MEMBER BLOG

A small victory
Posted on Tuesday, November 20 2007 @ 02:46:13 Eastern

So... When I was the tender age of 12 or thereabouts, my uncle introduced me to the concept of First Person Shooters, with the hottest new game in the PC world: Wolfenstein 3D. And it didn't take. In fact, it did much the opposite. And throughout the next 8 years or so, my sporadic reaquaintances - Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake 1 and 2; all thanks to my FPS-happy cousin - only reinforced this feeling. And for a reason I bet many of you can identify with: Fear.

See, the one thing I really hate about that kind of game is that they used to fricking scare me. A lot. And that was when I played them on Godmode. Heck, even turning off the monsters in Doom 2 still made me uncomfortable roaming their levels. That's some deep-seated fear ****. I really, really hated the way I could be turning around and the entire screen would be filled with the face of some ugly bastard trying his best to kill me.

And while FPS games are scary as hell - and don't even bring up horror survival games like Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil - it's hardly been the only arena where I've had some problems. Case in point, Ocarina of Time. I always had to pause the game before entering the boss room the first time I played this. I had to fricking muster up some courage. And that Shadow Temple? Took me 2 days to get through, no kidding. Of course, once I just actually got to the boss, that took me 5 minutes to beat, because as soon as the intro sequence is done, the worst was over as far as I was concerned. Yeah, it's weird.

And I have beaten both that and the other Zelda games, even though I still need a little break before some of the bosses. But it's not until now that I finally bought an FPS game. Of course, another thing about that genre is that they by and large are PC games, and I by and large am a console player. And most of them are first and foremost intended for multiplayer, while I pretty much go with single-player games.

But on the other, Metroid Prime 3 is hardly your average FPS game, and I think that's part of why I chose it for my test experiment.  So far, I must admit that it does contain those elements that I used to find too frightening to be fun. But I'm overcoming it. I'm actually overcoming it. Of course, it does help that it's such a ****ing brilliant game that is only partially about shooting monsters. I'll come back to that when it's reviewing time. But for now, make no mistake, I still get scared, especially from entering the big rooms, because that's where there's usually some monster swarming going on. So there is something to overcome.

And as someone with at least a passing knowledge of the Metroid universe, let me tell you this: Walking inside some narrow corridors containing metroids in some sort of suspended stasis that you just -know- you're going to release by cutting off an important power surge that's at the end of these corridors, meaning you know you're going to have to fight the bastards that actually want to suck out your life at brain level (thereby filling all the screen)... You'll more than likely just laugh it off, but in my mind, that kind of foreshadowing is almost akin to something á la the Cthulu mythos.

But I think I'll see if I can borrow the first two games from a pal of mine. And after that... Well, who knows? I'll probably never play a game like Eternal Darkness, but there might be some other single-player-friendly FPS game out there for me.