It's always the brand one does NOT currently have. 

Im talking rubbish. The NVidia Cards have more stable drivers, and in a lot of games they give more stable framerates. For example on Crysis my 5850 gives avg. 28-29 fps, and a GTX 460 will give 24-25 fps, but the NVidia card will only deviate by +/- 2-3 fps, whereas the Radeon card will sometimes go as low as 19, but it will go higher sometimes too, like 32-33 fps. So the NVidia card give a more stable framerate (and a more fluid gaming experience) even though it has slightly less raw power.

The Radeon 6-series and the NVidia 5-series are very close performance wise, which is maybe why NVidia have been a little over zealous with the clock speeds. 

Yeah it's weird aye... my card shouldn't be overclocked, i've never done anything with it. But on Timeshift and Blacksite it would start freezing after 10mins and Crysis in about 30secs even on medium settings. I tried tonnes of things to try and fix it that people had mentioned (of course no one mentioned clock speed) and was on the verge of taking the card back to the shop, then as a quick last resort turned the clock speed down 100 and it completely fixed everything. Crysis on very high without any problems at all. Why a card should be a complete piece of freezing shit at factory clock speed then run perfectly by lowering it 10% I don't know. They must have just had it too high, but then the temp was fine on it even at slow fan speed. My PSU is new and 700w so should be plenty.

In older games, even Far Cry, it doesn't freeze at all. But then I can get my old card an 8800GT and it's able to run Timeshift/Blacksite without any freezing when the 560 can't at factory speeds.

Oh and Crysis with max settings and natural mod looks pretty fkn sweet! Shame about the gameplay. I'll do a review in a day or 2 once i'm finished. 

Ah Crysis, my beautiful shiny brand new toy which, doesn't work very well. At it's release regarded as the best graphics in a game ever. For this review I should state the I played Crysis (for the first time) with everything set to Very High and with the Natural Mod added for that extra eye candy. So this is Crysis at it's very optimum.

Firstly I'm not sure how much of a difference the Natural Mod makes. But loading the first level without it looked good, then reloading with Natural Mod looked absolutely awful. All colour was gone, there was little contrast and it was quite hard to see. However the first level starts at night and, apparently, Natural Mod works best during day. I'm sure it does, because once the day finally shone bright ten minutes later it indeed looked fantastic.

But enough about the Natural Mod. Being that it's only been a few months since my first playthrough of FarCry, I'll be heavily comparing the two. Sure they're three years of development time apart, but Crysis could quite easily be considered FarCry2. The settings and gameplay are the same.

FarCry took outdoor design to whole new level. The island paradise setting was fantastic. But FarCry had it's flaws. The first of which was that for a game famous for it's beautiful scenery, there were far too many bland, ugly indoor levels. The outdoors levels were more memorable because there simply weren't enough. Crysis fixes this problem with only 2 out of 11 levels taking place indoors. The first of which, Core, is the inside of an alien mountain where a spanner is thrown in the works by making it zero gravity. And the indoor areas are quite huge anyway. The other is Reckoning, the final level on a ship with it's claustrophobic corridors. But at least it also has an epic battle on the deck. Ignore the brief but painful flying level Ascension and you've got 8 sprawling, unique, scenic adventures around this huge island.

Beaches, jungles, a military port, a mining complex (with just a little indoor action), snowy winter lands; it all combines to make one fantastic gaming setting. The problem is there are fewer set pieces here that in FarCry. Or fewer moments of awe. What I believe is the cause is that Crysis is much flatter than FarCry. There's not enough height to the game. In the predecessor there were moments where you'd be standing mountaintop gazing upon valleys and beaches below. The rope bridge, the hand glider, the lighthouse. Crysis just doesn't have this. Sure there's a few scenes such as Awakening, where a giant distant mountain is falling apart before your eyes. Or Assault where you're looking out across a bay to an enemy base under assault. Sure the graphics in Crysis are a big step up from FarCry, but these moments of awe, the truly memorable levels are lacking. Instead there's a lot of flat battles from village to village.

But that's only one small nitpick on a game that looks utterly amazing. This engine is capable of breathtaking scale as well as extraordinary detail on every piece of plant life.

Crytek have sensibly added quicksave to Crysis, another bad decision in FarCry. And the one thing that nearly ruined FarCry for me was the difficulty by the end of the game. Crysis isn't so bad. It does still have issues with it's final battle as it can be very frustrating when projectiles are constantly raining down on you and you can't even see where it's all coming from. But that's more an issue of a certain enemy in the game, the aliens, which I'll get into next.

Gameplay. And this is what I'm talking about when I say my shiny new toy doesn't work very well. This isn't the kind of game like Painkiller: Overdose or Timeshift where you can run through blasting those Korean bastards back to... Korea (Koreans are your human enemy in Crysis). Crysis is strategic. Typical gameplay scenario: creep around in the bushes until you get close enough to the next enemy village. Draw their attention, perhaps spray a few bullets then run like hell back to some cover and wait for said enemy to wander over. Kill a couple, then sprint further away to more cover before you're ass up in blood. Crysis human enemies take you down VERY fast, and you're usually outnumbered. It's not so much a hugely difficult game, you've just got to play very carefully and strategically. Sorry Crytek, but that just isn't that fun. And to poke a stick further into the wound, you're weapons are lackluster. The machine guns, even with zoom scope pointing directly at a Koreans head, are extremely unreliable at doing a proper headshot. No headshots in a strategy game? Bad call. 

The shotgun is decent, but not always useful since these are outdoor levels. Apart from handguns and rocket launchers saved for blowing up vehicles and 'copters, that's really all you get for fighting humans - both ridiculously bound to the same god damn key of which you can only carry two weapons at a time! You get to some cooler weapons later on such as the minigun, gauss gun (a big ass shotgun) and the infinite ammo alien weapon - but again they're all bound to the same key so you have to get rid of your fall back weapons the shotty and machine gun.

Now to the alien section of the game. I know this review is getting long, but it's an important game in the history shooters so I want to go in-depth. The Core takes you to an alien base built within the mountain and earth. It looks amazing. In fact it's the creepiest, most unique alien level I think i've ever played. Then the aliens turn up and ruin it. They look good - large floating octopus type aliens. But their attacks can be a little annoying. I do give Crytek props for changing it up though. It was a great twist to the game to give it some variety and differentiate from all the other realistic war shooters ala MOH and COD... neither of which come close the visual feast of Crysis. The snow level that came next was brilliant, and scary. However fighting octo-aliens inside a cramped battleship was not good. And the octo-alien is what i'm talking about in the last battle as I'm trying to concentrate on shooting the fat mothership while these bastard aliens just keep shooting at me and I can barely follow them in the sky since they move so fast.

Nevertheless, I'm glad the aliens did make their presence known because it did make the game more memorable; both from a storyline and gameplay perspective because another few levels of insane-strategy play against human enemies would not have won me over. Still, it's a love hate thing with the aliens for most players.

Okay so let's wrap this up. Crysis is a fantastic looking game. The Crytek engine is one of the best around, and certainly the best i've seen at doing outdoor scenery. There are players around who think this games' graphics are overrated. But for 2007, at least with everything maxed out, Crysis looks at the top of it's game. It's a shame that, just like FarCry, the gameplay isn't as polished. Inaccurate weapons and weapons limits, tough enemies and average aliens combine to make this a game that you won't be playing for it's gameplay. No, this is a game for the players that eat up beautiful environments and graphics. At least for a while because Crysis is quite a short game. I'm one of those players, so for me Crysis is a great game.

Rating: 8.5/10 

Absolutely wrong. Gameplay is the highlight of Crysis.

You don't have to play it sneaky; this is just the first impression that you get. Once you get more used to the game, and to the suit powers, you can go all out and absolutely annihilate enemies. You can fight groups of aliens out in the open with a shotgun. You can mow down an entire group with a vehicle mounted MG. You can cloak in the middle of your enemies. This is something that only comes with time though.

The assault rifles aren't inaccurate at all; you just have to go prone and/or use strength mode. Did you try the sleep darts?

The aliens are awesome IMO, as are the scenes where you have to defend some point against a horde of them. Intense stuff.

You can't play this like Quake, but it is one hell of a great shooter game.

Rest assured though that my first impression was the same as yours; I thought it was a stealth game because I found myself using the cloak mode so much. But it really isn't that kind of game.

I agree about the 3D-ness of Far Cry and that it's lacking in Crysis. It is pretty flat, true.

Give it a replay in a couple months. 

The main power I used with the suit was speed. Didn't find the rest anywhere near as useful. The shield was okay but you end up too damn slow. The invisibility thing I actually didn't use all that much. Maybe 5 times the whole time. Speed was awesome though. I didn't use strength much as I figured it only related to fist fights not weapons. Or does it actually make all weapons more powerful? That's cool if it does!

I didn't go prone much either, but i'll try that more if it makes the weapons more accurate. I didn't find them accurate otherwise, I don't know many times I repeatedly shot cunts in the head only to find them still standing. I eventually ditched the submachine gun to return to the FY-71 because the recoil was so bad.

But anyway I've got all the custom maps and mods to play through next, so I'll get more used to it. Playing Crysis through once isn't really enough to know everything about the gameplay - it's a pretty short game. 

Wow almost all 6 pages of Crysis mods on moddb.com are dead.

Any good Crysis single players maps or mods out there to play? 

I'd recommened checking out www.crymod.com for such stuff, but their downloads section is no longer up right now (updating) Might be worth browsing the forums.

If you like adventure/puzzle, The Call of the Fireflies mod isn't bad. Wrote a review for it here. The Worry of Newport is another, Moddb 

I found Crysis 2 had refined a lot of the gameplay stuff, they made the suit-powers easier to maximise their use aswell. And I installed the DirectX11 patch and Hires texture patch (both official patches) yesterday, and there are still crusty stains in my pants. Like W0W!

So have either of you guys played Crysis Warhead yet? I find Warhead to be better than Crysis because of better graphics and more intense battles. And Psycho is a little more charsimatic than Nomad. 

Far Cry - excellent
Crysis - more excellent
Crysis Warhead - installed but not started
Crysis 2 - waiting for price to come down 

The crysis 2 sandbox editor is being released today, which is why Crymod.com is down for maintenance I think.

\o/ 

I enjoyed Warhead but it did feel like a much more "standard" fps, it lacked a lot of the grandeur and open feel of Crysis. A few of the levels felt downright linear in my opinion, and some of the turret sections were tedious. It doe's have some great moments though, the frozen sea area was very cool.

I'm on my 5th (!) playthrough of Crysis 2 now that the dx11 stuff is out, this game is like crack, it's so fucking good! 

http://www.mycrysis.com/download/Crysis_2_ModSDK_1.0.exe

The site is getting hammered so just use that link :) 

I replayed this per Spirit's recommendation. Last time was 15 years ago and I didn't really like it then. This time around I totally enjoyed it, however, and agree with his verdict.

The levels are not very large, but there's lots of potential for exploration and nonlinear progression. Often the way to proceed is not immediately clear, but then you find a way by blowing up a wall or using the jetpack. This was probably all intented but it made me feel smart.
Most of the levels have an insane number of secrets, both marked (=with message/stats, sometimes up to 10) and unmarked, and the way you can create shortcuts and make the map more interconnected by blowing stuff up is pretty cool. Apparently there's TNT in the flame extinguishers.

I now see how this game allows for lots of excellent custom maps. 

I now see how this game allows for lots of excellent custom maps

The best thing about mapping for Duke3D though is the varied and diverse texture set, and the insane number of ways in which you can use them, then throw in some palette changes and spritework. Best vanilla assets I've worked with so far. 

and on top of that, building basic areas is simple like doom. just trace some lines out and boom you've got all kinds of shaped rooms and corridors. 

Including ones that break the laws of physics. Or at least utilise more dimensions than the usual 3. 

/hard-on

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2USBm4hMOAw&feature=player_embedded 

Steam Summer Sale starts today.

/hard-on

http://store.steampowered.com/ 

Though as usual the Euro prices/discounts are unfair compared to the other currencies and for Germans many games are unavailable.

I'd love to get the id Super Pack this time. And I'm so going to approach someone of you for another 'gift' deal... ;) 

Am excited, will buy. 

definately 

I'll step aboard this bandwagon! ;) 

And also the commentator guy looks remarkably like czg.

http://www.gamespot.com/shows/now-playing/?event=now_playing_torchlight_ii20110629

czg are you him???