Nothing To F.E.A.R.

I got myself into quite the pickle recently while playing F.E.A.R. on my PS/3. To understand how that happened, you need to first know how the Save function of the game operates.

Like many console games, F.E.A.R. employs a checkpoint system for progress saves. This means that, as you play through the game, there are periodic automatic saves done for you, such that if you get killed, you'll restart from that point. It avoids the mind-numbingly scary prospect of playing for hours, through many different levels, only to take a stray bullet and have to start all over again. However, it's also not as flexible (read: user friendly) as the way many PC games work, which is that the player can save at any time. Speaking as one of those cautious gamers who will sometimes do very frequent saves - usually because of very frequent dying! - I much prefer to be in charge of the saving. But many games, especially on the consoles, just don't support that.

Usually in a checkpoint-based game, however, you not only have the option of re-starting at the most recent game-initiated save but also of going back to an earlier one. There are several reasons why that capability is good, the most important of which - for me, anyway - being that you can 'undo' some recent poor choice by simply backing up a bit further and playing that part again, smarter this time. What I discovered this past week, while playing F.E.A.R., was that the game doesn't make all of those past checkpointed saves available to you (only a subset) and that, if you pick one of them to resume at, you don't actually get back to that point as you left it. How do I mean? Keep reading!

So one night this week, as Vicki was watching me play for a change, I got into a particularly difficult section of the game. I started off with tons of health and lots of ammunition, only to be set upon by some of the toughest AI bad guys to date, and survived that confrontation with the tiniest bit of health and a very depleted set of ammo left. At which point, as I stumbled forward in the game, it did a checkpoint! A few moments later, as a new wave of villains attacked and made short work of me, I realized just how dire my situation was! My restart situation, after all, was: almost dead, and almost weaponless! Each attempt to get through that latest gauntlet of ne'er-do-wells failed, and I had no way to increase my health or load up on different weapons!

That was when I resorted to resuming from an earlier checkpoint, only to discover that it put me an hour or more earlier in the game - so, not the previous checkpoint or anything close to it! - and reset all of the characteristics that I'd been painstakingly building up (a higher health maximum, a more varied set of weapons, a longer period of Slo-Mo abilities). This essentially made it impossible for me to use those prior checkpoint saves, as they were too infrequent and didn't actually capture my specific profile each time! Very poor design by the game creators, if you ask me!

I then spent one entire evening of gaming - about 90 minutes - trying, again and again, to get through my low-health, low-ammo scenario, with each attempt ending in my demise. Finally I gave up and went to bed, more frustrated than I should've been, considering that it was only a video game!

The next night, though, I happened to stumbled upon the solution, thanks to a "Tip" that appeared on screen as I was loading the game once more. This helpful text 'reminded' me that it's possible to adjust the difficulty level at any time, even during the game. A light bulb appeared above my head, and I immediately dialed my "Normal Difficulty" setting down to "Low Difficulty" and got through that troublesome scene on the first try! Shortly thereafter I was able to find some health, and then I reset the difficulty level back up, and have been playing happily in that mode ever since.

So now I forgive the game designers their poor checkpoint scheme, in light of the adjustable difficulty setting (many games require you to set the difficulty right at the start of the game and don't allow you to change it any point afterwards without starting a new game). If I hadn't noticed that one tip, though, it's possible that I would've given up on the game, more than halfway through (and having enjoyed it immensely up to that point).