One of my Christmas gifts was the PC video game Crysis. Ah yes, holiday cheer, therapeutic beating the bad guys… life is good šŸ™‚ .

Crysis launch window

The installation was weird. It was as if my DVD drive had problems reading the DVD. After the game installed I checked for updates and was directed to this URL: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105. Looks like Microsoft identified a problem with GPU’s and virtual address space usage. When I get the chance I’ll fire up Halo 2 and see if it works better. Or works at all: I kind of gave up on Halo 2 on the PC.

Crysis is the kind of FPS I like. It’s like Far Cry in that you can wander around and try different ways of getting to the target. You gather ammo and weapons and try to avoid the enemy. And just like Far Cry, Crysis is the current way of measuring up your PC. This game is graphically intense and eats system resources. I have two PCIe Geforce 7800s with 512 MB in SLI and I can’t run the game in high resolution or much anti-aliasing. The play is good so I don’t mind.

You are on an island that has been taken over by the KPA. You and your team of other specialists are wandering around on missions and on the way you encounter squads of enemies. You can fight or you can navigate around them. Your suit can switch from maximum armor, maximum strenghth, speed, etc. There is a cloak setting but it so far does not last long enough to really get the jump on the enemy.

The KPA took over the island after a team of archaeologists woke up some ancient alien technology. One of these things is killing the KPA as well as your teammates. It’s a nice touch and adds a sci-fi horror feel to it. It’s not F.E.A.R. but it’s good so far.

I’ll probably finish the game next week. I’ll see how I like it afterwards.