Crysis Management

Okay, *now* I’ve finally gotten around to starting Crysis.

It has a reputation for demanding extremely high system specs, but it’s running pretty well so far on my system, even with everything on High. The end result is indeed very pretty, with a ton more foliage than I’ve ever seen in any other game.

It’s a traditional shooter in many ways, but its main feature is that it’s like its predecessor Far Cry in there are often multiple approaches you can take to any particular battle. Although the overall path is still linear, there’s enough openness to the world that you could choose to stealthily take the enemies out in small groups, or create diversions to draw troops away from your path, or go rampaging in guns blazing, or take a more tactical, cover-heavy approach, or bypass certain hotspots or patrols entirely.

The other big feature is that your character has a nanosuit that you can set to one of four different modes: improved armour (the default), where your energy tank acts as a shield; improved speed, where you run faster; improved strength, mainly for jumping higher; and cloaking, making you nearly impossible to spot. Cloaking is by far the most useful of them, since it lets you sneak right past enemies, hide away after drawing their attention, and get the drop on them. You just have to watch out for the limited battery charge, which forces you to move from cover to cover while it recharges, so you can’t just run around permanently cloaked.

The rifle you start with is pretty useless since you run out of ammo soon, but once you pick up a different one from an enemy, there’ll be plenty of ammo for it. You can only hold two different types of long guns, and so far I’ve been sticking with the North Korean assault rifle and switching the other around as necessary. The ‘precision rifle’ is nice, but I’ve hardly found any ammo for it and abandoned it as soon as I ran out. There’s a shotgun, but I haven’t bothered with it yet since most of my fighting has been at longer ranges.

The story starts out fairly typical: an archaeological expedition has radioed for help and a squad of special soldiers has been sent in to extract them. But, of course, nothing goes as planned and nothing is as it seems… The North Koreans are interested in something alien and ancient that was discovered here, and only brief glimpses of it have been seen so far, mostly to kill off other members of our squad (now down to just me and one other member, Psycho). A big shift in focus is supposed to be coming up soon though.

So far the highlight has been a segment where you take control of a tank at the start of the level. In most other games, tank segments like that are more like a rail shooter, where you just have to make sure you fire at the right time and spot of the pattern, but here it’s a lot more interesting because it’s a wide open area with more freedom to move around and you have to be wary of dangers from things like roaming squads of RPG launchers. The vehicles are rather hard to control, which is expected with tanks but it also applies to the regular cars. They’re still useful though, just as additional firepower and protection if nothing else.

Right now I’m at the start of the sixth level, of eleven according to a FAQ, so it probably won’t be too long a game. It’s a pretty good ride so far, though.

This Post Is Not About Crysis

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.

Music For The Messes

So, with The Witcher on hold, I need a new primary game. But not tonight — tonight is for…music!

The DLC pack for Rock Band is pretty good this week. El Scorcho (Weezer) is a really easy song, but still pretty fun to play. I even got 100% on it, albeit still on Medium, but I rarely get 100% on anything. Why Do You Love Me (Garbage) is a pretty good song and a bit tougher, with actual chords, but I almost managed to 100% it if not for a screwup on the last half-dozen notes. Sex Type Thing (Stone Temple Pilots) is a classic, and the most challenging of the bunch, with more variety in transitions and power chords.

I also went back and beat my previous scores on a handful of songs like Outside, Ten Speed (Of God’s Blood and Burial), Pleasure (Pleasure), and Go With The Flow, though I can still only get four stars on that last one. Way too many long sets of repeated notes on which it’s easy to break the combo.

After that I spent a bit more time in Audiosurf, mainly in Sonic Youth songs, where I took some of the slower ones from Rather Ripped in order to get the Stainless achievement. Unfortunately, even though I’ve added a bunch of friends’ names, the friend score servers are down right now. Even when they’re working though, it doesn’t keep a very long list of the songs they’ve played, so it’s tough to try and find songs on which you can try to beat them.

Surfin’ Sine Waves

Today was the release day for Audiosurf, and at $9 I couldn’t resist checking it out.

It’s kind of like the various Tetris-ish block-drop games in that you collect blocks of the same colour in groups of three or more touching each other. But, the way you collect the blocks is by running a ship over a track with blocks scattered on it, and the shape of the track and placement of the blocks is generated based on the song you select (and any old MP3 will do). The pace of the blocks tries to match up with the beat, and the slope and twistiness of the track represent how intense or slow-paced the song is at that point.

It’s not a particularly deep game, but it can be fairly challenging. Although you can’t really ‘lose’ at it, you have to be quick and accurate in order to score well. You can also choose different ship types that affect how the game is played — with a ‘mono’ ship, you want to avoid gray blocks and only get the other single-coloured blocks, with a ‘pusher’ ship you can cause blocks to slide to the column on your left or right instead of the one you pick it up in, and so on.

If none of this makes any sense, you can probably just check out some Youtube videos of it in action to see how it plays.

Leaderboards are kept separately for each song, and so far I’m on top of several of them. Even if it’s only because I’m the only person to have played that particular song so far… I did about a dozen or so, including some of the included Orange Box soundtrack songs, some Interpol, and some Rush. I even did 2112 — yes, the full 20-minute version.

Procrastination Pays Off

I was somewhat interested in both Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed, but hadn’t bought them yet since I’ve got too many others to play at the moment. Looks like that was a good decision anyway, since both of them are now coming to the PC too, with some enhancements (better inventory UI in Mass Effect, and some new investigation types in Assassin’s Creed).

Not that there’s anything wrong with the 360 versions, but I put together a fairly powerful PC less than a year ago, so I might as well get some use out of it… At the highest end, PCs will still get equal or better graphics, if for nothing else than higher native rendering resolutions.