Crysis

Crysis website
Crysis gameplay videos

MGS: Snake Eater + Red Faction 2 + Lost Planet + Something Else = Crysis

This isn’t a review, since the game isn’t even out yet; it’s more of a heads-up. Crysis is a new FPS by Crytek, the developers who most famous for bringing us Farcry. Originally set in the Korean jungle, the game soon moves on to a future Earth; sub-zero and alien-infested. No details have been officially given as to why Earth was invaded, but there’s no denying that combining Korean jungle-fighting terrorists with some Lost Planet fighting-aliens-in-the-snow is a new idea. So what’s new? We’ve all seen FPS man vs. alien bang bangs, and we’ve all seen the hundreds of Vietnam games there are out there. Why bother writing a blog post on it?

Crysis is going to be an instant hit. Not only are the graphics and physics going to be legendary, but Crytek have put a lot of effort into the story this time. In there own words, they stated that “Story is a major area because we want to make people love this franchise… If it continues, it will be the story that gets it there.” So along with this real rarity for an FPS, there’s also a unique combat system.

Basically, you have some sort of hazard suit (no offence, Freeman) which provides the expected increase to combat prowess; however, there is also the option to increase power to specific parts of your combat suit, so at any time we can adjust the 4 attributes: speed, strength, armour and stealth.

On top of that, we are presented with an extremely interactive, Red Faction-like environment, that allows the player to blow down doors and walls, or literally rip a small building apart with the strength attribute maxed out. This is bound to be a great mix and should lead to some real opportunities for players to express creativeness during gameplay.

For those of us that like guns, alien shooting, player-decided tactics, stealth, melee, good graphics, good physics, cool armoured players, killing terrorists, changing landscapes and/or Far Cry, here’s a game you’re going to love.

Only on PC, which is a good thing you’re on the internet, really.

Live-D

Think Crysis sounds advanced? Check out these fab games:

Warcraft Reflections

Originally posted on Nobody Reads This.

I checked the other day, I have been playing WoW for a staggering 21 Months now – about £189 in Real Measurements – and its time to reflect on the experience as a whole.

What i’ve done

When I started out on WoW I was totally green; had no previous MMO experience and didn’t even conscript any friends to form a pseudo-Fellowship to make the virtual journey with. I was just a small-town Orc in a big bad world.

Since then i’ve grown and risen through the ranks to a respected and recognised casual player not only in my guild ‘Novus Initium’ but also accross the server.

I still vaguely remember my first Instance Run; Ragefire Chasm as a level 15 Shaman – It went horribly. Nowadays i’m conquering new 5-Man content with ease – and fulfilling the role I want and not being pigeon-holed into “Healer” because of my Shaman Roots.

I’ve cleared Molten Core, Onyxia’s Lair, Zul’gurub as Raids and am currently working on Karazhan.

Whats Changed?

So much it isn’t even funny. When I first played, WoW was calm – New content was slow, but came out ready to be conquered. PvP was simple, you had WSG and Arathi Basin and World PvP was pretty much non-existant.

Raids? … Molten Core was where “it” was at and Onyxia’s Lair was brand spanking new; lets not forget UBRS >_>

Lets look at what’s been released since then; Green for I’ve completed it:

• Zul’gurub
• Molten Core
• Onyxia’s Lair
• UBRS
• Ahn’Qiraj 20
• Ahn’Qiraj 40
• Blackwing Lair
• Naxxramas
  The Burning Crusade
• Magtheridon’s Lair
• Karazhan
• Serpentshrine Cavern
• The Eye
• Gruul’s Lair
• Black Temple
• The Battle of Mount Hyjal

As you can probably tell, I’m not exactly up to speed with raid progress, my Guild was half way through BWL when TBC came out, meaning we’ll never finish it (or Naxx in all likelihood). My point being, content has come so bloody quickly that even the best Guilds out there (read Nihilium) aren’t even keeping up.

Lets not even talk about the bugs.

How about Class Balance?

Class Balance is actually an Oxymoron; because I can hardly remember a time when the classes were actually fairly matched. It didn’t used to be so bad … Rogues were kinda the Kings but that was it.

Since then, with the expansion of PvP, Blizzard have gone Balance crazy; and with the ever increasing difficulty of End-game content they had to buff and not nerf. Some classes have been running around Unbalanced to the Max; Paladins became the best healers due to their ridiculous efficiency – Mages now have Silly DPS.

Shaman. Well things used to be good, we used to be quite powerful foes for PvP, but in PvE we weren’t so great. You had to be Resto to raid and our healing was never very efficient. Nowadays we have totally changed; In PvP we’re jokes; with such low Health and only Mediocre Damage (not going to talk about CC) we just get stomped.

PvE is totally different, All three Shaman builds are viable and generally accepted alternate builds; I Instance/Raid with my Enhancement build and do the job of Melee Support perfectly. The only thing you have to fight now is old-fashioned raid leaders.

So … Summary?

I’ve always loved the craftsmanship of any Blizzard product; I can still pick up and play their oldest Games and they work on every level. I play World of Warcraft and … I’m a little sadened.

I love WoW, it remains one of the best games i’ve invested my time in for quite a while – but I am still unhappy with many things. Like SW:G, Blizzard thought they needed big changes which were brought in for TBC. I think they’ve spoiled the entire game now.

Every new change seems to be a bad one … Shaman Nerf upon Nerf, Alchemy Revamp – Which makes it fucking shite … I just want to know how much longer I have to take this abuse before my card is up … Even during the last Shaman Class-Review, they just fucked us over and didn’t fix a multitude of our problems.

Where now?

I am confident WoW will continue to run for years to come and I hope Blizzard will get their best people on the case; because they are the Kings of Balance … but I don’t see why they’ve done such a shit job of Balancing WoW.

I bet £5 that WoW will run for 10 Years, and probably get a Graphics Revamp.

I said this because I do not think a Starcraft MMO could ever work; but then I thought about it … What about a Diablo one? Or atleast a Diablo Online Game, like Hellgate: London?

Anyway, those are my Warcraft Reflections; Tune in next time.

James

Ps. Still looking for people to write for WSAG; Get in touch people! >_>

Closing Down Offer

Well Mark has flaked out on another project; so this is an open invitational.

If you want to help write articles for WSAG then get in touch with me!

I’m looking for several new contributors to keep things going; I personally don’t have alot of time these days – Barely enough to play, let alone write about, games.

If you email me, register your interest via a Comment or (preferably) show your interest on the forum by post or PM then I will sort out your posting account so you can get started straight away.

The only requirements being that your posts should try to be atleast somewhat relevant to gaming and other popular media forms.

Should nobody register such interest / we don’t keep a reasonable level of activity up – I will just close WSAG down.

I did however start a little personal blog called Nobody Reads This, the .co.uk Domain should forward correctly by tomorrow.

I hope to hear from some of you soon.

Thanks for Reading,
James.

Layout

This new layout is absolutely nothing to do with me.

This is all Mark’s doing; Good or Bad, leave us your comment or post in this thread on the forums.

I am assured it is a work in progress; but i’m not going to fix it … I’m having nothing to do with it.

I was perfectly happy before.

Posting will once again be slow whilst I get my exams out of the way … in fact … I should’ve gone to bed hours ago. Whoops.

… can you even read this with all the sodding dark red on black?

Regards,
James.

Reset to default, because frankly I can’t take the whinging and nobody cares anyway. It’s times like these I wish I was still in 2002 playing Halo – Mark.

America – Fuck Yeah!

Captain America taught us that freedom is the only way, and you should never fuck with a six foot combat master with an invincible shield. He’ll be missed.

28 Posts Later

God; it has been an Age since I wrote anything.

I’m not really sorry, I’ve been busy having a life – So … Hush.

I went with the lady-friend to see 28 Weeks Later yesterday and I had heard only good things. Right from the start, I knew I wasn’t going to be disappointed.

** May Contain Spoilers **

Well; the movie opened with a slaughter, a brilliant little set of gory murders which told you that 28 Weeks Later was going to be far more gruesome. It definitely was. Next step featured the ever useful Americans, who did what they do best – Shot Friendlies.

And the ending … well … there’s going to be a Sequel; And its going to be equally as awesome.

The Protagonist shifts about 1/3 of the way into the movie – Understandably so – And we are given an awesome team of characters to get behind. The Military Sniper for example is just absolutely Golden.

Anywho; I don’t want to spoil it for you too much, it gets a solid two-thumbs up and a preliminary scoring of about 8 – 8.5. Its on a much bigger scale than its predecessor; but it is an equally big achievement.

Go See it.

Oh and Mark can continue his fucktarded CoH advertising if he wants, it just shows that he can’t see past the Gimmick. Mark fails.

James.

(*Deleted* – Mark)

Don’t edit snipes into my Posts, count yourself lucky I didn’t edit out your comment.

You’ve already proved on the Forum you can’t defend CoH, so live with it.

Lone Wolf Part 2

Nobody argued. I win.

Now that’s a victory.

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Lone Wolf By Choice

Of late I have begun to sense the (figurative) ravenous armies of darkness (figuratively) surrounding me, (figuratively) tearing at my arms with their slavering jaws. Within our unpleasant community of virtual murder simulator partakers, otherwise known as gamers, it is very easy to become ostracized when/if you vocalize a dissenting opinion to everyone else. so it is indeed with trepidation that I scribe what I am about to.

I hate Kingdom Hearts.

Hate is perchance not a strong enough word. I detest Kingdom Hearts. I abhor it. I am physically sickened by it. I am running out of words on this online thesaurus.

I hate the crap story that’s stupidly complicated to make people think it’s good. I hate the boring, stale stock characters. I hate the way FF (Another crap series) and Disney are dragged in. I hate the way I’ll be accused of “not liking Disney” and fantards will ignore everything else I say. I hate the utterly uninspiring combat. I hate the uninspiring platforming. I hate the character designs. I hate the way they gave Daffy and Goofy as a team. I hate Sora, so, very, very much.

Every element of the game was very well done, but one could say my faeces are excreted in a perfect shape.

I can’t go into real specifics, but if you email/put some comments in I might well respond to them, because I just can’t take abuse, only dish it out.

The most astute and undebatable comment on why the game actually possesses merit (I’ll be doing a comment special, and maybe even one after that so at least you’ll be able to rebuttal my rebuttal, as it were) might win a barely used copy of the game, even. I say “Win” but in truth you’d only lose your will to live. Unless you like the game, in which case you already own it and probably jabber on about it constantly on bulletin boards with like minded people. You’ll win the satisfaction of pissing me off.

This is what I do. I offer my own degradation for your amusement.

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Transform! Into a DOG TURD.

I will embark on a hunting down of Michael Bay. I am going to track him down and I will undertake to liquidate him in an abhorrent way, quite feasibly crucifixion, to lay the foundation of his ten decades of agonizing torture. Then I will doubtlessly attempt to invent a special device to bring humankind back to the realm of the living so I can in fact murder him again. I may very well do this certain activity a few hundred times. Then I will combust his corpse, locate some kind of machine that can in fact ignite him again and then, when burnt through, conflagrate those ashes some more in order to expel the pure evil and malign stupidity within them.

Why do I possess such dislike of this man named Michael Bay, however? Because he is in fact the director of the Transformers flicker drama coming to flicker drama screens this June, and he has no idea what the hell he’s doing.

An individual who has to go to “Transformers School” to make such a movie SHOULD NOT BE DIRECTING IT. An individual who only decided to in fact create the movie for the box office potential and not the vision within their skull SHOULD NOT BE DIRECTING IT. The man who directed “Pearl Harbour” SHOULD NOT BE DIRECTING IT, and should in fact be locked within a pressure chamber until his eyes pop out.

Apparently the traditional “box” designs weren’t in fact stylish enough, so all the Transformers look like Gundam Wing audition failures. “Failures” being the key word.

Optimus Prime is looking just like EVERY OTHER GIANT ROBOT I’ve ever seen.

And I feel that I can guarantee you with 100% of my frontal lobe that the film will concentrate on humans and their reactions to the Transformers. Yes, that is what I watch FUCKING TRANSFORMERS FOR. TO SEE PEOPLE LOOKING ASTOUNDED AT GIANT ROBOTS, NOT THE GIANT ROBOTS THEMSELVES. That was actually sarcasm, Bay. I should in fact actually only ever be noticing homo sapiens scurry underfoot as Optimus Prime and his awesome Autobot contingent try and defeat the malicious Megatron and his diabolical Decepticon aggregation. One would believe, nay, one would hope, that filmmakers would learn a lesson from what Paul Anderson did to Alien vs. Predator. Hopes are unfortunately often false.

Peruse the cast list on IMDB. One will only discover four transformer voices. This seems to suggest that there is apparently one individual doing a generic “Transformers” vocal session for every Transformer except Optimus Prime, Megatron and Barricade. Bumblebee isn’t even going to articulate. Apparently his voice box is fragmented from contention, which means “Steven Spielberg, our executive producer, wants to make E.T. 2″. One might suggest, and in fact does, that he should “fuck off” and go create that film, instead of further decreasing the quality a production that was already cursed to be a steaming pile of donkey excrement by it’s maniacal and talentless director.

What section of my infancy will be molested and perverted by the money worshipping raptors of Hollywood next? They’ve already accomplished hitting TMNT until it broke…

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The Neverending Story

EDIT: James has once again gained his powers of forum moderation. The matter is hopefully, in truth this time, closed.

• So, James is unfairly banned.
• Later a petition is started to bring him back. Two admins are apparently on at the time; Saturous, who banned him, and Blitz. Blitz feels it is up to Saturous to decide whether James can come back, even though he is a bloody admin himself.
• Saturous says no.
• Later, perhaps due to some strange quirk of the brain, we may never know now, Saturous gives James not only his account back, but also moderator powers.
• James does a fully respectable job, even closing a thread when Saturous went mad about my AWESOME poem and refused to take it to PMs.
• I come on this evening to find that his mod powers have apparently been removed by Zip, who claims that “I hope you enjoyed your short-lived moderation powers. So long as i’m an administrator on these forums however, you will not have any such abilities.”

One finds at this point that their brain starts to reach the optimum melting point of flesh due to the immense inconsistency in the governing of this particular “fora”.

We can all comprehend that this large collection of user generated content we call “the internet” will not always be harmonious. However, it is the responsibility for the administrators of a bulletin board to in the least attempt to reach a collective decision in matters such as bans, and especially moderation powers within their, shall we say, virtual headquarters. In fact, one could go so far as to suggest these decisions should be reached by all the respective grand masters of the domain before, in fact, the instance happens.

Obviously, there are the smaller predicaments to deal with. Warns, bans of fully warned offenders and somesuch. Obviously, these should be distributed fairly, and not retracted out of cowardice by another who fears too many have been distributed and decides to pretend that a warning never actually happened. This is feasibly what “Moderators” are for. And indeed, as with Administrators, they should be chosen for their responsibility. A co-creator of your particular cyber kingdom may well be very good at creating content. This does not make them a born moderator, much less an admin.

A valuable lesson should be learnt, and that lesson is that a forum should only ever have two admins and a handful of moderators. They should be responsible. And perhaps – and I say this in spite of James’ reinstatement of his voice, if not his cyberkinetic moderator fists – decisions should be stuck with, even when completely incorrect. And finally, there should be good communication within this team of hardworking individuals.

This may seem like a very obvious and perhaps unimportant lesson. This only seems to convince me its a lecture that more people should exert oneself to in fact LEARN, and perchance even fucking revise.

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