Looking forwards to it TBH. 

an hour and a half, tops? I didn't remember the puzzles that well AND I'm an idiot.

I haven't played Portal 2 yet, but doesn't 9 hours sound like an appropriate length for that sort of game? I can't see it being something that would benefit from a more-than 10 hour playtime. 

Ricky: Yes, I think that 9 hours is a bit short for a �30 game. My first playthrough took me less than 8, though, and the 10% pre-order discount isn't enough to make up for that.

Daz: Not convinced that the co-op game really counts towards game length. Yet to try it, though, as the person I'll be playing with hasn't finished single player yet.

starbuck: Hour and a half??? Took me 2:20 on my 3rd playthrough, so you must either know some sick speed tricks, or got your timing wrong... 

But I also went for the achievements and replayed certains bits (and sometimes the wrong ones). It's definitely and conceivable longer than P1, though 1.5 hours seems too extremely fast. This game is also nicely varied with old and new test chnmbers and different industrial bits inbetween. Plus it still looks very good even on the aging Source engine; some quite epic scenes or areas.

I agree the writing is great and the puzzles much fun. Some had me stumped for a while but when seemed actually easy after I had figured them out. Nice secrets and extra puzzles, e.g. the rat-man's dens and the chamber monitors. Too bad discovering all the dens wasn't an achievement - sometimes a 1/12 counter would have given me extra satisfaction in a trigger_secret way.

The Borealis dock is a nice little hint at the HL series and of course the few implicit and explicit Black Mesa references. The year prints on the old test chambers felt a bit 'off' maybe (although they were also nice to establish a sense of historic/scientific development or something, along with the modernization of the equipment) - is it really supposed to mean they had a portal gun back in the 50s? Or at least 70s? 

i guessed my time wrong. Short though. Very short. But pretty much the right length for what it was. 

 

I think. 

I got through the SP portion of the game in about 8 hours at my regular pace and was entirely satisfied with the experience. 

So I'm downloading l4d2 campaigns, are there any i should take special intrest in? Right now i have Satan's Little Helper, Overkill, Haunted Forest, Precinct 84, Tour of Terror, I Hate Mountains, Dead Series, and Open Road. 

Soul Brother 

Dead before dawn 2
dam it
levillage 3
deathaboard 2
helms deep reborn (hilarious survival map)

Dead before dawn 2 is particularly awesome, you'll probably recognise the setting from a certain film remake ;) 

helms deep reborn haha, is it really helms deep? kind of makes me want to get the l4d series! but i know i'd only play it a few times on single player. :P 

its a full size helms deep, you start on the long wall down one side, and zombies just stream at you from the horizon :) There are a few miniguns and pickups along the wall to help. Eventually the wall explodes and you eventually fall back into the keep and fight there for a bit.

Very entertaining stuff :) 

First off, this is a review of an enhanced version of Far Cry with the 64bit patch applied. This gives better textures and graphics, apparently. It's also played using a quicksave mod, so there's no replaying checkpoints over and over again.

Now, I'm not sure how good this game would have looked unpatched on a 2004 spec computer, as there's no way you could run it at maximum settings. However on a brand new 2011 spec computer built specifically for gaming, this game can run happily with maximum quality and resolution. There was one point in the game, in front of a boat in one of the first levels, where it ground to an almost complete halt. Not sure why it did it there, but the rest of the game ran smoothly.

Now Far Cry was a hugely popular game from a brand new gaming studio, Crytek, based in Germany. It's not often that a new startup releases a game of this quality using their own engine. It's a fairly amazing feat, especially compared to most of the games Germany puts out.

However as amazing as Far Cry looks for a 2004 release, I do have to bring it back to earth as there are other weaknesses in this game. But I'll talk about the graphics first. Now Far Cry is the first so-called sandbox game i've played. Games like Call of Duty, Medal of Honr and Vietcong had some sandbox elements where you weren't stuck on an absolutely obvious linear path, but even Far Cry isn't as open as I was expecting. There's still 20 levels which you can only play one at a time. You can't decide to return to the island from the first level at the end of the game. And many of these levels are quite linear, especially the indoor ones. There's a few where you can pick a path across an island, but your destination is always the same. Of course this is kind of a good thing for me, because I don't mind some linearity so I know where I'm supposed to be going.

The outdoor levels all look amazing. No game I've played up until 2004 (and for a couple years following Far Cry) comes close to the huge scale and tropical beauty of Far Cry. No other shooter comes close to the awe-inspring scenic scenes, as you climb a mountain and can look back at the ocean and cliffs you just climbed. It's truely epic. 

Unfortunately this quality isn't carried through to the indoor levels. Ships, catacomb, factories, bases... everything indoor sets the par back to average. In fact every time an indoor level interrupted my enjoyment, all I could think about was getting back to the lush jungle in, hopefully, the next level. The indoors are just plain, lacking detail and you really see that the CryEngine doesn't come close to id Tech 4 or Unreal Engine 2+ at close-up visual eye candy. What it does well is huge sprawling levels. But everything does look a little cartoony and unrealistic, not helped by the average CryEngine lighting.

What Far Cry also fails at is a story. You're thrust into a game after an epileptic low quality intro apparently trying to save an oddly clothed women with some random person helping you on the phone. Perhaps I was supposed to read the readme to get an idea of the plot, but as you start the game you have no idea who you're supposed to be or why your trying to save the girl. And none of that really changes throughout the game. Ultimately, the story is an afterthought.

Other weaknesses are the models. The Trigen look like they came from a 90's shooters, even the human models look average.

Now, I played Far Cry on medium difficulty with a quicksave, which in same cases I used enough to make it worthwhile. I imagine this game, in it's later stages, would have become very frustrating with limited checkpoints. A couple times my quicksave corrupted and I had to use checkpoints. One of which took me back almost 10 minutes of gameplay. So playing this game with checkpoints, I repeat, would have been painful. In particular the last level where you'll get obliterated in a couple of seonds by enemies which are too far away for you to shoot if you have the wrong weapons (which I did). So I threw god mode on, ran out into the open where I could actually see the enemy because once they get too far away the engine doesn't render the characters even though they're still shooting at you, which itself is another major flaw in the game. And with god mode on slaughtered everyone as quick as possible and kept notice of how many times I would have died without god mode (a handy feature of this particular cheat). 130 times was the answer, which is ridiculous with no quick save.

So overall the last couple of levels were very poorly done, but overall the gameplay was all standard realistic shooter type action. Not too difficult, in fact quite easy for the first half of the game. Apart from driving sections because Crytek failed miserably at providing a usuable vehicle.

So for 2004, Far Cry is one of the best games and renders non-linear outdoor areas like no other game before it. It's worth playing just for this. In all other aspects (gameplay, indoor levels, story), it's just another shooter. 

yeah agree with this.
the quality of the game always seemed to take a nose dive when you went indoors. also, i recall getting frustrated very early on about not being able to save and got THAT fixed really quickly.

my favourite map is the one where you have to blow up 3 or 4 islands but you're basically just dropped into the ocean on a little rubber dingy and told: do it.
it really showed off the whole non-linear aspect and is probably the reason why i remember that particular one out of the whole game 6 years later.

the ending is totally stupid though. that bit where you sort of get chased through this goofy open terrain where everything is on fire and then that huge open silo type place was just insanely hard. 

Yeah the level with 4 little islands is easily the best. I don't know why they didn't have more levels like this one. 

I like the indoors in Far Cry, gameplay wise, although they remind me more of Tomb Raider (or a number of console games' indoor parts) than Quake. I wish Crysis had more indoor type stuff actually.

It's no Doom 3, true. Brushwork in the Cryengine games is extremely limited, the Solid tool is really crude compared to something like Radiant. But the indoor layouts were between OK and enjoyable. "Bunker" might be my favourite level, actually. "Treehouse" was great, as well as "Rebellion".

Lights are super expensive in Cryengine for some reason, more so than in Doom 3. I guess it was really built for sunlight and atmospheric effects etc. instead of proper indoor lighting.

Vehicles I found adequate.

I like the main character because he is not a super soldier, but a boat rental guy in a Hawaiian shirt with a Die Hard attitude (that was his yacht they blew up in the intro, I find that quite humourous actually). I want more Jack Carver games.

Then again, I seem to have a different taste sometimes. 

that was me btw. Got error 42 and copy pasted around it. 

http://www.celephais.net/board/account.php 

i loved this aspect of the game. it felt like you were john maclain die hardin' it up. really badass. like playing riddick. 

Anyone up for it? Preferably one who hasn't finished the coop campaign yet (as apparently most people in func_group already have).
I also wouldn't mind some L4D again...

necros, are you on Steam btw? Or do you only play WoW. 

I'd like to try but haven't got time until later this week. My special copy is supposed work. 

BetterThanUNIX on steam.