead, Dr. Grout toils away in secret, performing cruel experiments on insane humans in an attempt to devise the cure he seeks — not just for him, but for his wife, who has also fallen prey to vampirism.

In this case, the inmates really are running the asylum, as Dr. Grout — a Malkavian — eventually went completely mad. What’s really awesome about this mission is, as you wander around the strange and labyrinthine mansion, you can play back tapes Grout has recorded as a form of notes over the years. He becomes gradually more insane and more paranoid with each entry, but what’s really fascinating is how he laments the decline of the great mental hospitals of the ’40s and how they provided a unique and haunting atmosphere that can never be recreated. As someone with a strange fascination with mental hospitals of that time period, I found myself sucked in by this narrative — and thoroughly unnerved. It was, in a word, excellent storytelling.

Unfortunately, I have just one gripe with the game. It suffers from a number of bugs, some of which were fixed by a series of patches — and some of which weren’t. Many of these, in particular, crop up in the later levels of the game. In fact, as you get close to completion, it becomes obvious that the developers were rushing to get the game out the door — level design becomes hurried, lackluster and uninteresting, the level of polish decreases dramtically…and the various engine bugs (which were just minor annoyances early on) start to actually prevent you from completing the game. One bug in particular was killing me every time. If you’re in an area with a lot of machinery or other objects moving, rotating, spinning or performing some activity on a preset path, if you save the game and then reload, they will no longer be moving. If the motion of these objects is somehow inexorably tied to completing a task at hand, you are well and truly screwed — forced to reload an earlier savegame from before you entered the area.

In fact, I was being faced with that exact bug the last time I fired up the game. I was at a secret lab in Chinatown, where experiments were being performed on me as if to prove that I was actually a vampire. There was one room that I could not get through. In order to pass through the room, I had to get beyond a series of whirling, moving blades. I got cut to pieces, so I reloaded my game to try again. Much to my dismay, the blades were no longer moving. And because of this, I could not trigger the particular script that the game was programmed to recognize and allow me access to the next area. I was so frustrated, I quit the game and have not been back to it since.

I’ll return one day, though, and finish it up. Because overall, Bloodlines is a truly excellent game, decidedly under-appreciated, and certainly worth a purchase — if you can find it. And hey, what’s not to like about a game that lets you have your own ghoul as a pet, anyway? Incidentally, her name is Heather — she becomes attached to you if you save her life early in the game, and later on, she’ll show up especially to do your bidding. Isn’t that sweet. You can be mean to her or nice to her, and I always chose the latter path…although I happened to discover that if you ask her to change her appearance enough times, eventually she’ll decide that you apparently must want to see her walk around in a camisole and panties. Hey, nothing wrong with that, I guess.

Anyway, in lieu of the Gothic experience, I decided to have another go at an older game that I actually liked the first time around (who knows…maybe I’d think it was trash now). The game I chose? Well, as the title of this post indicates, I chose Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare, which I guess is rather fitting, since there’s apparently an Alone In The Dark movie coming out (directed by Uwe “I Only Make Shitty Movies Based On Videogames” Boll—honestly, look at his upcoming slate of films: Bloodrayne? Far Cry? Jesus.).

Getting back on topic, though. I’ve never actually played any of the first three games in the Alone In The Dark series – though Sparse tells me they were a lot of fun back in the day. Indeed, it could be argued that the Alone In The Dark series was the first of what became known as the “Survival Horror” genre, which gave us such gems as the five trillion Resident Evil games, as well as Silent Hill. Of course, while both the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series are both well known for their dark looks and overall atmosphere, Alone In The Dark was very bright looking in comparison—something which the makers of Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare seemingly had in their minds when they went about making their game. Indeed, Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare probably took a lot of its inspiration for its updated character designs from games like Resident Evil, ironically enough—now Edward Carnby (the series’ main character) sports shoulder length black hair and a long trenchcoat, as well as a double-barreled pistol and a triple-barreled shotgun. Yeeeeah.

So yeah, the game: the story is that Mr. Carnby and a Ms. Aline Cedrac are heading out to a mysterious island off the coast of the northeast U.S. called, imaginatively enough, “Shadow Island”, which is home to our game’s central antagonists, Obed and Alan Morton—two scientists in a long line of scientists studying ancient civilizations and something called “The World of Darkness”. Of course, at first neither Carnby or Aline have any notion of this kind of stuff: Carnby is investigating the death of his friend, and Aline is tagging along to translate some ancient stone tablets for Obed. But soon their plane is attacked by some creature, and they both end up at a strange, spooky-looking mansion (actually, Aline lands on top of the manor, while Carnby is dropped off in the woods several hundred yards away).

You can play the game as either Carnby or Aline – and, in a nice touch, the game is actually different (and you learn different bits about the overall storyline) depending on which character you choose. Either way, you make your way through the manor (and several other various locations on Shadow Island), trying to unravel the mystery of just what’s going on with these Morton fellows, fighting strange creatures along the way (including lots of reanimated corpses, both human and animal). Also along the way you have to solve the usual litany of puzzles and traps to advance, as is the usual for the genre. Though it must be noted that Carnby’s is the more “action-packed” storyline, what with more beasts and fights, while Aline’s story focuses more on puzzles and the like (since she’s, y’know, a girl, and we all know that it’s always the men who are up for the fightin’, right?).

The game’s storyline is probably the best part. You find dozens of journals and papers written by long-dead ancestors of the Mortons along the way, filling you in with their various experiences (not all of which were good), slowly fleshing out the plot as you go along. The music is also suitably creepy – definite horror movie territory (interestingly enough, the main theme of the game was done – I believe – by Stewart Copeland, former drummer for The Police). The graphics also aren’t too shabby (especially considering the game is three years old now), but it’s a lot easier to have a game look pretty if most everything is static objects, I’d wager.

The bad? The controls are wonky and slow. But again, this seems to be a complaint with most every survival horror game, and it’s obviously not going to be rectified any time soon. The hit detection is also often atrocious, but especially in two key parts of the game: one, in Edward’s big fight in the manor library against some flying lizard type of thing—the lizard is hovering above your character and, on the screen, is between you and the character. You have to fire grenades at the creature, and often you can’t tell exactly where you’re aiming and end up not hitting the creature at all. Second, and most atrocious, is the final boss fight in the Aline storyline; she and the boss are both standing across from each other on a rock bridge in some caverns. Now, you’d probably think it would be as simple as aiming and firing (since the dude is huge and is RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU), but no. One time I was playing through the game I actually depleted ALL of my ammo in the boss fight (hitting him along the way, or at least it looked like I hit him), and yet the game didn’t detect a single hit on him. Not fun.

However, if you think you can deal with several minor annoyances like this (though the whole “you can’t hit the final boss in one of the storylines” is rather a major annoyance), you might actually enjoy the game if you’re a fan of the “survival horror” genre.

And one last thing: hilariously enough, the blurb on the back of the game’s jewel case is nearly impossible to read. Or at least most of it is, since whoever designed the packaging didn’t realize that dark text on a black background doesn’t really go over too well. Nice.

Tune in next time, when I actually talk about something relevant. Maybe. Hey, I can always squawk about Ashlee Simpson and how she was caught lip-synching on live TV! Right?

Maybe not.

And now it’s time to feeeeel the flaaaames!

Ahem. What I mean is, I think I’m one of the only people on Earth (along with Sparse) who didn’t like Freedom Force when it came out. I mean, yeah, the premise was awesome (playing as comic book characters? Sweet!), but the presentation seemed rather lacking. But the game was a critics’ favorite, as well as a fan favorite. So after taking all of this into consideration (not to mention the fact that the passage of time can do wonders for one’s opinion of a game, and I hadn’t so much as looked at Freedom Force since I initially uninstalled it off my computer back in 2002), I decided to give the game another chance; maybe there was something I overlooked the first time around (something like what happened to me regarding Oni – despite it’s flaws I really liked it my second time through after not touching it for two years)…maybe this time, I thought, things would be different.

Uh, no. Sorry. Still can’t stand the game.

To be fair, there’s nothing really wrong with the game itself – the graphics, while not outstanding, are decent. The sound is indistinct. And you really feel like you’re playing an honest to god comic book, with convincingly retro drawings, backstories for the heroes, and the like. The gameplay just never really grabs me – the game is boring as hell.

Okay, well I guess that means that there is something wrong with the game. The execution is tepid.

Anyway, I went through the first two or three missions, hoping that at some point the action would pick up. Nope. All I did was a) click on thugs until my character knocked them out, and b) repeat endlessly. Where are the REAL villains at? Sure, there was the stereotype Commie Villain™, but that 2-second fight was hardly worth it. Maybe the game gets better as you go along. I guess I’ll never find out, because if a game hasn’t shown me SOMETHING by the third mission, I’m not going to keep playing it hoping for a crumb of something worthwhile (and yet, I thoroughly enjoyed Xenogears, so maybe it’s just me). So back the CD goes into the “never play again” pile on my computer desk (which includes such winners as Nightfire and Street Legal aka “You Have To Patch The Entire Game To Even Play It”). Meanwhile I wait for my new DVD-ROM drive so I can play Silent Hill 4, which has already provided me with more enjoyment than Freedom Force ever could—and I haven’t touched SH4 yet.

And hey! Look! There’s a sequel to Freedom Force coming out. Sorry, Irrational Games. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, yada yada. I think I’ll just wait for BioShock to come out. It’s really hard to believe that the guys who are doing BioShock (and also who came up with System Shock 2—possibly the greatest game EVAR) could come up with this snoozefest. As long as BioShock is TEH AWESOME, though, I can overlook Freedom Force.

And with that out of the way, RANDOM THOUGHTS:

I was at my local Media Play yesterday, checking out the games (including yet another Law & Order game that was apparently just released), when I came across this gem. Hey, I know! Let’s make a Sims-clone, except make it all about the nookie! (Sorry for the Limp Bizkit reference there, it shall not happen again) Though it’s by Eidos, the same fine folks who gave us Boob…er, Tomb Raider, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. I mean, playing The Sims gets tiring after a while, and that has far more much to do besides trying to hook random game characters up, so I can’t imagine you’ll be playing this game past the, oh, five minute mark (if you even get that far). I truly feel sorry for whoever picks this game up.

And finally: I wish the media and everyone would just SHUT UP about how the Boston Red Sox have not won a World Series since 1918. Just SHUT UP. Why, the Chicago White Sox haven’t won a World Series since 1917 – and you don’t hear their fans bitching and whining and talking about the “Curse of ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson” or the “Curse of the Nincompoops Who Fixed the 1919 World Series”, now do you? Hey, at least your team is generally competitive and gets to the World Series on an average of nearly once per decade (even if their last four trips have been excruciating losses, all in 7 games). Try cheering for a team that lost 119 games last year and hasn’t been competitive for over a decade. And oh yeah, Red Sox fans? Your team still has won more World Championships than the good old Detroit Tigers, so nyah. (Yeah, the Tigers have more titles since 1918, I know. They still have won fewer overall than the Red Sox, though.)

Uh, don’t worry. I won’t be using this space to air sports commentary that often. I just had to get that off my chest.

And now—time to draw!

After all, it was January of 1994 when I first discovered that making levels for Wolfenstein was possible. (That same month is also when I acquired Doom, making it probably the most important month in the history of my gaming past.) I was fourteen then, and in my final year of junior high school, so naturally I had little else to think about in my life except for computer games. So I lived, slept and dreamt Wolfenstein. That year I sold a set of 60 levels to Apogee Software and started work on 60 more. Besides gaming, there was very little going on around me that I regarded with much more than a sense of disgust or, at most, a bemused half-interest, including school. I was pretty squarely in the zone.

Obviously I can’t afford (and don’t really want) to be so single-minded—almost obsessed, really—with games these days. But, as is the case with many of our childhoods, I wouldn’t mind reliving the feeling of those same carefree days when absolutely nothing mattered except what was fun, what was exciting and what captivated my sense of creativity. I’m extraordinarily lucky that I have a relatively stress-free life as it is, so I have found it somewhat easy to slip into modes of nostalgic hobbyism these last few weeks. And doing so is like taking a slipstream ride ten years into the past.

In the early nineties, I made a lot of tapes. One of my favorite things to do—and one of the most effective ways I’d found to blow off steam when something at school got me especially keyed up—was to take a hand-held tape recorder into our backyard, pick up a sturdy piece of tree branch and whack things with it. Back in those days I created a sort of “one man radio show” (although I did voices for two characters) that served as the vehicle for my nightly recording sessions. I won’t go into details about that here as it might make me sound schizoidal, but suffice it to say, those recordings provided many hours of entertainment that could be relived by simply playing back one of the many tapes I produced. As the years progressed, I upgraded from a $30 mono Sanyo recorder to a $100 stereo Sony TCS-430, which I still own to this day. If this stage of my life had been allowed to continue indefinitely, I’m sure I would have eventually graduated to MDLP minidisc…wow, to hear the ambience of that Michigan backyard through true digital stereo, without the hiss of a cassette noise floor!

So, while I’m sitting around working on Wolfenstein levels, I find it most engaging to take out some of these old tapes and give them a spin on the cassette deck. They make great background noise (I prefer to have something playing while I’m designing maps, but get too distracted by music), and at the same time, like a subliminal message in an advertisement, they have a more subtle effect on me as well. Hearing me rant and babble on about stuff from 1993, 1994 and 1995—stuff that seems ridiculously trivial in this day and age—is incredibly fun. Looking back on the daily crisis of biology class, or the incessant griping of my 8th grade teachers, ten years after the fact…talk about hilarious! Like any of that stuff matters today. Holy shit, my friend Jimmers got an 86 percent on a goddamn 8th grade math paper and got bitched out by the teachers because it wasn’t good enough. I threatened all kinds of ass-kicking that night, and now it seems like such utter hogwash!

Most of my tapes are unlabeled (since I’m a lazy old fool as well as a nostalgic one), but while that occasionally irks me, most of the time it just makes the act of picking out a tape that much more fun. I’ve got five huge bins of cassettes at home, and while every time I change residences I seem to misplace a couple more, most of the recordings from my entire life’s history are there. I’ll just dig my hand into a bin and pull out a bunch of cassettes, none of which usually have any labels identifying them, then pop ‘em in the deck and see what the daily “tape roulette” has served up. I’ve gotten so I’m taking a handful of tapes to work every morning, and only finding out when I get there what their contents might be. It’s certainly a way to keep from getting bored by a repetitive or tedious work assignment.

Yesterday I uncovered a real gem. An entire 90-minute tape I’d recorded during the course of an 8th grade school day in March of 1994. Yeah…I just carried this recorder around and recorded stuff. Just…stuff. Stuff that’s incredibly funny to play back today, in 2004. A lecture about the Olympics and how 1994 was a “transition year” from the four-year to the two-year staggered schedule system. The nasally shrieks of one particularly disturbed kid as he threw a fit over a math assignment, tearing papers and threatening to call his mother. (Yeah guys, and you thought I was a ticking time bomb.) A lengthy science lecture which was SO INTENSELY BORING, and yet so funny at the same time, it was like comedy gold. The droning of a real, honest-to-God film strip on nuclear energy produced in 1973—which still referred to the NRC by its old name, the Atomic Energy Commission—was especially captivating, as it spoke of the “great hope” of nuclear power and all that rot in a pre-TMI world. Approximately one minute into the filmstrip, the tape player broke, forcing the science teacher (who I still maintain has the most annoying voice of anybody on planet Earth) to say “That’s swell,” then read the entire thing herself, which unbelievably ended up being more boring and droning than the voice on the original 1973 cassette. (I felt like I was listening to an episode of Leave It To Beaver. All the while, you hear a bunch of kids, including myself and Jimmers, making jokes and snide remarks. Wow, I was really a little heller back then!

One thing I gotta admit though. On that particular tape, many many instances of the teachers griping, threatening, and disciplining students were picked up. I used to complain incessantly about their poor attitudes and the way they constantly focused on our mistakes, but in retrospect had largely thought I blew it all out of proportion. But jeez…after listening to one 90-minute tape, I began to feel that pain all over again. Six hours every day of listening to a bunch of people who seem to have made it their life’s work to find at least one thing wrong with everything you’ve done, no matter how good it is…yeah, it’s not that great for morale.

Anyway, when I wasn’t bitching about what a fascist injustice the whole concept of school was, or making comedy recordings about peculiar made-up churches that worshipped the God of the Toilet Paper (yeah, I went to a Catholic school, which somewhat soured my outlook on organized religion, to say the least), I was usually talking about some of my gaming pursuits of the day. Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Descent…all classic games that seem intensely old by today’s standards, but all examples of titles that immersed me like no game since has ever done (with the exception of System Shock 2). I often made recordings of me actually playing these games while my parents were out to dinner or a concert and I had the house to myself, free to crank up the speakers and hoop and holler it up like I had an audience. Playing these tapes back is like watching a movie. There’s just something so damn enjoyable about it.

So lately, with all this “brain fuel” churning through my tape deck, I’ve gotten to the point where I’m designing almost one full Wolfenstein level each day after work, which is funny actually because it’s the same rate at which I used to design maps back in ‘94. And with each level I design, they just seem to get better and better. I have three levels left in episode one, after which I plan to give my friend Pooch a sneak peek (or sneak playtest, as the case may be). Through the course of all this, though, I’ve discovered something even more interesting…that taking a few moments out of every day to immerse yourself in another time and place, whether it be a moment in your past or a fantasy world you create for yourself, is not only refreshing and invigorating, but is also an amazing catalyst for creative thought. If I were to just come home and surf the web or watch TV all evening, I’d go to bed feeling like nothing had gotten accomplished that day. While I do enjoy my job, I don’t feel like the work I do accomplishes anything even remotely noteworthy in the world or in society, so perhaps I feel like I need to create game levels to make up for that. At least somebody out there can enjoy my game levels, but I doubt anybody gets off over the advertiser lists I design or the email campaigns I create.

So, is this post just a bunch of nostalgic rambling, or a public service message advocating the enjoyment of a bit of “personal time” every day to rekindle your creative juices? Who knows—take it for what you will—but I do know that I’m having great fun for absolutely no money, and in today’s world, it’s sure hard to beat that.

First, though, I had to get the hardware ready, so that’s what I spent last night doing. I thought it was going to suck, having to switch between two computers without a KVM, but I’ve got a system down that’s not too bad. My monitor has two inputs and I can switch between them with the push of a button, so that’s all taken care of. I keep two keyboards and two mice hooked up—the keyboard for the DOS box sits on top of the CPU, which is under my desk, and the mouse is hidden under the edge of my monitor so I can slide it out front when I need it. I also hooked up a 1/8” stereo minijack extension cable to the speaker output of the DOS box and routed it up to my desk, so I can plug my headphones into it when I want to switch the audio source.

My DOS box is a Dell Pentium-II 300 which was originally assembled in November of 1997. It’s an LX motherboard, meaning that a PII-300 is as good as you could get (the switch to the venerable BX chipset happened just a month or so after I bought the machine, of course). To that I’ve added the following hardware:

• 128 MB PC-66 SDRAM
• GeForce3 64 MB video card
• Sound Blaster AWE64 (classic ISA)
• Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller from an old Gateway P5 server tower
• Seagate Hawk 2 GB SCSI hard disk (the boot drive)
• IBM Deskstar 8.4 GB hard disk (the games drive)
• Lite-On 48x CD-ROM
• Epson SD-800 dual floppy drive (5.25” and 3.5”)
• A generic 10bT network card, connected to my router

It’s pretty much the ultimate retro gaming machine—more than enough of everything for all those old games, but still old enough hardware to be 100% compatible with all my old stuff. For the most part, I think. I haven’t had too much time to play with it yet, but I believe that GeForce3 might just be too much for the system (more on that later). If I start having problems with old VESA games, I might just have to swap back in the old STB Velocity 4400 and Voodoo2 combo that was in there before. I would prefer the GF3, however, because I do run Windows98 on this box and I’d like to install some OpenGL Doom engine ports which require some beefy 3D hardware to run well. (Yeah, I could run that crap on my main machine instead, but why?)

Last night I was hoping I’d get the hardware setup out of the way quickly so I could play some Wolfy. Didn’t happen. I already had an old Quantum Fireball 1 GB hard drive (November 1995 vintage) in there that was full of Wolfenstein games, but after sitting up for a while, the old bugger had failed. No great loss, since 1 GB is next to nothing. Plus, I had a newer IBM 8.4 GB drive that used to be in my wife’s computer, but since I bought her a new 80 GB monster, the old drive was no longer needed. Ironically, that 8.4 was the original boot drive from that old Dell, so back into the Dell it went. Not as the boot drive—I still wanted the SCSI disk for that—but as the storage drive, segmented into four 2.1 GB FAT16 partitions.

Wow, I guess being so many years removed from DOS had left me a bit rusty. I installed all the hardware and booted the old machine up, and discovered I wasn’t getting access to the old 8.4 HD. So I ran PartitionMagic. Duh—FAT32 doesn’t work in DOS 6.22, idiot. Reformat. I set up those four FAT16 partitions, which sucks, but FAT16 has a 2.1 GB partition size limit so I was stuck with it. Formatted them all and rebooted.

Still no access. Thought maybe I had to specify a LASTDRIVE in CONFIG.SYS. Nope, didn’t help. So I tried FDISK. FDISK was reading those FAT16 partitions as “Non-DOS disks.” WTF! Grumbling, I blew away all of the partitions and recreated them with FDISK. Rebooted. Okay, now I just format them all and I’ll be good to go.

STILL no access. Stupid fraggin’ crap. I can’t format the new partitions either, because I get “Invalid Media Type” every time I try. FDISK shows the new logical drives as “System: UNKNOWN”, probably because they’re unformatted, but why won’t it let me format them? Got this crazy idea in my head that I should reboot with a Windows 98 boot floppy, so I did that. Now the format command from the Windows 98 version of DOS was working—I was able to format the partitions! I don’t quite understand it, but all that matters is that when I rebooted back to DOS 6.22, I had access to all of my nice, clean partitions at long last. Ready to start installing the goods!

I divided up all the partitions as follows:

By now it was 11:30, so I knew I wasn’t going to be accomplishing much else. I decided to test the limits of the rig’s “classic compatibility” by installing one of the most notoriously buggy and picky Wolf-engine games of 1994: the late Capstone Software’s Corridor 7, CD-ROM version. Even when it was new, I had more problems with C7CD than I had with probably any other game in history. I even returned the first copy I bought since I thought it was defective, but it turns out the game was just coded like shit. Anyway, it can be fun when it works, so I thought I’d try it.

Installed the game to the D: drive and fired it up. WHAM. Blank screen. Goody good-good! That’s just what I was hoping to see…not. No error messages, no crashes, no funky sounds, no random reboot…just a blank screen. Sigh.

Here’s where I begin to suspect my GeForce3. It may be too new for this old stuff. If it doesn’t have the same kind of DOS / VESA compatibility that my old applications will be expecting, I’ll have to dump it and go back to the older, crummier video card I’ve got. Actually, I’ve got a bit of a different plan. My wife has a Voodoo3 3000 in her computer, so I’m thinking of giving her the GeForce3 and putting the Voodoo3 in my gaming box. The Voodoo3, after all, was the last video card I actually had in that Dell, so it would be right at home. The Dell does have an AGP slot, although it’s a first generation AGP 1x, so I don’t want to deal with the old PCI video card crap I’ve got in my closet. I also do want to be able to run Windows it a respectable resolution and at True Color. I hate 16-bit color, and being stuck in 1024×768 on a 22” monitor is PURE HELL. You have to sit about ten feet away from the desk or your head explodes.

So when I get home tonight, that’s probably what I’m gonna do: Swap the GeForce3 for the Voodoo3. Once I get that done, I’ll try C7 again. I’m sorta using C7 as the benchmark for determining whether I’ve got my hardware configuration right. C7 always required such a precise set of circumstances to run correctly, if I can get it to fire up, I’ll know I’ve got a good thing on my hands. I know it’s not a memory issue, since I’ve got 612 KB of conventional RAM free, and that’s with a mouse driver, sound drivers and the bulky MSCDEX CD-ROM driver, too.

Once I get C7 right, all my other DOS games are going on there, starting with Wolfenstein. That in itself is gonna take some time, but it’ll be cool when it’s all finished. And maybe this weekend I’ll actually have time to play around with some classic games! Woohoo!

Next to Duke3D, Blood is my favorite Build-engine game. It had more creepy atmosphere than any game I’d played since The Legacy: Realm of Terror. So, naturally, I was excited to get my hands on the sequel, hoping it would be still more of that great horror/action/dark humor trio, imbibed with modern 3D graphics and hardware acceleration. Unfortunately, I was sadly disappointed. Blood II was an unpolished, buggy, unexciting, unfunny mess.

Fast-forward to last night. With the game already reinstalled, I set about applying the patches. There was so much stuff changed, the version number was 2.1 by the time I got finished. After that, I configured my display settings and launched the game.

The game menus were nicely done. I bound my keys, set up other miscellaneous options, and jumped into a new game. Ick. That’s why I stopped playing this game. That thought went through my head in the first five seconds. The models are atrocious—blocky, with horribly blurry textures, and stiff, unnatural animation. The weapons were lame, looked even lamer, sounded worse, and had no reload capability (for ultra old-school action). All of this could have been forgivable if everything else about the game was good, but sadly, it wasn’t.

The level design is crap. As you walk through the levels, everything around you looks like you’re viewing it with your eyes squinted half-shut. Almost every texture is blurry. There are signs and such all over the place, but you can’t even read most of them at all because they’re so low-res. This makes having them there in the first place rather pointless—even the Build engine had texture scaling capability that would let you post up signs that were still readable by the player!

The sound effects blow. Whereas SiN had some of the best sound effects ever to grace an FPS, Blood II has the opposite effect. All of the NPCs talk with the same grating, extreme New York accent. The weapons sound like someone farting, burping, or popping cells of bubble wrap. Only Caleb has decent voice talent, and that’s probably only because they got the same guy who did his voice in the first Blood. But even then, the lines he was given to read are so pathetic and devoid of all humor, it really ends up being for naught.

Did I mention the AI yet? It’s beyond crap. The enemies either shoot you with impossible accuracy the moment they see you (forcing you to run around every blind corner with your weapons already blazing), or they come running at you, not firing, and let you paste them on the wall. Blood splatters stick to thin air, floating above the tortured bodies of these people, whose character models are even worse-looking than the original NPCs in System Shock 2.

Speaking of NPCs, their AI is even worse. All of the game’s various non-enemy characters seem to be scared to death of Caleb, which makes sense I guess, since he’s a dead guy, but they apparently don’t realize this until about thirty seconds after he’s shown up. They all just stand around while you chat with their bad New York selves, then suddenly, they put their arms over their heads and run away—except the AI / collision detection / whatever is so bad, they just run in place indefinitely. Meanwhile, their faces are the ultimate picture of boredom, and their arms are not even waving, just sticking straight up like a damn NFL goalpost. Looks like a bunch of performers in a Cirque du Soleil show.

The very last bastion that could make this game good—the setting and atmosphere—are sux0rs too, unfortunately. Gone is the cool 1920s-era setting, with its run-down buildings, blood-stained hospital floors and creepy old mansions. Gone are the quiet nighttime levels, populated only by chirping crickets and the cold swirl of winter wind around you. Instead, you find yourself pounding the pavement in a futuristic city (probably New York; that would explain the accents at least), which just does NOT fit with the whole storyline, I’m sorry. It’s like a couple of classic storybook characters were transported from the 1800s into 2050 Los Angeles, and the audience is supposed to find it dramatic instead of hilarious. Sorry! Not working!

But, for all this, the game is still on my hard drive. During the last few minutes of play, it started to get a little more insteresting. I found myself in some sort of run-down tenement, all bricked up and with yellowed wallpaper peeling off the walls. Dead bodies lay strewn about, their corpses still filled with knives. (Thought that was a nice touch.) And the new enemies I’ve just started to encounter, these weird zombie-like fat guys who appear to be Frankenstein’s Monster-like reanimations of undead criminals (complete with prisoner numbers on their shirts), are more interesting than the blokes from the Bronx, to be sure. Additionally, the double-barreled shotgun—while it looks as bad as all the other weapon models—is quite fun to use, especially when you hit the right mouse button and unload both chambers into the fat sap who’s shambling toward you.

I’ll keep Blood II around for a while longer and continue to give it the benefit of the doubt. But one thing’s for sure: this game has not aged well. Actually, what am I saying? It was awful-looking when it was brand new. I guess that goes to show you how far the LithTech engine has come, since this same technology has given us such greats as Aliens vs. Predator 2 and the NOLF series!