Far Cry 2

Originally Posted by MaZ
Well after fighting for a half hour to get the game into DX9 mode without blackscreening me on load, I've finally got into game in DX9 mode and it's frickin perfect .No mouse lag at all, plays beautifully. No pretty DX10 stuff though :( :(

Apparently this is all to do with FPS - switching to DX9 gave enough of an FPS boost to clear the input sluggishness - apparently turning the quality down in DX10 has the same effect and also drops mouse faggotry to none.

Now I don't know much about game engine programming but surely input polling shouldn't be related to output fps? :/

yep that sorted it for me, dropped settings down from ultra high and very high which was giving me 30-50fps depending on what was happenning
now getting 60fps solid (vsync) and the mouse thing is fixed
annoying because the fps were fine at the higher quality setting :\

Originally Posted by LeMaltor

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Originally Posted by barrkel

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Originally Posted by LeMaltor

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Originally Posted by barrkel
What I need to know is if the DRM is preventing play after any or all of the Microsoft utilities Process Explorer, Process Monitor, File Monitor and Registry Monitor, have run on the same system.

This is currently preventing me from playing Crysis Warhead, and is really frustrating. In order to start the game, I'd have to restart my machine to clear out the kernel drivers. As a result, I have had Crysis Warhead here in its DVD packed for over a month and I have *still* not had the chance to play it - I need those utilities for work (software engineer) - restarting and starting up all my applications and setting up all the windows across all monitors "just so" would take too much time.

So that's my question: is the DRM as asinine as Crysis Warhead? If so, I'll pass, thanks. Burned once too many times.

Dual boot, one for work, one for games?

I think you didn't read my post. That would be twice as bad. The DRM requires me to reboot, which is why I haven't played the game yet. Dual boot would also require a reboot to play, but not only that, it would require a second reboot to resume work.

O_o are you really lazy? A reboot takes what one minute, a games boot and work boot removes the resizing cafuffle, or just google workarounds for the DRM.

It does *not* fix the need to stop debugging applications - getting an application under the debugger into just the right state may take nearly an hour; it does not stop the need to shut the many dozens of applications I am normally running concurrently; it does not stop the need to start those applications back up and move them into the right locations - I use a carefully arranged cascade on secondary and tertiary monitors to maximize the amount of information on screen, where the corners of each window acts as the window switching mechanism (because the task bar doesn't scale).

I use Cygwin and normally have multiple terminal windows open, many with long-running background jobs active. There's often simply no way to break those scripts in the middle of their work without having to restart them all from scratch after a reboot, and that's assuming that I've done a job listing and been producing logs sufficient to tell exactly what was in flight at the time of the shutdown.

Finally, there are other network users of my machine: my machine is accessed by my server for backup and indexing, and my gf may be e.g. watching a movie that's stored local to my machine. Restarting my machine is inconveniencing other people and putting my data at risk (however small).

Laziness has nothing the hell to do with it. No other game I have ever played has required me to REBOOT (!!!) my machine in order to play. I reboot less often than once per month. When patch Tuesday updates aren't critical, my uptime runs into 40+ days.

Why hasn't this arrived in the mail ;_; Play.com, you torment me with your poor choice of courier company ;_;

yea, the FOV can be an issue, but i got used to it.

my review:
- graphic: 8.5 (its great and all, but trees and stuff can't be destroyed such in Crysis, and there's no gunshot wounds on the enemy. they bleed when i shot them, but when they drop dead, theyr silky clean. fire is nice though.)
- story: 9 (great story and the little cutscenes where u got sick and almost all npc char ingame has different voice and background story)
- gameplay: 9 (wouldve give it a 10 if the damn FOV is more comfortable. driving is worse. health system and buddy system are awesome, and combat is wicked. i play on hardcore and it does give me hardcore. which is fun. which is immersive.)
- sound: 8 (meh? its good. its ok.)

yea overall its a 9.

oh, and yes, FPS is much higher and much smoother than crysis, but crysis is still prettier. a wee bit. yeah.

8800GTS 640 on 1680x1050, 4xAA, Dx10, ultra high. fps 29 - 40, average 32~33.... i turned off AA and due to high resolution its still pretty smooth... i wont notice it in the thick of battle for sure and its hops to 40~60, averaging 52~55....

Crysis on the same setting will choke my system... prolly 30FPS max outdoor and the snow-storm level would drop it below 10FPS.

Please use the edit button instead of double-posting. It's there for a reason. Ta.

crysis is much prettier imo

protip: hit numpad 8 and watch hilarity ensue :p

having sat down with it for about an hour i'm seriously unimpressed, its horrible, movement and combat feel wooden, stiff and unresponsive, vehicles feel like bumpercars on comedy fairground rails and visually its weak sauce. such potential ruined by serious consolification issues.

I wouldn't give this a 5 let alone 9

Originally Posted by Gunsmith
having sat down with it for about an hour i'm seriously unimpressed, its horrible, movement and combat feel wooden, stiff and unresponsive, vehicles feel like bumpercars on comedy fairground rails and visually its weak sauce. such potential ruined by serious consolification issues.

I wouldn't give this a 5 let alone 9

Yet another promising PC game turned into a lazily done console port D:

Originally Posted by Krikkit
Another bonus is the fact that quick-saves are distinct from each other in the save menu, rather than being a "slot" that you overwrite every time you stab for the button.

excellent :)
Can you fire the guns mounted on vehicles whilst you are driving them like you can on the easier settings in Crysis?

Originally Posted by LeMaltor
O_o are you really lazy? A reboot takes what one minute, a games boot and work boot removes the resizing cafuffle, or just google workarounds for the DRM.

Or just not have DRM in the first place. Yet another should-have game that's forced itself onto my do not buy list. If I have to work to be entertained, then it fails. These kinds of stupid asinine reasons are exactly why DRM drives away would-be legitimate customers, not to mention that it fails at its intended purpose (there are working cracks out for FC2 as of yesterday if not earlier).

Originally Posted by Cupboard
excellent :)
Can you fire the guns mounted on vehicles whilst you are driving them like you can on the easier settings in Crysis?

No, even on easy you have to switch between the car and the gun.

My favourite feature of the game is when you get in and out of cars actually. Once I managed to jam my car over the top of a cliff, so if I got out either of the doors then I'd fall to my death. Cleverly, the game recognised this and when I went to get out I instead climbed out of the back of the car automatically.

Originally Posted by CardJoe
Once I managed to jam my car over the top of a cliff, so if I got out either of the doors then I'd fall to my death. Cleverly, the game recognised this and when I went to get out I instead climbed out of the back of the car automatically.

Now that is clever design (assuming it was by design).

I've tried my best to get my car stuck in all sorts of nooks and crannies but it always seems to let out again. On the other hand, why bother? You are never more than 60yds from another Jeep with a mounter LMG! :)

Originally Posted by cjmUK
Now that is clever design (assuming it was by design).

I've tried my best to get my car stuck in all sorts of nooks and crannies but it always seems to let out again. On the other hand, why bother? You are never more than 60yds from another Jeep with a mounter LMG! :)

True. When I did it, I was stuck on top of a rock, not wedged in. It was like the scene from the Italian Job (the good one), with the underneath of the car see-sawing on a awkwardly hit rock.

Originally Posted by LeMaltor
O_o are you really lazy? A reboot takes what one minute, a games boot and work boot removes the resizing cafuffle, or just google workarounds for the DRM.

On my system a simple reboot will take around 10 minutes (old A64 based system which is extremely slow and in dire need of a reformat when I can get around to digging all the discs out). I have enough time after switching my PC on and logging in to go downstairs and make a cup of coffee before it's in a useable state.

It's a dual boot (XP MCE / Vista 64u) and while the Vista start-up is actually a lot quicker than XP, it's unfortunately also a lot more unstable than my XP install and will be until I replace my graphics card (an nvidia 6600GT which is still causing driver issues in Vista even with the latest drivers).

I've just bought a copy and now have to spend the next 4 hours at work looking at it...

Come on 5pm!!!!

Originally Posted by CardJoe
True. When I did it, I was stuck on top of a rock, not wedged in. It was like the scene from the Italian Job (the good one), with the underneath of the car see-sawing on a awkwardly hit rock.

haha its so easy to beach cars, i've done it numerous times now
kinda annoying cos it usually happens when im taking a shortcut through the ass end of nowhere and then have to run about 5 miles to the nearest car (this is where numpad 8 comes in handy :p)

have you found the hanglider joe?
when i spotted it my first reaction was "omg awesome!" then i got in it and promptly flew into the ground :(

Ok heres my first impressions after the first coupla hours

e4500 @ 3.0, 2GB, 8800GT @ 700/1000
1680x1050 res

After vista service pack 1 warning download and install as i dont have it yet (im a lazy so and so)

Went in to settings and put everything up to ultra with 2xAA, stuck it DX10 and got a black screen and a hud! Also mouse has started to do the horrible lag thing. So i go back into settings and change to DX9 (another restart) and voila! Seems a shame that i miss out on DX10 goodness, I have read somewhere that the beta nvidia driver can improve performance and get rid of DX10 blackscreen issue so i'll try this and let you know.

So i get round to playing (sigh):

I like the graphics despite no DX10, the jungle reminds me of crysis a LOT but i quite like that. The plants seem nice and responsive (although not crysis standard obviously) and the foliage is convincing which is important. The character models haven't exactly blown me away but hey ho.

The gameplay seems good and in particular the controls are nicely laid out. The AI is the one thing that reminds me of the original - unforgiving and keeps you on your toes whilst the environment gives you options all the time; which is more than i can say for some recent shooters (i.e.bioshock).

The sound is excellent, very creepy and keeps you guessing with little whispers of the wind and stuff. The music is very fitting and african whilst remaining tense, im gonna try it with headphones next.

All in all having finally got the thing running im thoroughly enjoying myself so far. It annoys me that what has been released is a half finished product though, the DRM i can cope with but why in gods name does the mouse not work in DX10? and why oh why do we not have full widescreen (which by the way is horrible in vehicles).

I bought Devil May Cry 4 the other week and its happy as larry running everything max in DX10 locked at 60 FPS. I understand that its a different engine with a largely fixed camera etc but it looks amazing (literally frigging gorgeous) in widescreen and ive certainly had no problems with stupid mouse lag. My point is that DMC4 is a CONSOLE game and that Capcom ported it extremely well, so in my opinion Ubisoft who surely have a hell of a lot more experience in PC development should pull their fingers out of their arses and FINISH THE GAME BEFORE RELEASE

phew

This is funny my AVG antivirus detected the matroschka_launcher.exe as a Trojan horse Generic11.BIAK

This happened while finishing installing FC2.

SecuROM is actually classified as a Trojan lol...

First impressions (after to be honest, not much playtime):

- Graphics are crap (and I'm not talking about the brownness). There's a damn good reason this runs faster than Crysis - its not displaying half as much detail. This much time after Crysis launched, I would expect games to approach that kind of detail, instead the game looks like COD4.
- Mouse responsiveness is ridiculously slow. The first thing I did was to increase the responsiveness as much as possible, it still plays like molasses.

Its early days, but I'm not impressed so far. We'll see how it plays out. :)

EDIT:

And another thing - why are there so many ****ing signposts everywhere? There was even a signpost saying "Safehouse" what the ****? Not exactly realistic, and it makes me think the developers think that I'm a complete ****ing retard.

Originally Posted by oasked

And another thing - why are there so many ****ing signposts everywhere? There was even a signpost saying "Safehouse" what the ****? Not exactly realistic, and it makes me think the developers think that I'm a complete ****ing retard.

hahah just wait til you've played it some more
realistic it is not :p

the signposts actually change colour if htey're one of your objectives too (although you can turn it off)

Greetings!

Originally Posted by ginbong
This is funny my AVG antivirus detected the matroschka_launcher.exe as a Trojan horse Generic11.BIAK
This happened while finishing installing FC2.
SecuROM is actually classified as a Trojan lol...

Probably AVGs heuristic picked its sneaky behaviour.

How is that proverb?
Walk like a duck, quack like a duck, ...

It did that with the bioshock demo, i just wished i'd payed attention to it. Took about an hour of web surfing and cursing to get rid of securom

Well, I took my time to buy and play Farcry 2 myself before judging the game. I have just finished the first (underground) mission where you have to get those files from the railway station, and here's my thoughts so far, which I want to sum up as follows: Another average shooter with the promise of free roaming and variable gameplay that (so far) hasn't kept its promise. In the light of my current experiences the bit-tech.net review seems far too enthusiastic and neglects to mention a few glaring flaws this game has.

One of these is that whereever you travel you will have to fight your way through checkpoints where the guards will shoot at you as soon as they see you, and will chase you with cars with mgs mounted on their rears. That means that all the time you will have to carefully approach these checkpoints, mount your own mg (I stole such a car during the training missions), and wipe them out. Again, and again, and again. Fun? Yeah, the first two times, or make that three if you like. Even the guys who initially gave you some missions after they had picked you in Pala will shoot at you now. If this is caused by some of my actions in the game I wouldn't even be able to tell which.

Then there is the "level", if you want to call it so. Sure, you can "freely" roam 50 square km, but actually you're always confined to a road winding between cliffs you cannot climb or some valley or so offering pretty limited room also. You cannot (usually) circumvent these darn checkpoints or stray far from a road.

The AI is also pretty stupid. Usually they will charge you and run straight into your fire, only having a chance when coming in packs of three or four (unless you're at your car mounted mg ... here packs make life easier for you). Operation Flashpoint has set a standard here that still hasn't been surpassed: You really could roam the entire area (sure, apart from your current mission area it was deserted, but still ...), and the AI kicked seriously ass.

The diamonds? Oh well ... looks like a means of keeping you from getting too powerful gadgets too soon. I'd rather crawl around with my sniper rifle the entire game and have the game built so that it would be challenging even if I have the best equipment with me.

Finally the graphics. Ok, they're not bad, but this looks like yesterday's tech to me. I have a C2D E8500 + HD4870 1 GB system with a 1680x1050 res monitor and it can run Crysis with all settings on high. Sorry, but Farcry looks dated, and the rest of the game isn't convincing enough to make me happy. It's apparently just the Farcry engine, and that one is a few years old.

I own the German version, and while the German voice over isn't entirely bad, it completely ruins that "Africa" feel. It's like the difference between a real beautiful 3D landscape and a flat 2D print of it. Bah. Just think of that "You don't find the Jackal. The Jackal finds you" spoken with that guttural voice and soft, rolling African "r", and then imagine this being spoken in German. It just makes me cringe. (Does anybody have the English sound data for me? Please? Pretty please?)

Maybe the game will change significantly later, but unless it does, it definitely has not deserved the high rating given to it by bit-tech.net. Definitely not.

Dang ... can't I edit my above comment? It could need some fixing ... ^_^

Edit: Yes I can! :)

One funny thing I noticed when playing was that I sometimes was moving superfast, running all the time, mouse reactiveness was extremely high ... funny. Looks like a bug.

Greetings!

Karx11erx, please(!) use paragraphs.