FEAR 2: Project Origin

So it’s 2005. I’ve recently seen F.E.A.R. played on my friend's PC. It looks very, very special indeed. And even better, my friend’s PC isn’t as good as mine, so there’s no way I’m not going to be able to run it. So I buy a copy. And it doesn’t run. It turns out that my rig's specs trump my friend’s in every respect but graphics card. Mine is about as powerful as a piece of toast. Sad times.

So I have two options. I can either take F.E.A.R. back to the shop with my tail between my legs, or man up, invest in some upgrades, and take the full plunge back into serious PC gaming territory. Naturally, I do the latter, and £150, one afternoon of tinkering and 120 frames per second later, we're in business. Was a single FPS worth all of that? Damn right it was. Now listen up and I’ll tell you exactly why.

FEAR 2 is its own metaphor: the baddies are ‘Replica’ troopers: generic cloned soldier dudes. And in this freshly-forged set of new single-player levels, which you can purchase online, you get to play as one of these generic replica troopers. Number 813, to be precise. Oh dear, they’re leaving it wide open for satire, aren’t they? It’s almost too easy.

Why can’t some people just call a spade a spade? Or, in the case of video games, call a health pack a health pack, instead of a multi-purpose, cosmic healitron 3000. We’re sick of developers trying to give their games extra context or dimension by pasting unnecessary and sometimes baffling terminology onto simple, every day game actions or objects. It’s convoluted, embarrassing and totally comically. Below are some of the

I’m not a miserable sexist ass; I’m just a practical observer. One thing I’ve observed is that men and women are different (I figured that one out pretty early on). Since I’m a rational person, I’m aware that nothing is entirely one way or another. Even the divide between life and death is ambiguous (uh, zombies, amirite?).

When Blizzard showed off Diablo III for the first time at the developer's World Wide Invitational 2008 in Paris, France, more than a few long-time fans of the franchise experienced self-induced strokes at the sight of some of the revamped features. Change, after all, is difficult to cope with.

Know thy enemy. It’s a smart bit of advice, especially when your enemy may or may not be a creepy ghost girl, a cannibalistic psychic with the ability to control a whole clone army with his mind, or mechanical exo-armor bristling with missiles and invulnerable to all conventional weaponry. Clearly, to get through upcoming horror-shooter FEAR 2: Project Origin, you’re going to need all the help you can get.