Crysis in Sim City

[PhoneLobster]

Right, so I actually buy and play PC games. Which is often stupid of me. And here is some proof of why it is stupid.

I bought Crysis, and I bought Sim City Societies. I was even looking forward to them.

Crysis
So these guys made Far Cry. A game with a really wildly pretty engine that still ran smooth on a PC that consisted of a rusty tin can held together with string. It was also a cool stealth FPS game in the very best tradition of Thief right up until the late level hoards of angry nearly invulnerable unavoidable enemies (much in the tradition of Thief). Only its on a tropical island. And really the single player game just seemed to go for ages, and was great.

Now they make Crysis, which basically looks like Far Cry with minor technical updates and now instead of some soldier guy you get to be uber future soldier with uber future super powers. And the late game bastards are aliens instead of mutants.

So first half of the game its far cry 2, you are shooting soldier chumps in a jungly tropical island place. Only now they are Korean, which makes it somehow less fun.

Also. Stealth? Oh, it refused to sign the contract for the sequel. In far cry, trees, bushes, shadows, crouching, line of sight, alertness. It all meant something, you could sneak up on dudes and damn well stab them, you could HIDE again before their buddies came looking.

Crysis? No, you have uber suit stealth, you turn it on, it lasts like wow, SIX SECONDS, and you are totally invisible, no one sees you (for 6 seconds, and then your suit armour is drained at the end of it) However, if you don't have that turned on, the second you walk within even reasonable weapons range of any dude regardless of intervening terrain, your speed of movement etc... He sees you, through the back of his head, and telepathically communicates your position to everyone in the camp, who then I don't know, track you by satellite or something so you can never hide again without using uber stealth AND running outside of magic telepathy range.

And the single player campaign? Oh jungle fight for like a whole 3 or so (much smaller, more boring, less "stealthy") areas than the typical far cry areas. Then suddenly you are in tunnels, a stupid "space ship" and "valleys" and a stupid aircraft carrier and junk where you may as well be on rails for all the non linearity you get.

And while on those rails its pure shooting gallery moron fodder. Heck for a good portion of the aircraft carrier "walk along this fixed path" mission there aren't even enemies to shoot.

And the second half alien bastards? After all the talking up the game gives them and the like 2 or three elite comrades they kill in about a nano second flat each they are weaker and stupider than the Korean elite nano soldiers, who in turn somehow manage to be weaker and stupider than the stock standard Korean troops who by far remain the strongest enemies in the game.

And weapons! They are few, far between, sucky, and the "weapon modifications" do almost nothing of any use whatsoever.

The suit "modes"? Boring and clunky, oh turn on strength mode to bash in this broken door that blocks your railway set path, turn on speed mode because... er actually there is never a really good reason to use speed mode unless you just want to skip a large section of the stupid games levels. Turn on stealth mode... well so you can pretend its still a stealth game.

And then, bam, single player campaign over, I kept expecting my stealth abilities to somehow upgrade and to get some opportunity to explore a sprawling far cry style map requiring sneakily taking down whole armies of mooks. But no, just when I was like "well this looks like the games halfway mark... maybe now there will be some good levels..." BAM credit sequence.

I mean fuck there is even a stupid Arbitrarium grenade launcher weapon which has no purpose whatsoever but to kill 1 enemy in the last level that has arbitrarium armor. Its listed as infinite ammo, but it fires tracking missiles that can only shoot when a target is acquired. On the like, 3 occasions you ever fire it it basically cannot miss and you are TOLD "shoot this piece of the big enemy with the arbitrarium gun NOW!"

I am unimpressed.

My thoughts on Sim City Societies in a second. After I stop seething.

[PhoneLobster]

Sim City Societies
OK. So I should have known this one would suck like the guy who plays "Peter" on Heroes. Because apparently there is some association between the people who made this game and the people who made the asstastically shit Ceaser (and Zeus and Civ City) line of games.

A line which, don't get me wrong was all very well when the first game was made, but frankly never really seemed to attempt the whole "ongoing innovation" thing all the more fashionable games were into.

Much as "Civ City" never deserved the Civilization brand it somehow bought the rights to associate with this game has about as much to do with Sim City as... well... this stinky dead fresh water crayfish I stepped in this morning at work.

The crustacean may have had more entertainment value and intellectual engagement as well.

So in the REAL sim city games you like placed zones and built networks of vital services, ballanced complex budgets, and agreed to take the neighbouring cities garbage, toxic waste, criminals, and other dangerous goods for a small fee. Then you built archologies. Then you got bored and unleashed godzilla.

In this "game" you individually place every building right down to the shit pile ten pixel wide shacks and chicken coups, "networks" are not required for vital services, if there aren't roads people just like walk or teleport or something, power is magically transmitted from wind farms to the entire planet and water supply is apparently a thing of the past.

The terrain is LESS exciting and adapatable than the sim city games. Mountain side city HAH, you wish. The path finding algorithm for placing roads, ESPECIALLY on slopes or bridging water, or connecting two existing roads, or going around a corner, or in a straight fucking line is so strange you NEVER know where a road will turn up next. Just click the road button and hope it create a pattern so vast and insane it doesn't break the budget AND your sanity.

Budget balancing? What budget? Money occasionally magically teleports into your coffers, if it feels like it. The only control you have over that is to build similar buildings near each other (which seems to have some sort of weird synergy bonus), and to build the same number of housing slots as you have job slots.

So aside from tediously placing individual buildings what do you actually do?

Well they pushed this "innovative" cultures idea. See cities would have different cultures, so you can build a shining "prosperity" metropolis or a decaying distopia...

So you think "Wow so I place my sim city zones (already not actually the case) and depending on my complex policies and planning decisions (non existant) my city will change in appearance and style? COOL!"

No, of COURSE not. See the designers though it would be much cooler if you were to just choose and place buildings of the I don't know six or something culture types, I already forget they were stupid and annoying culture types. Suffice it to say one of those culture types is fucking clown houses and circus shit. And that's the culture type the tutorial chooses to introduce you to the "complexities" of gameplay with.

So how do you determine type? Well you just build whatever fucking culture type you want, but the houses and junk remain innactive until your matching culture levels rise high enough. So how do you make them rise? Complex interaction with narrative events and exciting variable objectives? Public policy? Anything?

No You build fucking ornaments. You build a stupid aztec mural, and BAM one of your clown houses turns on. Of course to run even the tutorial city you need to build something like 8 of the same stupid Aztec mural. But you can build them on the opposite side of the map next to the fucking wind farms if you want to since proximity only provides minor irrelevant bonuses and has no influence on culture...

Or you just choose the right functional buildings that contribute to culture without ornaments and save some of the tedium of manual structure placement.

Build enough Aztec murals and clown houses and new Clown buildings get "unlocked" for the further tedium of manual placing and higher Aztec mural requirements.

So then at least you can just like build a stupid Aztec Clown empire city right? Well SORT of. It looks like you could but SOME clown buildings give like cyber punk blade runner building bonuses and shit like that and a lot of the (boring optional) objectives basically seem to require MIXED cities, so now you can have Clown town in the middle of Cyberpunktropolis... in fact you pretty much have to do that, with a tibetan monastery down the street next to the gleaming merchant skyscraper and rusty industrial factory. That will make EVERYONE happy... right.

This is the most infantile, boring, easy, stupid, and unrewarding sim city game ever. You can't even unleash Godzilla (or any disaster that resembles godzilla) on your stupid fucking Clown town/Tibetan secret valley.

Also, the citizens mutter annoying Simglish phrases all the time.

[PhoneLobster]

Anyway,I hope someone gets some entertainment out of reading my complaints because I got precious little "playing" these two games.

I've played some really bad games but few have been sufficiently bad for me to feel driven by the resulting madness to complain here about them.

And I bought a copy of Master of Orion 3 so thats saying a lot.

[Username17]

That does say a lot. Master of Orion 3 was the most disappointing thing that happened to me other than Bush winning the Supreme Court run-off.

Personally, I would like to make a Cyberpunk city with Aztec Murals and Tibetan Monasteries. Very Shadowrun actually. I'd even throw in the rusty factories and slums. But... just say no to Clown Houses.

It would be vaguely interesting if you could zone things Sim City style and were still allowed to check boxes for available cultures - so you could have a Hong Kong style city where people built in traditional East Asian and Ultra-Modern Corporate or you coyld build in literal Candyland where all the major buildings were castles with soft pink minnarettes and shit. And that's what I was looking forward to with SimCity Societies. But that's not what got delivered according to anyone I've heard from about this game.

-Username17

[Lago_AM3P]

You can't destroy your own city after building it? WTF?

That was one of the best things about SimCity, having riots or wildfires tear down your creation when you got bored of the little cretins.

[Daiba]

1197024345[/unixtime]]However, if you don't have that turned on, the second you walk within even reasonable weapons range of any dude regardless of intervening terrain, your speed of movement etc... He sees you, through the back of his head...

Most of your critique is pretty accurate, but this is just not true. You can sneak up through brush pretty easily, and in more open areas use Stealth to move between areas of cover. I think part of the reason you feel it's impossible to sneak, is that due to the presence of stealth mode the designers gave standard sneaking a lot less leeway (as an incentive, or something stupid like that...). For example, 20% of your body in 40% light saturation is needed for your opponents to spot you, instead of 40/60, or something like that.

If you want to sneak up from behind people, you have to be moving slowly, or your footsteps will alert them to your presence. Stealth mode muffles your footsteps, so they can't hear you move even if you're really close, but in any other mode (and especially in Armor mode), you'll make lots of noise running around. I think this is where your "back of the head" problem comes from.

One of the issues I encountered, was that at long enough range, you can just stand upright on hill crest or the top of a building, and the enemies will just mill around while you snipe them. They'll take cover, and then stand up and run around some more. They have a similar reaction if you attack directly from above.

[Jacob_Orlove]

I'm so disappointed right now. I was hoping that "Crysis in Sim City" was a bunch of internet people crying about some sim city related issue.

But now I find out that "Crysis" is just an awful misspelling of Crisis, and not a hilarious mockery of whining fools. For shame, somebody, for shame.

[PhoneLobster]

You can't destroy your own city after building it? WTF?

You can, just not with anything resembling Godzilla or the alien invasion. I think it was fire, flood, earthquake and meteorites.

The one time my city caught fire it was really underwhelming too, one single house burnt. A bit, it was OK afterwards. Even though the fire truck didn't make it in time.

So far I haven't even been interested enough in my own city to try and destroy it with meteorites.

You can sneak up through brush pretty easily, and in more open areas use Stealth to move between areas of cover.

Well. See now by pretty easily I would expect you mean you can equip a weapon without a laser pointer, crouch, move only occasionally, at some distance from a guy facing the other way through the thickest underbrush on the island and not be seen.

In Far Cry that worked, you could even do that AFTER a group was alerted to lose and confuse them. But every time I tried it that failed. Now if I had to use the lie down mode to sneak... Then I'm pissed because thats just too awkward and boring.

As for stealth between areas of cover... What is the point? You have to move to TOTAL cover. If you move without stealth or attack anything (ie actually use your new position to try and achieve ANYTHING) then everyone is alerted and angry and escape back into stealth is so hard as to not be worth the effort compared to just franticly running around killing everything that moves.

I didn't mention the sniper issues because I felt it was too much detail, but...

To get a good shot with most weapons you need to be close enough to be detected easily. EXCEPT if you get the sniper scope on the precision rifle. You then ditch the precision rifle and use the sniper scope on a silenced standard rifle and now there is a range at which you can fire from and that enemies cannot find you and so they run around in little circles like idiots.

Which is probably OK, you are being stealth sniper dude. What is NOT OK is that the precision sniper rifle sucks at sniping.

Its the rarest ammo in the game and though its great at long range it can't fit the silencer so if you do use it in the long range scenario the enemies know your location and come right for you.

But now I find out that "Crysis" is just an awful misspelling of Crisis

Crysis, sequel to Far Cry, made by Crytech. They have some sort of Cry theme going.

[Crissa]

It's funny, but everyone complained about the clown houses when they announced the game. And yet, they kept them in - in the tutorial, no less.

Second largest complaint was the repetition of buildings - needing eight or sixteen of something to get the bonus was really, really a bad idea. Especially when you only have one model.

But what do you expect from EA? That they'll actually listen to the people who buy the games?

-Crissa

[Koumei]

Many years ago, I played Sim City 2. That was fun. Especially the catastrophe missions, where something really bad happens at the start to an existing city, and you have to recover from it and get your population up to X within a certain time.

I recall once playing the "volcanic eruption" one. It was really cool, but after I put all the fires out and started rebuilding, I realised "I've won, it's just a matter of waiting". So I got bored. I then started trying to click on the helicopters.

I accidentally shot one down, and it crashed, and the fire it started raged out of control, seriously taking half the city with it and spreading more quickly than I could fight it. Forget volcanoes. Helicopters are the most explosive things known to mankind.

[JonSetanta]

I'll save up and wait for StarCraft 2. Nuff said.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Forget volcanoes. Helicopters are the most explosive things known to mankind.

Second most explosive. Most explosive is still Tokyo.

[RandomCasualty]

1197080684[/unixtime]]I'll save up and wait for StarCraft 2. Nuff said.

This is about the only new game that interests me at all. Most of the games coming out lately have been pretty crappy.

It sounds like Crysis did to Farcry what DOuble Agent did for the Splinter Cell Franchise.

[Koumei]

1197118506[/unixtime]]
Second most explosive. Most explosive is still Tokyo.

Oh, that's right. That city explodes like some kind of metaphor I can't think of.

Especially Tokyo Tower. I mean, come on, do they have spares hidden away or something.

As for new games, Haze sounds kind of interesting. Not sure of the release date, console or anything, but I just read one little report on it. A FPS game where you can play the evil empire and get access to awesome combat drugs (auto-targeting and enhanced strength/speed), but risk overdosing (auto-targeting your allies, randomly pulling pins out of grenades and needing to play Simon-Fucking-Says-Because-It-Worked-in-God-of-War to throw it away). Or you can play the rebels, granting you special guerilla tactics such as "shoot them in the drug dispenser and force an OD. Laugh." and "play dead, then play Simon-Fucking-Says-Because-It-Worked-in-God-of-War to leap up and sucker-punch them."

It sounds cool, and I normally don't like FPS games.

Someone's about to tell me it came out last month and was utter bollocks, right?

[SunTzuWarmaster]

It is going to be a sad Christmas, but the things that I (and others, I believe) am looking forward to are as follows (in no particular order):

Assassin's Creed (terrible shame to not have a PS3/360)
Star Wars - The Force Unleashed (all major consoles)
Starcraft 2 (PC only, IIRC)
Super Smash Brothers Brawl (Wii only, long live the GC controller!)
Spore (PC only if it ever comes out)

[MrWaeseL]

Spore won't come out. In a few months time someone will reveal it was all a hoax and I will laugh and laugh and laugh.

[Koumei]

Actually, I hear Duke Nukem Forever is going to be pretty cool

Assassin's Creed was apparently spat upon by many fans, though ZeroPunctuation merely gave it "I sat down expecting to have to trudge through the Olympics of Shit, but it wasn't that bad. It wasn't fantastic (shows a picture of "Portal"), but it wasn't terrible (shows a picture of "Clive Barker's Jericho" by Clive Barker*). It probably walks away with Bronze. It's not a bad game, go ahead and play it but I'll forgive you if you want to shoot it into the sun."

So take that how you will.

Seeing as my PC won't be able to run it, I will also laugh if they declare Spore to be a hoax. That being said, it'd be a pretty elaborate hoax, looking at the latest trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

*Ever notice that when someone slaps their name on a game, it really sucks and now the game has their name on it so people will mock them forever more? The classic example is of course "John Romero's Daikatana".

[CalibronXXX]

I just got RickRoll'd, and until now I didn't even know that was a thing.

[cthulhu]

Penny arcade liked Assassins creed.

[Koumei]

They usually know what they're talking about (within the genres they like, of course), too. Hmm. Well, the ZeroPunctuation review mostly just had complaints with how long it takes to get from your base to "anywhere", the amount of last words people have when killed (cutscenes ahoy - which can also be awesome, depending on what you want out of a game), and the way society considers it your fault if you punch lepers and clingy women in the face while heading to work.

I don't, come to think of it, recall any real criticisms that would be deal-breakers when buying the game.

And Calibron: Yes! I win again!

[JonSetanta]

Koumei, I hate you.

But yes, I did see Spore previews last summer. Robin Williams doing a preview test of the alien design live in front of an audience was funny, and got me interested, but I agree... there won't be many older computers able to run that.
My eMachines can barely render the Unreal series, and WarCraft was a strain when my girlfriend played it on this shitbox.
But then... it was a gift from my parents 5 years ago... meh...

[RandomCasualty]

Spore honestly doesn't interest me. It's one of those games that seems like a big technological innovation, but I don't think it has a great game to go with it. It's trying to be everything and that usually means it'll end up being nothing worth playing.

[Username17]

-Username17

[Koumei]

That would be seriously awesome.