F.3.A.R

I've not QUITE finished it yet, I'm getting very close but I'm having a brain fart and don't know what to talk about so I'm just going to talk about it now.  Before I start talking about the game itself I just want to say that the title of this game is really fucking dumb.  One, because replacing the E with a 3 is something that only a 14 year old Counter Strike player would think is cool and two, because its not fucking scary.

Here is where I would try to outline the plot but I'm only going to skim over it very briefly because I'm so mad about how misleading the name is.  Basically you play as Point Man (from the first game) or his brother than you capped to stop Sada...no sorry, Sama....no sorry again, Alma from giving birth to ghost babies after she raped the main character from the second game.

Now F.E.A.R 1 was trying pretty hard to be a horror game.  It had the spooky set pieces, lots of areas where there wouldn't be any music playing, a little bit of misdirection here and there as to whats an enemy and what's a spooky hallucination.  It failed, really hard, but it tried and I can commend the effort.  F.E.A.R 2 was a lot more action oriented but the attempts at horror were still there, again, complete failure, but you can tell someone tried at the very least.  F.£.A.R just dropped the horror thing almost entirely and it just became Call of Duty.  They should have called it Call of Jumpscare or L.O.U.D or something.  They do little sections where spooky cultist men will come after you and there's blood on the walls or they'll have a twitchy beast jump out at you but 98% of this game is just shooting dudes in the face with a machine gun.  What's hilarious is I had a friend come over and he saw me playing it and he was like "Are you playing CoD m8?". 

That's not to say that it's a bad game, by any stretch.  The shooting is fun, Point Mans slo-mo mechanic is still satisfying, they now let you play as the brother if you like doing magic shenanigans instead of shooting, it's a generally well made game with a lot of polish.  Just that title is one of the most misleading things in the history of all games.  Still, it's only £13 on Steam and for what you get it's pretty good so if you like your FPS games definitely check it out, just don't expect to get any actual horror out of it, is all.

2019 Vlog: F.3.A.R and Lucky Bags

This ones a bit short and shit because of the hectic New Years Holiday schedule I'm on right now but that ends tomorrow so I'll have much more time to work on the next ones.  Enjoy my stupid purchases!

Expect to see these every sunday

Tau and Friends Play Shovel Knight Part 3

Cool Looking Horror Games of 2019

So as I said previously, 2019 is going to be the year of horror games for Identity Gaming, both old and new.  So I'm gonna kick off this horror festival by talking about some upcoming horror games that I think look pretty good.

 First I wanna start with World of Horror, pictured above.  Here's the trailer

It looks like some kind of retro-style point and click adventure horror title and I can't wait to play it.  The game is still in development but you can download it for free from the website (https://panstas.itch.io/world-of-horror) and then support it by donating to their patreon! 

The one thing that the game seems to be very proud of is it's inspiration from a Japanese manga artist called Junji Ito.  He's famous for writing things like Uzumaki, Tomie and the profoundly strange Gyo, which is about sharks that grow robot legs and attack people on land.  I'm a big fan of Junji's work so any game that takes inspiration from him is one that's worth watching out for.

I know it's free and I can download it now but I'm gonna hold off for a bit and see if it gets a full release soon so I can play a full version straight off the bat.

 Someday You'll Return is another one that I'm keeping a close eye on.  Here's the trailer

While it doensn't look like there's any combat, from what I've read it seems like surviving in the mountains is of paramount importance and hopefully there will be some puzzles that will help separate it from being just a walking simulator.  You can also see some clear Silent Hill inspiration in the trailer with shifting realities and the game is about a dude looking for his daughter and where have I heard that one before?  There isn't an exact release date but it's scheduled for 2019 and I for one am rather excited.

 Supermassive games, responsible for Grim Dawn (a game I've not played but will be buying very soon I think) is back at it again with The Dark Pictures Anthology.  It looks sort of similar to what I've seen of Grim Dawn only this time its on a boat.  To be honest I'm just a huge fan of the trailer and the British man giving us an ominous synopsis of the game. 

Finally there's The Sinking City, a clearly Lovecraft inspired horror games by those guys that did those Sherlock Holmes games.  "Lovecraft inspired" is a term that makes me roll my eyes as much as games about zombies does nowadays but there's something about the trailer that gave me a little shiver with how cool it was when I watched it.  Also deep water and anything involving deep water freaks me the fuck out so this game will probably get right under my skin.  Even just entering the water temple in Zelda kind of makes me feel uneasy and while horror games don't usually freak me out too much this one has a good chance of breaking through my barriers.  Here's the trailer if you wanna see it

And of course I'm looking forward to the Resident Evil 2 remake but I don't really feel like I need to talk about that too much since the hype surrounding it is fairly large.  If there's anything else I should be keeping an eye on, lemme know in a comment!

Tau and Friends Play Shovel Knight Part 2

I just want ONE AR zombie survival game

So a little while ago a friend of mine brought to my attention a game called mobile called The Walking Dead: Our World.  The game looked, at first glace, like a sort of Pokemon Go-esque thing where you go around killing zombies and it looked pretty cool.  However when I got home I found out that going around killing zombies with your phone camera seems to be the ONLY thing you do.  Granted I haven't played it yet and I'm such a sucker for TWD I'll at least give it a try but my disappointment is pretty high.

Ever since the success of Pokemon Go I've had this fantasy about an AR zombie survival game that would involve running around your local area to find supplies and fight for survival.  At the start of the game you'd register a location as your "base", it could be your home or place of work or wherever the hell you like.  You'd build up a base and gather survivors and every so often on the map little caches of supplies would pop up around the area your in.  You'd be tasked with going off and gathering supplies and keeping your camp alive but when you went out you'd be chased about by zombies (or whatever else) and if they caught you, you'd game over.  Maybe if you had a survivor in your camp it could act as an extra life or there could be some perma death system, I don't know, but I just want that kind of game to exist.

I got the same pangs of disappointment when I played Zombies Run, a sort of fitness app for mobile.  I thought it would be just that where I'd have to jog about collecting supplies but from the little I experienced of it, it's basically just a podcast you listen to while you go for a jog and the "fun" comes from the fact it asks you to run a bit faster every so often.  Not a bad app by any stretch but just not the zombie mobile survival game of my dreams.

So if you're a game developer and you stumble on this post, please go and make that above idea a reality.  I'm not a game dev so tweak it and make it actually good but at least give me a credit as "Blog Prick" or something like that.  I know zombies are an over saturated genre but I seriously feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in the world of zombie AR, someone needs to get on it.

Tau and Friends Play Shovel Knight Part 1