Moody Gamer

Since I updated. Lots happened during that time: Ramadhan, Eid, started Masters program, excessive workload and working on some new reviews at MEGamers. So on the gaming scene, a huge amount of new stuff came out and/or happened that I don’t know where to start. Maybe a good starting point is what was I doing related to gaming.

First of all, I played and finished Devil May Cry 4 on the PC. Easy recommendation for button mashing players. You get to play as both Nero and Dante with each having their own play style. The game does suffer from one of the most horrible repetition of levels and boss fights. It is also worth to mention that it runs great on the PC compared to it’s older brother DMC3, so good job Capcom.

I also managed to grab a PS3 and a copy of Metal Gear Solid 4. All I can say that it is AWESOME. I can’t remember a game having a more complicated, twisted and emotional story better than this. I must warn you that it is very much recommended that you play MGS 1 to 3, which you can play on the PS2 (MGS1 was released on the PS1 and PC, while MGS2 was released later on PC after PS2 release). Keep in mind that MGS4 is about granting the player an experience through both cinematics and gameplay which both complement each other very well. The game is quite lengthy since I managed to go through it in about 19 hours without checking many features out because I aimed for the story. Though that time can be extended thanks to the replay value MGS games have. I haven’t checked out the multiplayer part of the game but from various feedbacks, it seems to be a blast.

Going back to PC, As I told you before, I purchased Crysis Warhead from Steam. Being in Oman, I totally recommend against this. It is both slow and expensive to get the game that way. Since you will have to pay 30$ for the game and then pay for the gigabytes to download through Omantel which many of you know, is bloody expensive (1RO per GB or about 2.6$ per GB). So you will end up paying more that 60$ for the game over here. Check out the review of Crysis Warhead to know more about the game.

One thing many of you know, Warhead is quite demanding on the PC, so I went ahead and bought me a Gigabyte Radeon 4870 512MB card (Contact me if you want to know where to get one in Oman) and am happy that I did. The game is now very playable on Enthusiast setting at 1680×1050 resolution. Though I can’t enable Anti aliasing ore Anisotropic Filtering. I also got me an extra 2 GB of RAM which helps a lot since Warhead is very resource hungry. Of course I did suffer the penalty of using Windows XP 32Bit version hence my PC shows only 3.25GB instead of 4GB. I guess 64 Bit OS is the way forward, but an extra GB is still useful.

I still have a lot to write about and because of time, I have to stop here and will update another day. Feel free to let me know of your experiences about the games mentioned above.

Crytek, the developers of the very much hyped yet great game: Crysis will soon be releasing the Standalone expansion of the game named Crysis Warhead. The game story is the same as the first one except this time you get to play as Psycho instead of Nomad. The single player levels will be more action packed than before with a lot of improvements almost everywhere. The multiplayer has been also tweaked and also the big question answered: Will it run better? YES IT WILL. The first two reviews that went online already are giving great scores for the game. IGN gave it 9.4 while Eurogamer (which was harsh on MGS4) gave it 9/10. The reviews already say that it can run at high resolutions on Enthusiast (Very High) setting pretty well on a 8800 GTS card. Ofcourse no mention of Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic Filtering being used. Still, the talk about performance optimizations are pretty evident in the reviews which is always good.

After Crysis was released, Crytek wasn’t happy on how the sales went and blamed it on piracy. So they already announced that they will stop releasing PC exclusives and might consider console releases. Though with the near release of Crysis Warhead (25th September 2008), in a surprise move, Crytek announced that both Crysis and Crysis Warhead are available on Steam! For those who don’t know, Steam is an application you can install on your PC and through it buy and download games. You can quickly learn more about Steam at store.steampowered.com/about. This marks the first EA game being released on Steam and questions are already floating on whether more games will follow (Red Alert 3!).

The reason for Crytek releasing both games on Steam is because it proved to be a very effective way to sell games with lesser risk of piracy and hence better sales which might help Crytek reconsider their PC exclusives direction, though I doubt.

Lastly, I went ahead and pre-ordered Crysis Warhead of Steam (it is released there on 16th of September) which is the first time I use it, lets see how it goes oh and keep an eye for MEGamers review.