Shades Of Twilight

Recently my 5-year-old “gaming rig” died on me. There was no forewarning – I wake up the next day, turned it on… and nothing happened. So, off I went scanning Sim Lim pricelists on Hardwarezone, and realised that a typical PC costs about $800.

Since I’m only going to get some components and re-use other existing stuff like DVD and Harddisks, my costs should be lower. And it was. Essentially I got what can be considered today as a “budget system”, since the graphics chip is embedded on the motherboard. The graphics chip, an ATI Radeon HD3200, actually has better specs than my nVidia 7600GT.

Remembering Crysis as one of the games that really stressed my older PC, I loaded it up again on the new PC and tested it.

On starting it, Crysis auto-detected the settings to be MEDIUM. This is as opposed to LOW settings on the older “gaming-grade” rig. I did a video capture of the session below:

While the game isn’t “screamingly fast”, it’s still playable. In fact, just about as playable as on my 5 year old PC. Considering that it is a “budget system”, this is impressive performance indeed!

The funny thing is, on some games, it “feels” laggy on the new PC compared to the old one. On other games, the games play smoother. Since I’m new to the ATI range of graphics card, I haven’t learnt the finer points of tweaking the Catalyst drivers yet, so perhaps I can fix the “lagginess” like I did in the nvidia range.

I’ve been quiet on this blog for a couple of days for one very simple reason – I was busy finishing up Crysis.

Late last year, I slowly drifted off playing Crysis due to many things. One thing I remembered when I was reformatting my PC earlier this year was – I will get back to it again, and thus I should keep my saves.

The thing about continuing from an old savegame a few months old is this – you tend to forget where you were, and what you did, and in some cases, what the heck the controls for the game were! This was true for Crysis. When I got back into it again last week, I truly forgot everything. I was even thinking whether I should start it all over again.

Then I decided to just stick it out and see if can remember. I’m glad I did.

Crysis is one very demanding game, seriously. During the last battle, against the giant boss monster, framerates slowed to a crawl, in fact. It was so slow, at some points in the game, I thought the game hung, because the screen would remain frozen, no sounds came, and it stayed like that for a good 15 to 20 seconds.

I was literally pressing a key, letting go, and seeing if it moved the screen 5 seconds later. Then I’d press another key, and see if the screen moved. The last final frantic fight turned out to be like Six Million Dollar Man – everything in slow motion. Press, wait, press, wait etc.

This problem is compounded by the fact that on my PC, Crysis seem to like to crash to desktop – a LOT. It can even crash as soon as I load up a savegame. Or, it can crash 10 seconds after I loaded a savegame up and trying to shoot/run.

The constant restarting of the game (not reloading saves mind you!) was really frustrating.

And, I had EVERYTHING on LOW! I even lowered the resolution down to 800×600, which was the lowest the game supported! Yeah, don’t try to play Crysis on a 5 yr old rig….

Well, sorry no videos this time around. Frame rates were so low, if I turned on video capture, it’d go into negative…

First of all, I’m actually surprised that the launch of Crysis in Singapore was such a hushed affair, what with all the hype surrounding its imminent release on 16 Nov 2007. I actually FORGOT about it until a week later, on 23rd Nov, when I happened to visit my regular game shop and saw it there.

So, I went home, loaded it up and started to go through the game. I tried setting the graphic options to MEDIUM (the game autodetected my configs as “LOW”) and yeah, it starts to lag pretty bad. I turned everything back to LOW and just bumped the resolution up from 800×600 (autodetect) to 1024×768. I mean seriously, the jaggy edges are horrible at 800×600… at least at 1024×768 I’m slightly more forgiving.

The first “level” is the same as in the demo – you freefalling onto a Korean island and then you catch a glimpse of the alien. So, I’ll skip ahead to the 2nd mission.

This is where the alien has captured another of your colleagues and killed him, and now you and Psycho have to go rescue a hostage held in a school.

This is where the bug is – After I had totally CLEANED out the school compound, the hostage and Psycho disappeared! I couldn’t find them anywhere, and my map didn’t update with a new objective.

Fine, I reloaded a savegame somewhere in the middle of the mission. I cleaned out the school compound again, but this time, Psycho and the hostage wouldn’t budge from the room they were in. I threw a few grenades into the room, Psycho ran around a little inside the room, but never left (incidentally, the hostage is invulnerable… the frag grenade didn’t even faze her).

So, giving up, I selected “RESTART LEVEL” from the main menu. This time, as I was in the process of approaching the school compound, Psycho finally said he’s coming in after me. Then, during the process of sneaking to the school building, Psycho said he’s right behind me.

I never got these 2 messages the first time!

So, now, I cleared the tanks, and right on cue, Psycho chirped – “Let’s get outta here!” and started to run.

Ok I dunno what the difference was between my first run and my 2nd run through this level, but now it’s not “stuck” anymore and I have a new quest objective in my map.

Just thought you guys would like to know if you encountered something similar….