Hurr hurr, I made a funn- *shoots self*

Anyways...Crysis. If you've spent at least five minutes on the SW board, you've probably seen this game mentioned just as many times (with said mentions accompanied by ten screencaps...each). This game is the crown jewel of the PC gaming fanbase, it would seem. Now, I've been a PC gaming enthusiasts for a while now, but I never had the hardware to really run this graphical powerhouse above medium-low settings. Well, with completion of my upgrade to a dual-core CPU and an 8800GS, I figured I finally had a shot of seeing this thing run in high settings and it was high time I experienced the proclaimed FPS GOTY. I enjoyed the demo, so why not spend the $40? So, I pop the sucker in, go through the installation, tweak the settings a bit (everything set to high, resolution at 1152x864), and let 'er rip.

After getting through the botched parachute-opening and swimming ashore, I made my way to my first KPA foe. ...An english-speaking one, no less. So, I aim down the sights of my 'SCAR' (It's an XM8...come on, Crytek), position the RDS on the poor saps head, click...click...click again...BANG. What the hell was that? There was about a three second period of freezing between my click and the round actually going off. I figured it was a one-time deal, but no less than four seconds later, it happened again when I encountered a pair of KPA soldiers about 100 feet away. For SOME reason, the shader settings seemed to be causing the issue. So, I grudgingly lower it to medium settings, effectively taking away about a fifth of the game's visual quality (REAL nice scaling there, Crytek...). Meet the other nano-suit guy, hear some of the most cliched dialog I have ever heard in my 19 years of existence, find what was left of the poor hispanic guy...why didn't I remember those cringe-worthy lines from the demo? Anyways, after all that, dawn starts to break on my little unidentified Philippine island. Finally...time to see just what this game to do. I cap a few hapless KPA soldiers on patrol, who probably needed to be removed from the gene pool anyways due to the fact that the sight of one of their comrades falling to the ground like a sack of rocks apparently isn't enough cause for alarm. I make it to a ridge, and....holy sub-20fps batman. My performance fell like a goddamned dive-bomber. And when that boat-gunner somehow managed to spot me squatting in foliage from 1,000 feet away and let fly with his 'machine-gun' (more like rapid-firing sniper rifle with farking guided bullets), and my framerate took yet another hit. Guess what I had to do to get at least 30fps? That's right, tone down the shaders again. Crysis now looks, at best, half as good as the screenshots you see posted in the SW board so often. I was, and still am, dumbstruck. I had upgraded my CPU, RAM, GPU...even the freaking PSU, and I can't even manage 30fps with shaders on MEDIUM!? This is simply a case of poor optimization. But, hey, I should manage. I progress, taking out more KPA soldiers...and more...and more...and more. Okay, things are staring to get a bit redundant here. Granted, it's fun taking these guys out, but sheesh, I'd like a bit more variety. Same can be said for the weapons. There are a grand total of...four you're going to be really using (AK, sniper rifle, missile launcher, and the ice-chaingun...thing). Anyways, things went from being predictable to downright painful around the instant the first alien that you fight appears. And the zero-G level inside the mountain...Christ, I nearly uninstalled the game right then and there. Things pick-up again once you hit the Nimitz-class carrier, but that lasted a whopping 30 minutes. Oh well, I'm going back to the now-frozen island to hopefully bombard some hapless aliens from the air in that near-uncontrollable VTOL...wait, nope. It's over. Yup, the supposed crown-jewel of current PC gaming is essentially a 10-hour campaign that has an even more laughable plot than Far Cry and a vomit-inducing multiplayer mode. I will be blunt, I cannot believe that THIS was the FPS GOTY. Maybe if I hadn't had such high expectations due to it earnign that award I wouldn't have been so disappointed, but...Christ. STALKER slams this game into the ground in fun and gameplay factor, even WITH the plethora of bugs it launched with.

*EDIT* Well, if I'm gonna b*tch, might as well go for the gold. Another thing that really bothered me were was what the KPA was fighting me with. I mean, you'll find a variant of one of the world's most advanced assault rifles and farking nano-suit technology in their hands. You will also see updated variants of the T-99 Chinese MBT. Now, in stark contrast to all of this futuristic tech, you will see, multiple times, 60 year old Mig-21 fighter craft on patrol in the skies.

I guess Kim Jong Ill dumbed every penny of his country's budget into his land forces.

There's also the little fact that the current KPA is laughably ill-equipped in 2008, a mere 12 years prior to the events in Crysis. They still use shoddy Chinese copies of the AK-47, their best tank is a slightly upgraded T-64...in short, all of their stuff is the same equipment that the Soviets dumped decades before the Wall fell. There must of be one HELL of a modernization movement in N. Korea that'll occur in the next 12 years.

Again though, this last segment was just my military-buff side ranting.