GregHowley.com

As you may know if you've read my blog for any length of time, about twice a year I have a weekend where Linda is away and I just lock myself away and play video games for two days straight. The last time was in January. But this weekend, Linda was away and I played games.

In preparation for the weekend, I bought a copy of Condemned: Criminal Origins, which was originally released for the XBox 360, but rereleased recently for the PC. I played a little bit of it, and was ready to quit, since the gameplay was a bit monotonous - reminded me a lot of F.E.A.R.: same head bobbing, same bad physics - but one thing convinced me to keep it. The game caught me completely off-guard a couple times. Scared me. I like that. This is the first game to do that since Resident Evil 2. So I'm playing it.

I also completed God of War this weekend. It's a great game, even if some of the running and jumping sequences did drive me a bit crazy after I died for the 30th time.

But the majority of my game-time this weekend was on Saturday, when I played through Fahrenheit.

Fahrenheit is Indigo Prophecy. Same game. But it's the non-censored European version. You see, the Europeans are less neurotic about sexual content. In the U.S., we can have nudity in movies. We can even have pr0n. But as soon as there's a breast in a video game, OUTRAGE! Think of the children! So upon a replay through the game, here are my second impressions...

I was actually a bit disappointed in the lack of extra content in Fahrenheit. I don't know what I'd been expecting. But the extra content consisted of a 2-second shot of a couple having sex when Carla and Tyler bust into the wrong hotel room, a fairly steamy sex scene between Lucas and Carla near the end of the game, and a 10 second sex minigame between Lucas and Tiffany near the beginning of the game. Honestly, the yo-yo minigame had more to it than the sex minigame, but it's probably nearly identical to the minigame in Grand Theft Auto that has come to be known as hot coffee, so I'm sure The Powers That Be would have flipped their collective lid if this had been released in the U.S.

I'd also forgotten most of the plot, and I was a bit put off when I remembered that the main two bad guys were (spoiler warning) an ancient Aztec oracle and his gang of illuminati-like baddies, and some ultra-advanced AIs who "grew sentient using the net in the eighties" To me, the "AI" looks like a spiderman villain named Video Man. And if you remember Video Man, you get two points.

But I made some different decisions this time through the game. I saved Markus's life, I kept the Indigo Child rather than handing her to Agatha, and I had Tyler break up with Samantha. I also found it odd that Lucas's windows are always open when it's below zero outdoors, and that he can't get out of his apartment without unlocking the door from inside with a key. He also really likes duck soup - his cupboards are full of it.