Since The Witcher is on hold, I thought I’d get back to a more action-oriented game, and hey, whaddaya know, I already had Crysis installed and patched up. I’d played it briefly before, but only far enough to get through the first couple firefights, still in the tutorial really.

When I fired it up though, the cursor was behaving oddly at the main menu. Its position on the screen was a bit to the lower-right of where it thought it was, making it hard to click on specific spots. It was still bounded by the screen, and restricted from a bit of the left hand side of the screen, so there were some buttons that couldn’t be clicked at all.

Thinking that I might have goofed up the install somehow by accidentally running the patch for a second time (I wasn’t sure if it was already applied or not), I uninstalled, reinstalled, and repatched Crysis. And, while waiting on those steps to finish, I got in a bit more time with N+.

I made it through another five episodes tonight and most of them were uneventful, except for episode 14, the first real sign that the difficulty curve is ramping up. Level 14-2 took a good dozen or so attempts since there was one vertical shaft where I had to bounce from wall to wall all the way up, but there were mines on the wall and they were close enough together that there was little margin for error, so you had to pull off the whole sequence of walljumps perfectly. Each time I tried, I went straight for that shaft first since there was no point in wasting time on the other, easier ones if I was going to botch it on that one anyway.

Then, level 14-4 was the real torture test, being one of those levels where you’re chased by missiles nearly non-stop. The slightest hesitation, all too easily caused by landing in just the wrong spot or getting too close and grabbing a wall instead of falling, and the missiles get you. It’s stopped from being too frustrating by there being a real sense of progression as you keep trying, though. First you can’t figure out how to reliably drop onto the ledge with the door key without falling into the pit of mines below. Then you figure out how to do that more or less reliably, but keep hitting a slope and falling into the pit as you try to get out. Then you learn how to slow your jump to avoid hitting the slope and can get off that ledge reliably, but can’t make it up to the upper keys without getting hit by the missiles. Then you figure out how to weave through the ledges to avoid the missiles, but get caught by them when you slow down to get a key. Then you learn how to get close enough to touch the key without slowing down too much, but aren’t sure how to turn around and get the other key. And so on… Victory was eventually mine though, and with it the achievement for completing 15 episodes.

Eventually, the Crysis reinstall finished, but the cursor still behaved strangely. Running out of ideas, I poked around the menus a bit, and restarted it in DX9 mode just for kicks (the default is DX10, apparently), and tada, it worked fine again. I just installed Vista SP1 on this system, and it does mess with DX10 a bit (mainly to add DX10.1), so maybe it’s involved here. Edit: Turns out it’s not an SP1 problem, but just a Crysis bug when the desktop and game resolutions don’t match. It’s fine now that they’ve been set to the same.

Oh well, DX9 is good enough for me for now, but by this point it was too late to kick off a new game anyway. I don’t like to start it only to have to quit while it’s still halfway through the tutorial.