Back in my day, before broadband Internet was for all intents and purposes ubiquitous, developers had exactly one chance to get their games right before sending them out the door to retail. Anything less than the best it can possibly be could (and often times did) lead to nothing short of negative critical reception and likewise, poor sales. Much like today, word on the street was pretty powerful back then too. In some cases it's all we had.

Fast forward to 2011 and we see a very different scenario consistently play out in the gaming industry. The number of new releases with "Day 1 patches" are quite staggering and paint the respective companies as a group that simply can't get their games right on the first try. Even after these often times mandatory updates are applied, things may still not be quite right until several months after release, if ever. Sure, games are infinitely more complex now than they were 10 or 15 years ago. However, the number of people working on them and the amount of money invested has also increased exponentially. Though I understand that it's not really possible for any release to be entirely bug-free, the resources are certainly there to insure that glaring things like memory leaks, installation problems, broken textures, and outright game-breaking issues are resolved before titles hit the shelves.

But the underlying problem is that the industry simply doesn't care for the most part. In fact, technologies like high-speed Internet and seamless content delivery systems have made it so that they don't have to.

I have to be honest. After the second instalment of the FEAR series, I wasn’t even following the development of this game let alone planning to play it. In my review of FEAR 2, I documented my disdain for what I saw as the “genericization” of the intellectual property and the “console-ization” of a PC shooter. The distinctive “pure bred” style of FEAR became a cross bred “mutt” through the heavy influence of games like Crysis and other tactical shooters. The resulting mix was not a success in my view. Yet a friend with similar leanings and opinions started playing FEAR 3... and continued playing it. As with “Mikey” from the Life cereal ads, he seemed to like it. My curiosity was piqued.

In terms of technical data, there’s almost no point in mentioning it these days unless there are glaring issues (cough *Duke Nukem* cough). These games are made “cross platform” from the ground up and for the most part, the XBOX and PS3 priorities have basically caused PC hardware requirements to flatten out considerably. That said, FEAR 3 runs just fine on my Q6600 Core 2 Quad and ATI 6870.

Beyond the irksome “console first” menus and controls, despite the near mandatory (shudder) cover system, the constant hover help and “click me” glow on every object and beyond the “you can never go back” realities of what’s hip and happening, the fact is FEAR 3 is a pretty solid and entertaining game.