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I have been playing the 1.77 gig download Crysis game demo. In case you haven't heard, it is the best first person shooter ever to date. To see it in it's full glory you will need the most powerful pc computer (which I don't have). It even supports Quad Core. I need to get one of those! Currently I am using an average single core with a $35 128 meg PCIe graphics card yet I love this game! The motion is still smooth for me and I haven't seen a glitch.

The music is scary ambient; most appropriate for this kind of a game as opposed to GTA which uses pop music and The Elder Scrolls which has movie score type music. A game is not a movie, they should not try to make it one. There are some plot scenes you have to sit through but thankfully once I got past the start of the game there hasn't been too much of that.

A word of advice on this game. It's fun to shoot but try not to much because you will use up your amo quickly and you need it later. Your instinct will be to shoot from far away but this uses too much amo to kill them. It is better to get close and kill without taking a lot of shots. Your health goes down but all you have to do is run away and it comes back soon after that.

http://www.ea.com/crysis/

yup, thumbs up for the game (atleast until someone comes in saying "its all about koreans and aliens!" its a game goddamnit )

it was launched as a hallmark in gaming especially when it come to hraphics/physics), allthough i liked the gameplay in farcry more (same developers, and less demanding in resources). If you havent got the most up-to-date PC i'd like to recomend classics like max payne, farcry, mafia and the also hall-of-fame Deus Ex.

Old skool classics, costs close to nothing, graphics are medicore compared to todays standards, but gameplay is exellent.

I tried Max Payne but it kept stopping me with those stupid plot things. I hate that.

They should remake BF1942. with all the same maps and response to controls and everything, but make it support better graphics and physx on graphics cards. not bf2 or 2042. those are rubbish.

imagine being able to shoot part of someones wing off in a dogfight and they can still fly but actually affected by the missing control surface or lift. or shoot a jeep in the tire and the guy gets a flat and runs over his buddy. even more hilarity than regular bf1942 (which is still really fun on the right servers)

LAND and SEA and AIR never covered in such a fun way as bf1942

see you on TAW battle of Britain 24/7 ill jeep you!

I haven't tried multiplayer games yet. Recently I played World of Warcraft demo but not with other people. It's very beautiful but I was not into the game that much. I don't like having to ask the characters what to do, also I prefer to shoot enemies rather than hack at them with swords and clubs.

Long post here, warning. Speaking of Max Payne, I actually enjoyed Max Payne 1 & 2. The first was a tad buggy for me (would occasionally not respond to my requests to fire the damn gun) but at the same time looking back I enjoyed it a bit more than Max Payne 2, which was free of the bugs from the first version and better looking yet somehow not as challenging or engaging. My only real issue with the first Max Payne is that I wish I could skip the wandering around in the black+red room thing that concludes all the nightmare sequences.

Crysis was a great looking 'realistic' simulation & quasi-scifi war game, but the hype surrounding the game was incredible and based mostly on the visuals of the game. It also still takes an insanely powerful machine to really enjoy it even a year later (even the lastest generation of graphics cards & cpu's, a year later still can't hit high framerates on the highest settings at 1920x1200 or 1600x1200 resolutions). I found the "story arch" very typical for large scale Sci-Fi-esque FPS games though.

The typical premise being: you are 'brought in' under pretenses that soon turn out to be not all there is to the story, and as you go further you "descend further into" hell/the abyss/the alien world/etc, peaking with actually being in hell/on the alien ship/etc and then 'work your way back out' to "reality" for the endgame.

Spoiler commentary, highlight by selecting with mouse if you want to read:
The final "boss" shop was a bit anticlimactic after the creature you fight on deck just before it (the only thing difficult about the boss ship is the insanely powerful shots it shoots, so you just stick to cover). And the 'aliens' you fight while in their base/craft weren't nearly as difficult as the enemy troops you face earlier & later in the game, though getting used to finding an "alien" in zero gravity takes a bit of getting use to. The alien ship stuff is definately beautiful (I stopped many times to just look around) and the best part of the game (for me) was the portions spent working you way out of the alien base/craft and back to your ship (the frozen landscape is even MORE visually stunning for me due to the contrast).

Switching to Multiplayer for Crysis you can quickly tell who has invested thousands into their gaming rig, and will quickly have to turn down your game settings to survive (or invest in pricier gear yourself).

Overall I found Crysis to be an interesting 'realistic war-sim' in multiplayer mode, and more interesting than the Battlefield series (where multiplayer games are incredibly random) but most of the pace of multiplayer crysis was a bit slow & time consuming for me (though it's popular among my army/air force buddies). Overall I think Crysis was worth the purchase and at least 1-2 plays through single player, and it's astounding to look at even a year alter, but I didn't see it as perfection in terms of gameplay as some of the fanboys would lead you to believe.

----Even more games I've played----

CoD4 (Call of Duty 4) goes even further than the earlier versions with the war 'realism', and is starting to approach believable atmosphere with some of the single player war scenes. But one thign I really can't stand in the whole CoD series is the infinitely respawning enemies because you can just stick to cover and keep advancing without firing many shots to 'turn off' the spawn points as you go, letting the AI NPC's on your 'side' do all the work for you. A great example of this in Cod4 is a scene/map where you must work your way through a television station/studio. The infinitely respawning enemies mean that the easiest thing to do here is just run straight through lobbing 2 grenades to take out the cluster of enemies near the far doorway as they appear, and shoot 1 or 2 more and you're out. So you either finish that map in under 40 seconds, or get completely bogged down dying over & over by trying to actually 'engage' the enemy. There are some scenes that change the formula a bit (the belly crawl through the enemy forces is great) but overall I'd much prefer to do single player in Crysis and take my time picking off the enemies knowing they won't just keep coming (Crysis's AI is much better too).

The multiplayer aspect of CoD4 is still incredibly popular, but people are good enough now I just don't have the time to bother learning enough to keep up. Also 'realistic' war games don't engage me much (got bored of Counterstrike years ago too, though I have all the versions of that as well on Steam). Again the guys I know in the military love this game.

My longtime favorite FPS game to play multiplayer (and strictly multiplayer) is the Unreal Tournament franchise. UT99 & UT2003/UT2004 are a lot of fun, my personal predilection is the CTF game mode with the translocator. The fast pace of the game combined with the dynamic of the translocator can eat up time like nothing else if I am playing with good players on a decent server. I'm good enough at CTF that I can "get in" and "get my frags on" and in 20-30 minutes play 2-3 matches and get a good mental reset (escape) out of the game, then get back to the things I really need to be doing. The "Onslaught" (Warfare in UT3) game mode is just too slow paced & random for me, equalling experiences I've had in the battlefield series.

Sadly Epic has completely ruined the PC userbase with UT3, by removing most of what made the game competitive, substituting overpowered (spammy) weapons and high quality graphics for the skilled gameplay that previous versions took, and then putting out a typical "console port" to the PC (console UI & lack of customization in comparison to the other UT's). It's pretty obvious to most of the longterm players that Microsloth has paid Epic off to focus more on Gears of War 1/2 through the lifespan of the development & launch of UT3, and UT3 suffered dramatically as a result. Similar things actually happened with UT2003 (farmed out to 2 other companies while epic made the Xbox "Unreal Championship" game) and again with Unrea2 (also farmed out while Unreal Championship 2 was being again made for MS).

So most of the longterm UT players have gone back to UT2004 (or even UT99) now, which is kind of ironic. Most of these people wandered back to the UT world in preparation for UT3 and have stuck around playing the older games instead. Most of the gamers I've met don't seem to enjoy UT as much as I do, or stick primarily to single player gameplay against the PC (which is easy) or the non-CTF modes. UT3 seems to be really popular with kids that want to play in vehicles though as I've said for me the vehicle modes for me are as random as I found the battlefield games to always be.

I was debating trying out Rainbow Six 1/2 or getting the Ghost Recon/GRaw/GR2 pack on Steam, but the tactical shooters eat an incredible amount of time and the pacing of gameplay is really slow (for my tastes). Then of course I remembered I have the rockstar pack and so I replayed Max Payne 1/2 and am working my way through GTA3 at the moment. Vice City & San Andreas should keep me busy for months to come (single player "Sandbox" games like Grand Theft Auto are still enjoyable for me but I can only do them in small doses, 1 or 2 missions at a time).

You wouldn't know it from reading the above, but right now I'm probably playing games less than I have in years (only 4 hours or so a week on average), due mostly to not seeing anything in the single player realm I can tackle without a huge commitment, and the same thing goes for multiplayer. Interestly this summer has been rather slow for PC gamers in general, and there's a lot of rumor in the gaming community that "PC gaming is dead" (some of this is actually backlash from the Unreal community). However there's a slew of games preparing to drop for PC which should change that a bit: STALKER "Clear Skies", Fallout 3 (not pc exclusive), Crysis Warhead, and GTA4 is actually finally going to be released to PC for those that don't have a PS3 or xbox360 (the only console we own is a Wii for my wife's mariokarting). Spore of course is also just about out, and I might check that out just to see what the hype has been all about.

Lastly, here's a quick flash game that will take more than one or two tries to get right:
http://www.nekogames.jp/mt/2008/01/cursor10.html

Now all of that being said, I have to make a separate post for what is probably my favorite single player game from the last year.

Portal

If you've got a Steam account (or don't mind signing up) there's a demo called Portal Slice, but you won't get the depth of the game with just that. It's not your typical FPS, though it does stick mostly to FPS fashion (you have something other than a normal 'gun' though). The full Portal game is also relatively short for your first play-through (5-8 hours depending on how long you linger) but the depth of the game's story & atmosphere made it completely satisfying for me.

The music in it though is top-notch ambient music (imo) almost throughout. Also even in the earlier levels it pays to pay attention to certain areas where you can 'wander off the path' if you really want to get the full impact of the story. And if you're a Half Life 2 fan, this game should tie nicely into Half Life 2 Episode 3 when it comes out.

I really can't say more beyond just an absolute endorsement that anyone interested in PC gaming would be well served by at least checking out the Slice demo (though I say skip that and just get the full game on Steam or boxed, your choice).

As an aside to that, the Half Life 2 series (including the episodes) weren't included in my long list of games above, but are well worth a play through. In some ways Crysis is more visually satisfying and a bit easier in terms of not having to commit to a deeper story, but the Half Life 2 franchise has got one of the better stories in PC gaming right now, the visuals definately don't suck and the game is worth playing (more so than some other games I own mentioned above).

Lastly for "Multiplayer" there's Team Fortress 2. Great graphics, incredible humor, and the game has seen more development than any non MMORPG multiplayer game I've ever seen. There are updates every month or so, another one this weekend, and more are still apparently to come! And not 'we fixed a few bug' updates, but rather they're still changing & tweaking the skills of each player class to keep the gameplay interesting, there are new maps and even new gametypes added with most of the updates as well.

I still personally prefer the pacing and skill levels I find in UT2004's playerbase, but I have to look for IRC based "pickup games" (pugs) and clan scrims (don't have time to be in a clan myself) to get satisfying gameplay there. Public servers are overrun with people running stolen/hacked copies of the game, especially on the demo servers. So for a quick/casual FPS game Team Fortress 2 even beats my longtime favorite game as the TF2 community is mostly top-notch as well (much less "BS" and many people playing who I am sure I would enjoy actually being in the company of in real life).

So these got their own post since all 3 are available in the Orange Box and that package is a testimony to what Valve has done over the last few years. Steam went from being one of the worst ideas around, to being a very convenient platform to get PC games on. Their Source engine has given rise to a lot of really nice mods and even the games that they put out based on their own engine are top notch.

That is a lot to absorb. Any of these games have free PC demos? I know I'm not getting the best graphics in Crysis but it's good enough for me now in single player mode. I play it for about 20 minutes a day.

Sooner or later, gaming is the future of the internet in my opinion. Graphics quality is horrid in Second Life and I wish I could kill some people there. People enjoy that they can be creative though. We need faster internet speeds. I just read that the United States has fallen to 15th place among developed nations in internet speed. So much for the free market solving everything! I hope to move to another country before I die. Things keep going from bad to worse here.

Basically the main thrust there is to check the demo of Portal, but it requires a Steam account (Valve's application for distributing & running games). It's called Portal Slice. The full game is 100% worth the investment though, and available both via Steam and in boxed form. It occurs I ought to bracket some of the Crysis commentary in spoiler tags, I'll do that now.

Second life is interesting and has a lot of financial backing in what they're trying to do, with a big focus on user generated downloadable content. There were also some interesting uses of the scripting exploits that the game had for a while, looking beyond the ones that just changed your character data out for something offensive. But I had to wonder if the security issues hadn't been involved if there might have been more exploration of what the use the exploit implied. Being able to push visual data in a very immediate mode to someone you're having a conversation with seems like an interesting idea. Ie, more than just picking an initial avatar and using chat bubbles, etc. though I'm not sure I feel the need to commit virtual murder to break out of a chat bubble. Second Life is certainly more interesting right now than Google's Lively project. Though google does have a wider selection of platforms for it's own attempts at user generation of 3d content to be used in.

Back to what might be accomplished with a more mutable approach to 3d visuals... A lot of the geometry in 3d worlds is rather static, one would think because many games simulate a believable world modelled on what we know in order to suspend your belief & get you 'into' the game. Currently much of the focus of making that more mutable seems to be based on physics simulation & AI, and improving the realism of rendering (ray tracing is coming in the next several generations to realtime graphics & gaming.) The only time that the environment really takes on dreamlike qualities where it conveys more than just a sense of space & location is in games like Max Payne, where it's directly tied to the storyline. It would be interesting to see our other converstational mediums take on some of those qualities to a greater degree, and even user interfaces in general.

Or of course in games that are often passed off as childish or too casual.

If you just want to "shoot stuff" on the PC, I'm sure Crysis is a good start. There are a zillion FPS games with demos, and even a lot of free FPS games for playing multiplayer: Gunz, America's Army, Nexuiz, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, PlanetETF/Team Fortress mod on ETF. Warsow is particularly interesting (much more satisfying than Nexuiz which is rather easy). Combat Arms and Rising Eagle: Futuristic Infantry are supposedly fun war simulation games, but I've not played them. Starsiege:Tribes (ie, Tribes1) is really old and dated graphically, but is also free and was an incredibly fun game 10 years ago and is what led to all of the games like battlefield that came after with huge playercounts, large maps, vehicles and so on. Tribes1 didn't suffer from the as much randomness as its later imitators have. Tribes2 was ok as well but again is considered dated now.

One thing about gaming & entertainment, aside from a few standout titles that have wider potential appeal, people's tastes tend to define what they'll want to spend their time on. So again I recommend Portal or it's Slice demo version. Beyond that we'd have to talk about what you do and don't enjoy right now for me to give more than just my own impressions.

and on tha tnote i would like to say that the "orange box" from valve is the best value for money in pc games for the time being. you get Half Life 2, including the main game plus episode one and two (addons), you get Portal, you get Team Fortress 2.

a VERY good value for both single playing action and multiplayer.

Thanks.

I got the portal demo. It looks and sounds great! More cartoonish than Crysis but that is fine with me. I think I will love this. I guess this is enough games for a while.

Already after a few minutes I got the gun which makes portals. That is very cool. They are nice to you.

How's the portal demo going braincell?

Heh,

I just played it. I play it about 10-30 minutes a day. This part made me laugh today when she says this level is impossible, if you quit, you can have piece of cake. It's an original game. Makes you think. I wonder if it's going to change or just keep getting more complicated.

For anyone who is not familiar with Portal, It's like puzzle solving. So far there has been no real violence.

The gameplay gets more complicated yes. But the story with the AI also changes

Team Fortress 2 is having a free weekend for Steam users (just let it install while you're not at the computer).

I finished the portal demo I think. It just said loading and then nothing happened so I pushed escape and I was back at the start of it. How much longer is the paid version? That game was great! The last level I did was really difficult for me. Just randomly shooting is not the way to get out of it but that's your instinct.

Portal is a great game, but it's not a long game, I can't remember exactly how many hours I spend on in it... maybe ten hours all in all?
Portal was/is only one part of a package of games, it was never intended to be a "full" game in it's own right, maybe because they new it wasn't long enough to justify a release on it's own, or maybe it was because they knew they had gold on their hands and wanted to push other games with it because they knew people would pay the price regardless because they wanted in on the (justified) hype around Portal.

Anyways, i remember having a very good time playing the whole game, which really delivered one good experience after another. Great leveldesign etc. and the evil computer voice/character is just great

If you're able to catch the sidestory in portal, it's intended to integrate with HalfLife2 Episode 3, Aperture Science is related to the combine in some way. If you do get the full game and pay attention to the game's "nooks and crannies" then you'll find something that will be of use here:

http://aperturescience.com/

Personally I wouldn't hesitate to get the full version of Portal or even the Orange Box. The nice thing about the Orange Box is that in addition to officially having Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2 on the DVD, you also will get the full Half Life 2 game and Episode 1, though they must be installed via Steam I think (can't recall 100%). So basically you can play the entire Half Life 2 series as it exists so far.

Also, if you do get the full game come back and give your impressions when you're done playing and I'll link to a blog with some musings on the game which are interesting (especially his first post).

Braincell, if you haven't picked up Portal yet, this weekend it's 50% off on steam ($9.99)