Star Road

Nowadays, the beautiful environments we explore in video games are rendered in real time. But back at the dawn of video gaming, consumer hardware couldn’t render lush 3D graphics at all, let alone in real time. This led to the concept of “pre-rendered” computer graphics, which were rendered on a powerful professional workstation and then compressed to be used as backgrounds, sprites, and FMV’s. Pre-rendered graphics were very common on the Playstation, and many games from Final Fantasy VII to Resident Evil 2 to T.R.A.G. and beyond featured animated backgrounds. But what if every background in every scene was fully animated? That was the basic premise behind the style of Fear Effect.

When it comes to games that still images don’t do justice, Fear Effect is one of the strongest examples: virtually every background is an animated FMV loop. Even though the game came on four CD’s, the FMV’s are still heavily compressed to fit the short ~8 hour total play time. On their own, the low-res backgrounds with strong compression artifacts can look pretty bad, but in motion with the cell-shaded characters, this game has a really cool style.

With the internal resolution turned up in the emulator, the difference between the pre-rendered backgrounds and polygonal characters can be pretty stark, but I found the aesthetic of the sharp characters to be much more enjoyable than one uniform, blurry mess–especially for these screenshots. With that said, the game does have a pretty cool look and feel when played on original hardware.

Yeah…crunchy. I would love to see a remastered version of this game with all the FMV’s and characters rendered in high definition.

Your teammate, Glas, is rendered as part of the background in this scene. Not such a big deal in the original resolution, but very obvious here.

I played for a while before I realized that this game does in fact have subtitles. However, the only way to enable them is to go to the main menu, into options, set the subtitle option, then load your game. And you have to do that for each disc. Not only that, but it defaults back to off; so if you turn on the game and load your memory card save, it doesn’t remember your saved settings; it loads the defaults. Weird behavior, and they kept it that way in Fear Effect 2 as well.

I’m getting mad Fisker Karma vibes from the mustache front of this limo, even though that car came out 10 years after this game was released.

And the red aggressor vehicle kinda reminds me of a Ferrari 360. Anyone else see the resemblance?

Our guys are in the black car, and to end the chase we…drive off a dock and crash into the water??

Well, that was easy. The classic “bad guy gives up too soon” trope and the good guys rise from the ashes! I guess we didn’t care about that car.

Whoa, Disc 2 already? This game devours data like pigs in a trough, and after only a couple hours we’re out of space on the first disc.

Disc 2 opens with Hana taking a shower–another classic trope–but this actually sets up a few plot points.

Everyone’s worst fear: you’re in the middle of a shower and you start getting attacked by zombies. All Hana can do is throw on a towel and go!

Meanwhile we switch to our homie Deke with a cool double shot-pistol setup.

This is a bit of an odd one. The bridge catches on fire and extinguishes itself repeatedly in a pattern, and you have to cross when the fires go out. But why is it even doing that..? I shouldn’t think too much into this game.

Hana walks with the most dramatic hip sway known to man. Meryl and Claire have nothing on this.

There is so much style in every single scene. I wish that every screen capture here could be a GIF to show off the animated backgrounds.

The UI is a bit odd. All the gameplay is in the widescreen area in the middle, and all the information is in the black area above and below. When you are locked onto anything, the green target icon appears in the top center of the screen.

They caught us!

While you’re in this standoff, the only thing you can do is scroll through your item list. Wet towel..?

The other setup from the shower scene was that Hana can drop the towel…

…and distract the guard while Deke rolls up and snaps his neck.

In fixed-camera games, I always enjoy getting my character up close and big on the screen.

This game is insanely difficult. Admittedly, I switched on the cheat for infinite health way before this screenshot. The relentless enemies have guns and great aim, and you have chunky, sluggish tank controls and there are zero health power-ups.

Who decided on Comic Sans?? I guess 2000 was a different time. This is one of the few puzzles in Fear Effect, and I couldn’t figure it out on my own. This has nothing on Fear Effect 2 though, which is filled with obtuse puzzles.

This is where you end up when you get off this ladder. You better be clear about the positive and negative space up there, because you’re walking on beams–if you walk straight forward for about 3 steps, as I did the first time I ascended the ladder, you’ll immediately plummet to your death. Oops.

You then have to fight these dudes in that area. They leap around, mocking your slow turning speed and tank controls. At least this game has a quick turn button like Dino Crisis. Don’t fall off!

Running on top of a train and running away from an explosion? Super double trope combo! These are two of my favorites so of course I loved this scene that combined them.

Check out the rimz on this truck. I wonder if this was a stylistic choice or just a badly proportioned model.

Oh! It’s time for Disc 3 already.

The animation quality is quite impressive for a video game in 2000, but again, severe data compression really kills the presentation quality.

I wonder why the subtitles are in a fixed-width font. Even back in the PS1 era, virtually every game with English text used a variable-width font.

Check out the super cool lighting in this scene. Now we have ambient occlusion and ray-tracing to give us sexy, real-time lighting effects, but the old baked-in lighting could go pretty far and still look good.

Not only does this game have a shower scene, it also has an undressing scene for the double whammy of 90’s voyeurism tropes.

First they make you use your imagination…

…and then they just show it to you.

Similar to seeing a pixelated zombie so closely in Resident Evil that it actually looks cute, this low res “sexy” outfit is kind of hilarious with the internal res cranked. Can’t do anything about those gigantic pixels.

It’s easy to get involved in this game because the characters are well drawn and animated, plus the voice actors are really good too. Such a huge difference from Syphon Filter or so many other games released at the time.

Whoa, this was a gnarly scene.

If it wasn’t already abundantly clear, this is definitely a game for adults. But I’ve always thought it was funny that if the ESRB slaps a “M” (Mature) rating on a game, designating it to be for people who over 17 years and older, it can be sold anywhere to anyone. However, as soon as it’s rated “AO” (Adults Only) and deemed to be only for audiences over 18, suddenly it can’t be sold anywhere.

Games like this clearly show the hypocrisy of the system; developers can plausibly claim their creations are for adult audiences, but it’s pretty obvious to me that publishers and the ESRB have a literal vested interest in making sure nothing gets rated above M for the sake of profits: these games need to be sold unrestricted in any store, to anyone who wants them. This is made even more obvious when you look at the Japanese rating board CERO; not only are quite a few (over 100) of our M-rated games given their 18+ “Z” rating (such as Biohazard, Grand Theft Auto, and even the Tomb Raider reboot), there are even games that had content cut from the ESRB M-rated version and still got the Z rating in Japan.

This is how I feel when I get this far into a game these days. I used to have no problem abandoning a game if it didn’t hook me, but lately I’ve been pushing myself towards completion, especially with PS1 games. It sounds like torture but it’s actually quite satisfying to push through and gain that sense of progress; getting to the finish and seeing the ending is an even bigger triumph.

Speaking of which, here we go! The final stretch!

This environment was epic. It reminds me of the trippy flashbacks from Final Fantasy VII.

The enemies at the end here get pretty freaky too.

No targeting reticle on the screen? Too bad, those shots are going nowhere! Just another example of why I had no issue playing this game with cheats.

Glas survived his arm getting cut off! He’s back in action! Although obviously not able to dual-wield guns anyore.

Oh wait, it’s a new disc. Hold on for a second while I reboot the game, go back to the main menu, change the settings, and re-load my save so I can continue playing with subtitles.

I point out tropes a lot, but that’s not because I have a problem with them. In fact, the reason I point them out is specifically because I enjoy them. In this scene, we get the classic “finding that our former teammate has been transformed into a monster” trope.

Just like Resident Evil, you see a human transform into a crazy monster.

Man, this screenshot looks like an unplayable mess. Trust me, it’s a lot easier to figure it out when it’s in motion.

I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on in this game, and it really goes off the rails at the end.

My wrists hurt just looking at this scene.

Ooh yeah, another fun trope. We have to do this one specific thing or else the entire world will be gone forever.

This is such a great “evil laugh” scene. Not just the expression of the main character, but the minions in the back, and the clever Dutch angle as well.

We’re done with Disc 4 out of 4! Now we’re on to…disc 2 again? What?

Seems to me like this was just a data saving tactic to cleverly pack everything onto four discs. Ultimately the 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 2 progression is pretty normal compared to what they did for Fear Effect 2: that game has the almost-unbelievable disc sequence of 1 > 2 > 1 > 4 > 3 > 4 > 2 > 3!

Whoa, talk about getting close to the camera.

It gets pretty epic at the end, as you would hope and expect.

The fork! Here’s where the five endings are decided. On Normal, you can pick Hana or Glas; from here there are no more Game Overs. If you beat the final boss or die, you get an ending: those are the first four endings. On Hard, there is one more choice: you can pick the middle option where both Hana and Glas work together. I played on “Normal”, so I could only pick Hana or Glas.

Of course with the glory of save states, it’s easy to do both, so there are no FOMO concerns. Although I didn’t know at the time that you could get other endings by dying, so I need to go back and check that out.

When you beat the final boss, the King of Hell accuses you of ruining everything. Really?

Hana kills the King of Hell, blows up the area, then declares: now she’s ruined everything. The End.

If you pick Glas, you still fight, but for a slightly different reason.

I thought it was pretty neat that it’s not just the same boss with a different character; everything here is different.

Everything about the final boss fight, from the camera to the attack patterns to how you ultimately destroy it, is different in the Glas ending.

This one ends a bit of a trippy cliffhanger. Glas picks up the the paper doll that Wee Ming had transformed back into, then destroys the brothel we were fighting in.

Then he walks away, contemplating the power of the doll. The End.

And then the credits roll. What the hell was that game even about? I really don’t know, but it was quite an audiovisual feast. The graphics in motion are captivating, bolstered by a great soundtrack. Okay, the story is confusing and the graphics can get clunky, but the overall feeling of the game is so compelling. Fear Effect 2? Bring it on!