I've been catching up on a lot of PC games recently. More to say, I've been finally getting around to playing a lot of titles that I bought, sometimes as much as 2 years ago, and have never taken the time to play. It's been great.

First up is Crysis. The game is tight. Good. Cool. The graphics are obviously awesome, and it is a great tech demo. I am sure it looks even better in DirectX 10. I am playing it on the Main Tower, which is an XP machine with a nVidia GeForce 8800GTS 320MB. Still, the game is very sharp. I am amazed that people have spent so many months complaining about not being able to play the game on max settings. I am equally amazed at the forum trolls who laugh at the people who are asking for help in assessing whether or not a given video card is worth buying or not because the card is not capable of rendering Crysis at max settings. You don't need max settings; the game looks fine on medium setting. Play through it once. Buy a new video card two years later; re-install the game and play through it again on max settings. In the meantime, the story is fine and playing it on medium settings will not decrease your overall enjoyment of the game unless you are one of these people who need the bragging rights of claiming that you played a certain game at max settings.

That all being said, the game mechanics are nothing special. I'll give it props for the destructible environments. I often laugh at titles that claim to be innovative when they are really just doing something that's been done before, but doing it extremely well. In Crysis' defense, I laugh at Battlefield Bad Company's claims of innovative new destructible environments when it is clear that EA lifted the well executed concepts in Crysis for BBC; the environment destruction essentially runs the same gambit in both titles from the publisher.

I also have to gig Crysis and all of its fanboys for lauding it for being this new great thing. Crysis is a good game...but as far as game mechanics and physics goes, it is just Far Cry in a super-suit with better graphics. I mean, substitute Jack Carver for Nomad, and it is the same game. So I like Crysis, but don't tell me that when it hit it was some new innovative title. That is just a load of rubbish.

The good things about Crysis: the AI is aggressive and moves around. Camps have roving patrols. I am sometimes disturbed by the AI's ability to seemingly suss out the fact that you are in their vicinity without getting a clear visual on you. But I'll tolerate that to a certain extent. I am also sometimes bothered by objectives that are sometimes unclear ("Take care of those tanks"; "Oh, you mean with these RPGs that nobody told me were hidden in some obscure hut-size building on the other side of the camp and I only found by running around screaming for my Mommy? Sure, no problem"). I have not played through the whole game yet, but the vehicular portions are forgettable, just because they are so similar to Far Cry (although I have not flown on a hang-glider yet; one of the cooler things to do in Far Cry). The sequences that you spend in your super-suit are much more poignant. Dodging bullets with your super-sprint and getting close enough to a guy to pummel him is pretty cool. I have not found maximum strength to be good for anything yet other than jumping higher. It would have been nice if you could use it for a one-shot picking up of a HMMWV to throw at a group of antagonists, or to hit them over the head with it. Cloaking is a pretty cool trick, but some of the fight sequences, where you are completely overwhelmed by numbers of bad guys, devolve into "shoot-run-hide-cloak-reposition-surprise shoot-repeat". This sequence is neat the first few times, but gets old, particularly in some of the larger fire fights where you have to go through this sequence over and over again for five minutes or longer continuously.

I would have pretty much given this game a strong eight when it released in 2007, and stand by that today.

Some other titles that I have circled back around to but have already discussed here before: Max Payne, Need for Speed - Carbon, Underground, and Porsche Unleashed, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003, Bioshock, and Tomb Raider: Legend. Great games all.

I can see that, with the economy, and my begrudging admission that maybe it is time for me to grow up, I may have to be satisfied with finally going back and playing through some of these retro titles. The opportunities to go and buy the latest greatest gaming titles just to let them sit around my home for 2 years are few and far between now as I consider other needs. Ahhh...the good old days.

- Vr/Zeux..>>