Careful now, quoting my old posts triggers people more than spiders and anime combined.
But man, that was a rough period for the Steam thread looking back on it, too, but for very different reasons than now.
During that period, there was a weird trend of building up a cult of personality around specific posters and the reigns changed hands a few times, generally with different, disastrous results. I remember the time when Salsashark could derail the thread for pages and pages with 3DS talk because he was the thread's chosen celebrity for the month.
Now, though, no one is specifically the star. No one person has the ability to derail the thread like before so we have all these minor thread-celebrities posting as pseudo-characters with weird interests and quirks that have been taken to an extreme bordering on fetish. I remember when a lot of you started posting in here and some of you used to be normal and that's really, really weird for me.
I've been out of the loop for over a year now, so I don't know the ins and outs of the thread anymore. I miss it sometimes (and some of you guys too), which is why every now and then I'll come back and take a quick glance at the latest posts, but very rarely can I follow a conversation/discussion well enough to participate in it. To me, the move to Community was a very negative thing.
Whilst the guns felt much better in the first game (in the second they just did the job, whilst in the first game they felt markedly different from each other and had "weight" if you know what I mean) I couldn't get over the repetition and sparseness of plot.
In F.E.A.R I felt like i was just going down corridor after corridor after corridor towards office cubicle/boiler room/slight different space which really wore me down. The story being told via the medium of the voice mail was nice but It didn't feel substantial enough...I actually enjoyed the pseudo escort bit because It felt like I was more involved in the story. The game just dragged a bit....
In the sequel because there was a lot more exposition and environmental variation it felt more immersive to me. I actually felt like I was achieving something....I'll remember the school level and the little plot details about the vitamin feeding programs for a while, but there was nothing comparable that stands out as a memorable section in the first game for me (although I'll remember the jump scare in the alley at the beginning of Perseus Mandate for a while! Also Steve Blum helped make Perseus Mandate memorable too)
I'm planning on Installing FEAR 3 tonight and playing through that to compare to the first two games despite all the bad press I've read...
Thanks for sharing this! While I don't share your feelings about the first game getting boring, I certainly understand where you're coming from. That game did feature very few different environments and many similar areas and rooms, and the plot was built around the phone messages and character dialogue, rather than level design. The sequel, as you said, mixed the plot with the areas themselves better, like the school level shows, and the increased variety of backgrounds is appreciated.
As for the plot itself, I enjoyed F.E.A.R. 2's but wasn't as much of a fan of it as I was 1's. The thing you disliked about the latter, getting very little pieces of information at a time instead of a whole lot of exposition, actually what made me care more for it, as I felt I was solving a mystery and slowly beginning to understand what happened. Learning the truth felt incredibly rewarding, and I couldn't stop thinking about it for several days after finishing the game. F.E.A.R. 2 fleshed out the world a bit more, by explaining some backstory and showing what happened after the original game (in the canon universe at least, as Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate take place in an alternate, non-canon timeline), but it never felt necessary. It doesn't reveal anything mind-blowing regarding past events, as most of these elements have been shown in the previous game, and it doesn't add any new ones of that sort either. The only thing about it that left an impression on me (apart from the intro which I had to replay many times due to my failing graphics card) was the ending, because it's such a twisted, disgusting, repulsive and bizarre scene (which I kinda enjoyed for the pure weirdness of it, but looking back it appears to come out of the blue and is something horrible to experience).
The single player mode of F.E.A.R. 3 is shit. Don't go through it alone. Get a friend to play it with you in co-op, preferently with a mic so you can talk about how bad the plot is, and have fun shooting the monsters because the gameplay is rather good (even if cover mechanics in an FPS don't make a lot of sense). Of course, if you do this the atmosphere will be ruined, but it's so bad anyway that you won't miss anything, and you'll gain a lot in sheer entertainment value. Trust me, I played it on my own twice, once per character, and it's awful. After you finish it, it gets worse the more you think about it, so the less attention you pay to the story the better. As a mindless shooter you'll have fun, especially due to Paxton Fettel playing a little different than the Point Man and the several challenges you can complete during the levels (which are stupid for single player, but suit the co-op campaign just fine, provided you skip the cutscenes).