Stephen King’s F13

Pros • SK trivia • Some truly disturbing screen-save modules • Original SK work “Everything’s Eventual,” with great ambient music	Cons • Some great opportunities blown • Games nothing more than whack-a-mole spasmodia
Bottom Line While the “games” are barely games at all, F13 offers super-stylish custom desktop goodies for horror-starved computer geeks, plus a terrific King interactive-only short story. Let’s be up-front about this: F13 isn’t a game---or God-sure isn’t much of one, at any rate---and technically probably shouldn’t be in the EP purview at all...but it’s got some creepy, stylish desktop dementia, a terrific never-before-published Stephen King story in onscreen format, and most importantly, could be the vanguard of other, deeper titles that bring a mix of gaming, information and mood to the all-too-often blando world of the personal computer. At the very worst, you’ll come out of F13 with some cool interface sounds, some really messed-up screen savers, and a Stephen King short story to chew over the next time you see a strange piece of graffiti on a wall or a sidewalk.

First: If you’re not especially a horror enthusiast in general and a Stephen King fan in particular, you have many, many better things to do with your time and money than piss around with F13. K? K.

If you are a Kingophile, you may have noticed that The Great Steve-O has been getting a little... darker lately. Yes, he’s always been about dark stuff like ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night, but even a ghost or a ghoul is, at some point, a physical being, a thing there in the room with you that, if you’re lucky, you might be able to dispatch with a knife or a cross or a silver bullet or (in one instance you readers might recall) a boosted nuclear warhead. But in recent years, King’s sense of the horrific has diffused into more vague, less tangible and hence much more horrible things, things which cannot often be given proper names or even forms----how do you defend yourself against an idea, or a state of mind, or a zeitgeist? Following in the intangible footsteps of King’s recent (audio-only) haunted-hotel-room novella 1408, Blue Byte’s F13 presents PC users with a never-before published short story---available in interactive format only---called Everything’s Eventual, which may be one of the airiest and ultimately bleakest shorts he’s written to date All the while, toggleable ambient music---not too shrieky, just enough to set mood and lower the room temperature---plays behind the words.

“But whither gameplay?” you ask---and here alas I must hang my head and mumble that, yes, there are some whack-a-mole games here---specifically, Whack-a-Zombie and Bug Splat, two corroded sides of the same nigh-worthless coin. You’ve played these games before: move the mouse around and click. When your shovel hits a zombie, it goes blonk, and when your flyswatter hits a bug, it goes squirch. There’s also a parody of the “fishtank” screen-savers, where you can drop in cows and other livestock, to be devoured by the patrolling flesh-eating fish. Must I continue?

What value remains here is in the screen-saver modules, “Deathtop” backgrounds and system sound-effects...and truth be told, some of this stuff is kind of neat. A bank of high-fidelity samples can be reassigned to various system functions as in any other desktop theme-pack, but here the sounds are muffled heartbeats (great for drop-down menu sounds), disturbingly wet sounds of carnage, and crisp, satisfying cracks of thunder. Some of the screen-savers themselves are quite ghastly---”Creature Under My Bed” features the image of a bundled-up sleeper in a dark bedroom...and the small, awful changes that begin to occur around the room. “It’s just Lightning” features a tiny, freaky clown---aren’t all clowns freaky?--that seems to move itself about with each new flicker of lightning. Less threatening but still fun are the Frightware Trivia (test your King Quotient) and Evil Genius at Work (where a cartoonish King bangs away a keyboard, triggering words and sound effects on your screen).

Like I said, it’s not a game by any stretch of the imagination---still, a similar product with about 300% more mini-gameplay and the exact same amount of desktop goodies would be a high-scoring product indeed (ask any game reviewer---near-misses hurt a million times worse than the across-the-board crap titles any day of the week). In the meantime. you King/horror buffs out there will get, at the very least, some cool system sounds, a handful of dark, nasty screensavers, and a King-in-top-form story to take away with you.

Just remember that short story the next time you get a weird piece of e-mail from someone you don’t know.

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