Moody Gamer

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.

A lot has happened since my last post. First of all, I managed to get hold of a Red Alert 3 Beta key. Thanks to someone at Rage3D forums who had two. If you are wondering why I didn’t buy Kane’s Wrath and obtained the key that comes with it, then check out No RA3 Beta key for ME.

Also, I have been accepted as a reviewer for the best Middle Eastern gaming site MEGamers. My acceptance review was Mass Effect (Check out the review at MEGamers). Look out for a bigger review of GRID with a lot more details than the mini review I have written here at Moody Gamer. Lastly, stay tuned for my Red Alert 3 Beta Impressions at MEGamers soon.

So you might be wondering that since becoming a reviewer, posts will be much less here in Moody Gamer right? Wrong. I will still continue to write reviews, articles and whatever. Only difference is that I only write reviews for MEGamers and very detailed ones. Here I have the freedom to write my usual mini reviews of both old and new games, unique articles, guides, thoughts and many more. So really, hardly any change will happen so fear not. I already have a nice guide cooking that am sure will interest many of you.

Keep your eyes open and stay tuned.

Infinity Ward (the developers) just can’t stop surpising us with their war FPS games. Just when you think that this genre has been done to death with the hundreds of WW2 and/or modern war variants, they come and prove that there is still lots of room for improvement and excitement. After missing on Call of Duty 3, which landed only on the consoles, Infinity ward comes back with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

The new sequel is based, from it’s subtitle, on modern age war. Using everything you ever know about current weapons and tactics. The game uses an updated version of the graphics engine used in previous Call of Duty games. Simply put, it is brought to current age graphics with up to date shaders and effects. Simple reason, and good one too, of updating from a previous engine is that you get access to a wider configurations of PCs when focusing on that market only. Optimized graphics engines that don’t have to be cutting edge is always a plus (Take a hint Crytek). Graphics can keep the wow factor for an hour or so, gameplay can keep it as long as the game lasts. Which brings me to probably the only annoyance in CoD4, it’s length which is about 4-6 hours long for it’s single player campaign, that is if you are slow. Other than that, you are in for a heck of a ride.

I never played a realistic FPS war game that is so engaging. As soon as you start a level, you get the feeling of really being part of a team that are storming, ambushing, defending and whatever other means of actions you get to do in the different levels of the game. The enemies also put you on your edge and going guns blazing rambo style won’t work here, and it never worked in real life too. Taking cover and being non static is the way forward. Stick too long behind a single cover and the enemies will swarm on you or will flush you with grenades. The missions themselves have interesting variety in them, from one of the best sniping missions to spectacular base assaulting missions. You also have to always check your flank, the enemy is so good at this that you can easily get carried away by focusing on the ones infront of you and then suddenly get killed be someone from behind. The thing is, when you are going through the single player campaign, you get that cinematic feeling that you might find in a Metal Gear Solid game which is of course nice to have a little of. Maybe because the music is composed by the same composer that did the music for MGS series, Harry Gregson-Williams.

One small thing I noticed is that rag-doll physics are absent almost throughout all Call of Duty series. The physics when it debut, was of course silly and funny but current implementations are far more realistic that before so it might have been a good time to have it implemented. It isn’t a big issue but rather a slight note that won’t affect your experience in this amazing game.

Now from all the three versions: PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, getting the PC version is best if you have a good setup simply because of the keyboard+mouse control which is almost always better than the controllers used in consoles for FPS games. Still, whichever version you get, you will be sure that you will have a blast playing this game.