I am continuing my celebration of the F.E.A.R. series by covering the Extraction Point DLC. I had never played this DLC before and was pretty excited to play it. Unfortunately, much like with the New Year, I hit struggles fairly early. In this case, the game took me days just to successfully load the first mission. Once again, there was also no controller support, just like I found with the original F.E.A.R. game I reviewed to start this new mini-series.

I still remember when I was promoted to online editor in 2013. I had much the same feelings that I have playing Extraction Point where I was excited about new possibilities, but hesitant about the upcoming events. I was so excited for my promotion back then that I had to run a few laps around my apartment building to get the energy out. The difference is that my time at Game Industry News has been a pleasure while Extraction Point has been the exact opposite.

At this rate, I may have to try F.E.A.R. 2 or F.E.A.R. 3 to see if they will even run on my gaming laptop. I can run Marvel Midnight Suns at 120 FPS, yet neither F.E.A.R. game has been able to run at more than 20 FPS. While I’m happy I got all of these titles on sale, it doesn’t do me any good if I can’t play them.

Anyway, the problems with Extraction Point kind of made me remember some of the other duds I looked at over the years like the time I was sent an Amiga and C64 emulator package. I gave that one out of five GiN Gems just because it started up. And there was a Thundercats 3DS game that had GameBoy Advance graphics. It was an interesting time then to be a reviewer. These came back to me as I thought about what I would have rated Extraction Point. Extraction Point released about four years before I joined GIN. It’s weird, all the things I thought about after watching Extraction Point crash in the middle of the mission for the third time.

So, my idea to write my column and celebrate the F.E.A.R. series in its entirety with the five F.E.A.R. titles for under ten dollars that I got on sale may not be working out quite the way I wanted. At the very least I have two awesome titles that I am reviewing for GiN which may help to alleviate my frustration at trying to get this classic to run on modern hardware.

So, if you are wondering why there is so little written this week about Extraction Point, it’s because I could not get it to function long enough to gather any kind of impression. The few times when I was able to get the thing to run without crashing, it did so at less than nine frames per second. Old movies from the 1920s looked better.

I can see now why the pack of F.E.A.R. games were on sale. Had they actually been optimized or even properly ported by Warner Bros., they might have been fun to play again. But as it stands, I’m not really sure how anyone can get much out of them, which is sad.

So, without much else to do for this one, I guess it’s time to wrap the column up. Sorry if this is shorter than normal, but I put all my eggs in the F.E.A.R. basket, and it didn’t quite work out the way I had hoped.

Until next time, Happy New Year!

And no, I still have not beaten the final boss of Final Fantasy XIII.