Monday, January 10, 2011
Crysis 2 Preview
Wheeee! The bit of Crysis 2’s collapsed New York that I’m playing in has a makeshift slide – about 20 feet of wet, sloping concrete. If I sprint at it and duck, I launch my nanosuited mega-soldier into a high-speed bumslide. Hence the wheee.
There’s an alien at the bottom, and he’s blocking my path. The bastard, no one gets in the way of my bumslide. I’m going to kick him. I tap left mouse as I near the alien’s lower body and boot his legs out from under him. Propelled by my strength-augmented shoes, he flies backwards, crumpling into a pile next to a wrecked bus. I should really go and make sure he’s dead, but instead I run back around to the top of the slide. I combo’d a bumslide. Wheee!
It’s about this point that I realise I’m actually saying “wheee!” out loud and three or four of Crytek Frankfurt’s staff are milling around behind my PC, whispering to each other. One comes over. “Hey, so, that door over there is where you need to go.” I look at him with the pleading eyes of a man enjoying a bumslide, and he smiles wanly back at me. I go back to the top of the ramp one last time and “wheee!” under my breath.
He's been in 'train-ing'! It's funny because there's a train.
I decide to try it his way for a while, and move into the next section. Crysis 2’s New York is more organic than I’d expected: water flows from broken pipes to form makeshift rivers, grass and trees jut up from under the concrete. The fallen masonry has carved a path that enables freeform firefights – a choke point, followed by a wider area, corralled into another choke. Crytek call these sections ‘action bubbles’. It’s a formula the Halo series has experimented with to much success, but it doesn’t immediately tally with the first Crysis’s open manmurdering environs.
Past one doorway, and there’s an alien with his back to me. I can’t see how he didn’t hear all that bumsliding commotion, but he seems oblivious to my presence – most likely because I’ve engaged my nanosuit’s cloak and am now completely invisible. I’ve got a few options. I can empty a magazine into the base of his spine, but that’s boring. I can move closer and snap his neck with one swift motion, but I’m saving that treat for later. Or I can punch a burnt-out car so hard that it lifts off and twats into his back, then hurl this trolley I’m holding squarely at his armoured skull. Did I mention I picked up a trolley? I was cradling it during the bumslides.
Guess which one I did? As the trolley bounced off my foe’s head, it made a small clang. Turning round, I saw the Crytek guys. They were whispering again.
It's a hell of a town.
Crysis made you feel like an angry extension of the island you were dropped onto. The nanosuit was the star – letting players rise from the sea or the forest like a vengeful, invisible god and smash the teeth out of any ill-fated Koreans who happened to be milling about. Crysis 2 takes this empowerment, keeps it, and hones it. Five nanosuit powers have become two and a half: strength and cloak being the alternate states it can flip to, while speed is a sprint key and an increased jump. All drain your suit’s energy, but combining something like cloak and speed means you get a limited window of invisible mid-air fun before you’re dry on juice and visible again.
At the moment, the window to use suit energy successfully is tight. I found myself misjudging distances, flipping to cloak mode and launching myself at full speed towards a flock of enemies who hadn’t seen me yet, only to fizzle into visibility a few feet from their position and face their combined fire. Waltzing into a combined onslaught felt imprecise, so much light and sound thunking into my suit’s visor that I couldn’t see an exit, let alone plan a defensive stand. Part of me wants unlimited energy to dick about in peace. I put this to Crytek’s CEO, Cervat Yerli. “There was a version of that game about a year ago where we dropped energy to see what happened, but it felt wrong. We tried solutions to counter having infinite stealth – like if you run it flickers slightly – but there were still drawbacks.”
The increased vulnerability made me plan my rampages before engaging. To compensate and encourage that kind of behaviour, Crytek have introduced a tactical assessment mode. ‘Magic goggles’, essentially, the assessment view can be flipped on to note targets and track them as they move around the map and behind cover. After an acclimatisation period, it made my sprees much more focused and efficient – by the time I’d removed my armour-enhanced hands from the throat of one foe, I was already spinning to face my next target, rifle raised.
This is why you don't get unlicensed taxis.
The tactical assessment view opens up another layer to the game, as Cervat explains. “The scan you get back makes three or four recommendations. You can mark the recommendations and they usually show you a way of taking advantage of a path you might not have chosen.” I tried this out on my fourth attempt at the first action bubble I played. On previous runthroughs, I’d gone for close-range firefights, but with a sweep of the tactical assessment view, I clocked a sniper rifle away from the action. Engaging cloak, I whizzed past a set of dimwitted aliens and hopped up to the ledge it was on. Shouldering it and hunkering down behind cover, I swept the field one last time to get a bead on my targets before pop-pop-popping three headshots off to kill them all without dirtying my nice new nanosuit.
This action bubble was one of the largest I played, yet thanks to the highrise architecture it felt tighter and closer to a standard FPS than Crysis’s expansive setting. I asked Cervat if the games were comparable in level size. “In metres, they’re going to be smaller, but they’re about the same because we’re pushing the height. Crysis was a sandbox, but it was a 2D game: you’re just walking left, right, forward, back, and sometimes you jump. Crysis 2 is a voluminous experience.”
The switch brings its own challenges for the development team. “That requires awesome AI to take advantage of the volume, that traverses the buildings and jumps between different levels. It took 18 months to get an AI we’re happy with that can follow you in 3D, and isn’t scripted.”
At the corner of 57th and Explosion.
My own playtime with the game didn’t allow me to really push the enemy AI, but I did enjoy their realistic line of sight: my standard reaction to getting shot at was to duck behind a box, and pop my head quickly round one side, before turning cloak mode on and rushing round the other to blindside my confused opponents. If I could get a bumslide involved in the process, all the better. Seeing their confused alien faces staring at where I last was instead of tracking my ghost was reassuring – definitely a refreshing change from Crysis’ omnipotent magic-men who shot you in the head from their perches on the moon.
The series’ alien obsession continues into the second game, despite a less than favourable reaction to their floaty appearance in Crysis. This time around they’re humanoid, and their armoured heads are topped off with fleshy dreadlocks, making them look like a Predator. When they move, they gallumph around the map, limbs jiggling – making them look like a Predator after a few pints when his favourite song comes on. There’s currently a connection missing in close-range battles between player and aliens. Their armour dispels a lot of damage from your puny human guns, which makes gunfights into extended hosing sessions, repeated until the requisite squishy bit is exposed and the game tells them to fall over. It should be stated that this kind of thing is subject to heavy balance tweaks as the game progresses, but in eschewing foes as human as the first game’s panicked Koreans, it’s hard to feel truly connected to scraps.
Crytek are pushing that connection this time around, leaning so heavily on the game’s story that they hired a proper book writer and everything. Richard Morgan – sci-fi author and the project’s story lead – explained his take on Crysis 2’s plot. “We’re looking for a reboot as far as the console market’s concerned. At the same time, we’ve got this history with the PC, and a set of fans we don’t want to let down.” How do you do that, then? “The trick is to create enough stuff that goes back to the original game so fans will recognise it, go ‘ah!’ when they see it.” Not that Crysis had any particular resonance as a narrative experience – Richard charitably describes the plot as ‘flimsy’.
Look who finally decided to show up.
But Crysis 2’s main character is constantly clad head to toe in a buttockhuggingly tight suit packed with tiny friendly robots. I asked Richard how you make a man who looks like the inside of a bicep into a character. “The suit isn’t a problem, because that’s the FPS dynamic. You have to reflect everything back onto the NPCs. It was very important to me to have reactions from the NPCs to this guy in the suit, so you can see the questions they raise.” Crysis 2 seems keen to tell its story by reflection and osmosis, rather than stamping it in cutscenes, and that extends to the architecture. Graffiti around a choke point made reference to ‘them’ lying about where the game’s alien invaders originate from. Intrigue! Delicious intrigue.
The ‘series reboot’ that Richard Morgan mentioned has been reflected in Crysis 2’s multiplayer. It’s been beefed up and farmed out to Crytek UK – the team who used to be Free Radical, the developers of multiplayer console shooter extraordinaire, TimeSplitters. That legacy shows. A short interlude – this is the bit where people who like to use words such as ‘consoleification’ should probably put this magazine down and start running around the room with their arms waving. For those still reading, I’ll put it out there now: Crysis 2’s multiplayer is already sharp and well polished, if completely different to the first game’s cursory multiplayer addition.
Like the singleplayer level structure, multiplayer feels like Halo. Each player, as well as the standard suit armour/speed/ cloak suit skills, gets to choose two perks and two weapons, varying builds from sprinting shotgun bastard to invisible sniper bastard and all bastards in between. Despite the fact I was playing three-month old code, guns already felt right – the armour suit mode offered enough protection to make it noticeably worth using, even against heavy weaponry.
Four-by-four drivers are very territorial.
The game’s Crash Site mode works like a king of the hill match, intertwined with the series’ fiction: an alien drop pod whirrs around the map, hocking up gobs of alien junk that your team has to stand next to for a short time for some reason. Fancying myself a dab hand with a sniper class, I took cover behind a crate overlooking one of these objectives. With a corridor viewpoint and invisibility on tap, I was able to squeeze off killshots before rippling into the dark – until one of my opponents hurled himself from the top of a parking garage, fist-first, onto my exposed head. His ground-pound smushed me into the concrete, the perfect deployment of a multiplayer special skill.
Crysis 2 feels like what you’d get if someone explained the first Crysis when heavily sedated. The freedom and lethality of the first game are there in spirit, but they’re given a more focused approach: Crysis 2 is much more driven, a sharpened point to Crysis’s slug. The problem with following such a seminal title is the weight of expectation. My advice is to drop that weight, and just enjoy Crysis 2’s bumsliding ride.
Kinect Hacks: Build a monument to yourself in Minecraft
For a full breakdown of this super technical process, check out Viniconis' explanation on his website, Order of Events. Even if you don't grok the jargon, there's plenty of delightful images to take in, such as these:
WGA nominates Singularity, New Vegas, more for writing award
But it's really let us down with the 2010 lineup:
- Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
- Fallout: New Vegas
- God of War III
- Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
- Singularity
- Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II
So way to go, kid. You don't have good taste in games, but at least you aren't a nutjob.
Update: As some of our readers have been kind enough to point out, WGA awards are limited to members of the organization, which may explain some of the more notable omissions. So now you know.
Black Ops led 2010 UK game sales, Just Dance top of the pops on Wii
Breaking it down by format, Blops landed in the top sales spot for Xbox 360 and PS3 games, while Just Dance and its sequel filled the first and third positions among Wii releases, naturally. Professor Layton And The Lost Future took the golden picarat for DS and FIFA 11 charged to the top of the charts on PSP.
Although one could speculate as to why Black Ops wasn't at the front line of PC sales in the UK, it's just as fitting that Football Manager 2011 and 2010 occupied the forward spots in the region. Check out the complete breakdown by format after the jump.
UK Bestsellers of 2010 (via UKIE)
All Formats
- Call of Duty: Black Ops
- FIFA 11
- Just Dance
- Red Dead Redemption
- Wii Fit Plus
- Just Dance 2
- Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
- Wii Sports Resort
- Halo: Reach
- Battlefield: Bad Company
Wii
- Just Dance
- Wii Fit Plus
- Just Dance 2
- Wii Sports Resort
- New Super Mario Bros Wii
PS3
- Call Of Duty: Black Ops
- FIFA 11
- Gran Turismo 5
- Red Dead Redemption
- Assassins Creed: Brotherhood
Xbox 360
- Call Of Duty: Black Ops
- FIFA 11
- Halo: Reach
- Red Dead Redemption
- Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
DS
- Professor Layton And The Lost Future
- New Super Mario Bros
- Art Academy
- Pokemon Soulsilver
- Mario Kart DS
PSP
- FIFA 11
- LittleBigPlanet
- Gran Turismo
- Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines
- FIFA 10
PC
- Football Manager 2011
- Football Manager 2010
- The Sims 3
- World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
- Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty
MyCrysis & NVIDIA GeForce Competition
Introduction
Here at MyCrysis.com, our aim is to give you, our community the very best competitions with the best gear available. Our tech partners NVIDIA have kindly given us six GeForce GTX 460 graphic cards to giveaway. This is an exclusive to MyCrysis and its loyal Crysis community, as such, it is only available to members of the site who are logged in. To be in with a chance to win one of these bad boys, all you need to do is answer one Crysis 2 themed question, found above.
The Prize
Rules
- You must be logged in to your MyCrysis account to vote (see rules)
- Users entering with multiple accounts will not be eligible to win
- You may only vote once
- The contest will run from 10/01/2011 – 14/01/2011
- You have to answer the question correctly to be in with a chance of winning
- Winners are selected randomly out of all people giving the correct answer
- Maximum of 1 prize per winner
- There is no legal recourse
- This competition is open globally, all prizes will be shipped directly to your location
Please take into consideration, that you are only allowed to enter by pressing your selected answer on the poll once, all submissions are final and cannot be undone!
HD 6950
The obvious upshot here is that these cards will cost less than their fully equipped brethren. Sapphire's above mentioned model is the only one we've found, but so far it doesn't appear anything other than the amount of RAM has changed; clockspeeds and other features still match up.
While Sapphire appears to be leading the charge, German website HT4U.net says other vendors will soon follow, offering both HD 6950 and 6970 cards less memory.
Would you be interested in a Cayman card with 1GB of memory?
Read More
Zeit 2 and random zombie deals on Xbox Live next week
Next week will also discount "more than 25 pieces" of DLC from Activision, including Call of Duty map packs, Guitar Hero songs and Arcade games. EA will get its chance starting January 18, with an equally vague promise of "one-time savings" on EA "content." For the full schedule of Xbox Live releases, check past the break.
Deal of the Week (Xbox Live Gold members only)
January 10 - 16
- Zombie Apocalypse - 400 Microsoft Points* (50% off)
- The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai - 400 MSP (50% off)
- Plants vs. Zombies - 800 MSP (33% off)
- January 4: Crackdown 2
- January 11: Need for Speed SHIFT
- January 18: Transformers: The Game
- January 18: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
- January 18: Dante's Inferno
- January 12: zeit 2 - 800 MSP
- January 6: New Year's Resolution
- January 6: Food Fest
- January 6: Burton
- January 13: Dinosaur Pets
- January 13: Xbox 360 Gear
$20 MS Point cards discounted to $15 at Walmart [update: They're gone]
There may be no such thing as free money, but in this age of digital economies we're getting quite accustomed to discounted fake money. Enter Walmart, which is currently selling 1600 MS Point cards -- that's $20 worth -- for $14.96. Thrifty Nerd tells us that you don't even have to pay shipping costs if you choose the in-store pick up option.
The Xbox Live Arcade House Party begins next month, including the likes of Torchlight and Beyond Good and Evil, so you might want to stock up on a few of these before they sell out. And they will, very fast.
Hackers claim to find Mac App Store loophole, pirating Angry Birds
A group of hackers by the collective name of Hackulous also reported to BBC News that its developed a piece of software titled Kickback which can break the copy protection on any App on the store. A representative from the group told BBC, "We're not going to release Kickback until well after the store's been established," as they "don't want to devalue applications and frustrate developers."
Kinect PC compatibility will come at 'the right time,' Ballmer says
Given the peripheral's sales success and the overflowing passion of the modding community (already using Kinect with PCs), we'd say the right time is "now." We're fine if Microsoft wants to take its sweet time, though -- we're not sure we're ready for our Kinect to watch us while we work, anyways. It can be so judgmental!
Nintendo 'exploring option' of reprinting Super Mario All-Stars
"Because of the strong response, we are exploring the option of bringing this item back at a later date," Franklin told GameLife. "Until that decision is made, consumers should check with retailers, as supplies will vary by store."
Nintendo tried 3D on GameCube and GBA
In a new Nintendo-organized roundtable discussion with the excitable Earthbound writer and all-around Japanese celebrity Shigesato Itoi, company president Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto discuss how the 3DS came about, revealing Nintendo's long history with 3D experimentation. In fact, the company had 3D running on both the GameCube and the Game Boy Advance SP, which was also used as a test platform for the DS's touchscreen technology."Making three-dimensional images that can be seen by the naked eye requires a special liquid crystal, so we tested it out by putting it in the Game Boy Advance SP," Iwata reveals. "But the resolution of LCD was low then, so it didn't look that great and it never made it to being a product."
Of course, Nintendo's most famous dalliance with three-dimensional technology, the Virtual Boy (pictured), actually made it into stores, where it ... didn't do much. Miyamoto attempts to cast the odd goggle thing as a toy, like the Ultra Hand or the Love Tester, rather than what was intended to be the next step in the company's game console line. "I imagined it as something that people who were on the lookout for new entertainment or who could afford to spend a bit of money could buy and enjoy, even if the price was a little expensive," he offers. "But the world treated it like a successor to the Game Boy system."
"That was also true within Nintendo," Miyamoto adds. "Our sales department treated the Virtual Boy as an extension of our licensing business." In hindsight, it does make sense for Nintendo to file away the Virtual Boy, along with its low sales and small game library, as a weird, one-off toy, instead of a true platform iteration. Of course, all the headaches it caused are probably best forgotten.
Bulletstorm started as a third-person shooter
"We actually went through lots of iterations of how cover could work really well in a first-person shooter," Jessen explained. "But when it came down to it, once we started to see how great some of the weapons were coming along, we felt the core of Bulletstorm is the face of the enemy and the player figuring out what to do. So in that case, cover-based combat didn't really work so well." It's all good -- we're sure Gears 3 will have it ... covered.
The Behemoth's 'Tournament of Champions' giving away a gold-plated Xbox 360
There's plenty of other prizes to go around, including a Castle Crashers-themed 360 Elite, and ... um, 250 squishy chicken toys, all of which go to the third place winner, which is appropriately bizarre. Check out the rules and regulations for the contest over on The Behemoth's official site!
Razer Hydra impressions: Super-precise motion controllers make it to PC, Portal 2 support in tow
During our hands-off tour of the still-prototype hardware, we were consistently impressed with the controller's accuracy. Imagine dual-wielding two PlayStation Move controllers except – in place of the relatively cumbersome process of requiring a PlayStation Eye to track a glowing sphere to position the controllers in 3D space – the Hydra uses a small base station that creates an electromagnetic field with a radius of about six feet. That's it. That base station serves double duty as a stand to rest the presently wired controllers on. Worry not, wire-haters, a wireless model is in the works but, much like Razer's other hardware, it's going to perfect the technology with a wired release first before chasing the wireless solution.While there's no release date or price yet, we were told to expect them early next year which, considering it will be released in a special bundle with the April-released Portal 2 packed in makes sense. As for price, Razer's targeting a sub-$100 tag or, roughly what two PlayStation Move controllers would run you. That Portal 2 bundle will include a special version of the game, that includes not only native support for the Hydra controllers, but new maps and puzzle mechanics built exclusively for Hydra. In our brief tour, we saw "scalable cubes" which can be stretched along the x-axis. Stretch one side, rotate, stretch another side, rotate again. In one puzzle, a scalable cube was stretched into a bridge; in another, it was stretched on all sides until it was large enough (the mass increases as well, conservation of mass be damned!) to shatter a glass floor below.
In order to manipulate the cubes, you enter 1:1 mode by pressing '1' on the right stick, which locks free-look on the right controller and remaps it to control the object. You can then rotate, move, and place the object with an impressive amount of accuracy. Remember that PlayStation Move multitouch demo from the Engadget Show? Adjusting the size of a scalable cube is pretty much that. You're also able to rotate and reposition portals. Instead of simply reshooting a portal to another position, you can grab it, move it, and even twist it. The exit velocity of anything thrown into a portal will carry through, meaning some Hydra-based puzzles may take advantage of your ability to twist and re-align portals.
While Valve's Left 4 Dead 2 was shown off last year with 1:1 sword controls, the Sixense rep we spoke with couldn't confirm if that would ever be released. He did, however, share a video of Call of Duty: Black Ops being played with Sixense, using the Sixense MotionCreator tool, which remaps traditional keyboard/mouse controls to the twin motion sticks. You can also see apps like Boxee being controlled with Sixense, though with a 6' radius, you may need to park that electromagnetic base station on your coffee table for proper couch navigation. Since that range is wholly dependent on the size of the electromagnetic coil and power provided to it, it's possible we may see a larger range if consumer demand is there. Also not included in this launch release: Mac support. With Razer working to make its entire product line compatible with Apple's OS, we'd imagine some consumer demand there would go a long way.
In short, Sixense technology and the Razer Hydra product are very impressive. If you're not inclined to believe us, that's fine, but we'd also point out the tacit endorsement of Valve, not only one of the most talented FPS developers in the industry but one of PC gaming's most successful and influential supporters.
Even more PlayStation Phone shots appear, comparison shots galore!
Codename Kingdoms: a new Xbox 360 exclusive from Crytek
