Is FEAR that much different from Pacman? At first you think, well yes of coarse! It’s completely different, for first Pacman is 2D, FEAR happens to be 3D, which is a massive difference in the way the game is designed. FEAR would have taken a lot longer with much more intricate detailing, design and art.
Basic controls are used in Pacman, direction arrows allow the player to move around the maze avoiding the ghosts at all times, unless the roles are reversed by eating certain fruit. The controls in FEAR are more tactical, with the controls ranging from the shooting to running and general moving, with flash lights and object interaction. A lot more detail had to be made for FEAR to work, Pacman is more simplistic, although for the time it came out, it was pretty futuristic as not many games had been made then, so audiences wouldn’t have expected as much as people do now.
In FEAR there is also a more comprehensive narrative, it takes you through different stages and levels with a more varied storyline. Pacman however, is basically the same simplistic story of being chased by ghosts around a maze over and over again. FEAR has a single-point narrative, however you can go about getting through this in a couple of ways, maybe alternating ways of killing and such.
But FEAR is very similar to Pacman! Why you ask? Because the creators use the same emotion to fulfil the gamers desires, fear. Yes, pacman is not scary because recient developments in film and games had numbed audiences into brainless “zombies”, nothing scares us much anymore because we are used to the reaccuring themes. But when Pacman first game out, audiences were scared, it is basically a yellow person trapped in a maze being chased by ghosts. Now if that happened in reality, I think we can all say we’d be pretty scared being chased by a never ending round of ghosts. FEAR is very similar, it plays on the primal instinct of the audience of being frightened, it is on a more in depth level than pacman, as it uses psychological and physiological (if you get THAT scared by it) fear to make the audience scared. Every game is deigned to provoke an emotion, this is how the audience relate to a game. Pacman and FEAR both use the same emotion to stimulate the audience.
FEAR is a glorified version of Pacman, in both games you are being chased around some sort of maze (One is a building and surrounding area, and the other is an actual maze) by something evil that wants to kill you. However much the fundamental controls in FEAR are different, it is still the same sort of chasing fear that the game uses. If you change the games down to there basic rules, be chased, run and kill, they are practically identical, and the only reason why FEAR is different is because it was made in an era where horror is more glorified, and gaming technology has increased.
In conclusion, when we ask the question is FEAR that much different from pacman, we immediately think, of coarse! But on deeper analysis, they are quite the similar type of game.
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