Crysis
Jun 9, 2019 7:48:42 GMT -5
Post by anayo on Jun 9, 2019 7:48:42 GMT -5
We’re allowed to talk about Crysis on HRG. That makes me feel old.
19 year old me thought that he wanted to work as a computer animator. So I spent two semesters at an animation program at a community college 30 miles from my parents’ house. The program was not great. Most of the students were delusional artists. The instructors were fine, but the curriculum consisted of tutorials read out loud to us: “Here’s how to do the Ken Burns Effect in after effects.” “Here’s how to make a polygon in Maya.” “Here’s how vector graphics are different from bitmaps.” Those are all important to know, but I had a decent track record of reading and teaching myself basic level stuff. It made me wonder what how the program was any different from what I could have learned from self-study. I was also researching the post-school work prospects and the stuff I heard about brutal working hours and layoffs didn’t thrill me. Lastly, my portfolio was OK by amateur standards, but by semester 2 I was really beginning to question whether I was cut out for professional computer graphics.
Anyway, before starting school, I wanted a way to work on my projects at home. But the latest version of Maya was no longer supported on my Pentium IV. So I bought a new computer. It was an Intel Core Duo with 4 GB of RAM and a 512 MB Nvidia GPU. I recycled my old case and power supply, so the parts only cost $600. Although I ended up changing majors and ultimately my career, this computer still served as my entry into next generation gaming. Before that, my most advanced gaming machine was a Gamecube.
Before the 2010’s, PC gaming used to have big games that targeted PC specs, meaning these games were so advanced that you absolutely needed a PC to play them. The most prominent titles I remember growing up were Doom, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, and Crysis. There was no way to play Doom on a Sega Genesis (they made a SNES version but they had to chop its arms and legs off to get it to work). Half Life on N64 or Playstation was just out of the question. You weren’t getting Half-Life 2 on Playstation 2 or Gamecube. I acknowledge the eventually ported HL2 to the original XBOX along with other “PC-spec” games like Doom 3 and Chronicles of Riddick, but the XBOX itself was just a consolized Pentium III PC that used DirectX - the start of the console hardware homogeneity seen today.
Crysis was the last game I can think of that targeted PC specs without any consideration for how it would run on home consoles. Ever since then, PC gaming has been less about games that will only run on the latest CPUs and GPUs and more about playing console games at higher frame rates and resolutions. Digital Foundry made a video about how Crysis’s technology dominated even the most capable of gaming PCs when it came out in 2007. But 19 year old me was hardly aware of all the technicalities. All I knew was that when you had an expensive computer, you got Crysis. It was the most lavish and advanced game available. The meme, “But can it run Crysis?” lasted for years after Crysis’s release.
Now, as of June 2019, I have been playing NES games for 6 months. Those games are generally skill-based. They entail mastering enemy movement patterns and sharpening one’s reflexes to overcome a challenge. This is because during the NES era, memory and processing power were limited, so they had to make the games difficult. If they didn’t, players would complete them in 30 minutes and feel they wasted their money.
Crysis, in contrast, is an ego shooter. It’s mostly a power fantasy where you’re outnumbered by enemy forces with more soldiers, tanks, and helicopters than you, but you’re so powerful you can kill them all anyway. The install size is something north of 10 gigabytes, making it possible to include geographically accurate miles and miles of terrain. This also removes the need for scenarios like Castlevania (1987) where the actual campaign is stupefyingly short, no more than a few small rooms, but the practice needed to master it creates the illusion of length.
In Crysis your character is downright over-powered. He is a special forces soldier in a cyborg suit with a variety of powers. Pressing the middle mouse button lets you choose from a wheel with super speed, super strength, super armor, and a cloaking device. This trailer embellishes somewhat but is mostly accurate to the gameplay:
Unlike Doom (1992) where I felt like prey, in Crysis, I felt like the predator from the 1987 movie of the same name. Choosing weapons felt less like a matter of life and death and more like I’d get bored with my current weapon and would want to change for novelty’s sake. I should also add this game shamelessly sings to the tune of Far Cry (2004), another Ubisoft game where you’re on an island fighting soldiers which I played when I was 15. The similarities between both games’ tropical island setting and guerrilla warfare style gameplay is impossible for me to overlook.
Stuff I still like about Crysis:
-The trees and foliage look very pretty, especially from far away.
-The lighting effects are pretty.
-The destructible scenery is limited, but what’s there is way cool. I like how sniper towers fly into pieces when you shoot them with an RPG.
Stuff I don’t like very much about Crysis 10 years later:
-Under close scrutiny the graphics don’t look as tangible as I remember. Often it looks like 3D geometry with an image stamped on it.
-When I first played Fallout 3 I loved how I could pick up random objects in the environment. But the more I played, the more I noticed the touchable objects were all repeated from the same library. In Fallout 3 I remember seeing the same teddy bear and tin can a hundred times. This happens a lot in Crysis.
-Enemies don’t always respond when they get shot. This is a little hard to describe but it’s like they have an unseen health bar and no matter how much you shoot them, they don’t react until the bar reaches zero. This has always bothered me about games from this era. In 007 Goldeneye I can accept that an origami man with a JPEG painted to his face can’t get wounded. It’s a little harder to swallow when I shoot a hyper-detailed, lifelike North Korean soldier in the leg and he runs away like everything’s OK.
-This game has some bugs. At one point my save file got corrupted. I had to go 4 save files back in order to keep playing. On the final boss, I was supposed to get a special weapon to defeat him. I unwittingly skipped this weapon. Then while fighting the boss, Dr. So-and-so kept yelling at me to “Use the TAC cannon!”, which I didn’t have and couldn’t pick up at that point. I had reload like 6 saves prior and get it.
-The ending is anticlimactic. I wasn’t exactly timing my play through, but it feels like the shareware version of a full game. I would have been pissed off if I paid full retail price for this.
-I like the parts where you come across a compound of North Korean soldiers and organically figure out how to slaughter them all. I also like when you pilot big, powerful vehicles, like a tank or a gunship. When Crisis tries any other kind of gameplay it feels weird. I’m referring to a strange out-of-place boss fight with a North Korean general, a part where you go solo into an alien structure while your character explains everything in tone-deaf borderline fourth-wall breaking narration (“I notice that this door might open. Maybe I should try it!”), and a mercifully brief escort mission. I just tolerated those parts so I could get back to the cool parts.
To me it’s weird how close Crysis comes to something that would come out in 2019. If you were to play a 12 year old game in 2007, it would not look and play like a slightly more modest version of whatever people were playing in 2007. You’d be playing a very early Playstation game or a very late 16-bit game. Maybe this is because the Cambrian explosion of Moore’s Law started slowing down in the 2010’s. Or maybe it’s because better-looking graphics started requiring exponentially more and more computational power. But it still feels weird to me. At every point in my life, I can remember electronics changing drastically from one decade to the next. In the 90’s, everyone listened to music on CD players. Then by the 2000’s everyone wanted iPods until the 2010’s when those merged into the digital Swiss army knife of the smart phone. Playing Crysis 10 years later is kind of like using a 10 year old smart phone. It’s not as lavish as what’s available today, but it’s still eerily similar.
Crysis’s “ego-shooter” design philosophy left me wondering why I was enjoying it so much. I’m really vocal about how modern gaming killed challenge and skill, but I still kept coming back to it, playing an hour or so after work. Then I started thinking about what it means to “play” and I came to the conclusion that Crysis has less to do with this:
and more to do with this:
The boys in that commercial are all in their 40’s now, but I’d wager that the impulse to drive little plastic figurines around in jeeps and helicopters and have imaginary wars never completely went away. They would just simulate it on a supercomputer because it’s more convenient and socially acceptable now.
19 year old me thought that he wanted to work as a computer animator. So I spent two semesters at an animation program at a community college 30 miles from my parents’ house. The program was not great. Most of the students were delusional artists. The instructors were fine, but the curriculum consisted of tutorials read out loud to us: “Here’s how to do the Ken Burns Effect in after effects.” “Here’s how to make a polygon in Maya.” “Here’s how vector graphics are different from bitmaps.” Those are all important to know, but I had a decent track record of reading and teaching myself basic level stuff. It made me wonder what how the program was any different from what I could have learned from self-study. I was also researching the post-school work prospects and the stuff I heard about brutal working hours and layoffs didn’t thrill me. Lastly, my portfolio was OK by amateur standards, but by semester 2 I was really beginning to question whether I was cut out for professional computer graphics.
Anyway, before starting school, I wanted a way to work on my projects at home. But the latest version of Maya was no longer supported on my Pentium IV. So I bought a new computer. It was an Intel Core Duo with 4 GB of RAM and a 512 MB Nvidia GPU. I recycled my old case and power supply, so the parts only cost $600. Although I ended up changing majors and ultimately my career, this computer still served as my entry into next generation gaming. Before that, my most advanced gaming machine was a Gamecube.
Before the 2010’s, PC gaming used to have big games that targeted PC specs, meaning these games were so advanced that you absolutely needed a PC to play them. The most prominent titles I remember growing up were Doom, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, and Crysis. There was no way to play Doom on a Sega Genesis (they made a SNES version but they had to chop its arms and legs off to get it to work). Half Life on N64 or Playstation was just out of the question. You weren’t getting Half-Life 2 on Playstation 2 or Gamecube. I acknowledge the eventually ported HL2 to the original XBOX along with other “PC-spec” games like Doom 3 and Chronicles of Riddick, but the XBOX itself was just a consolized Pentium III PC that used DirectX - the start of the console hardware homogeneity seen today.
Crysis was the last game I can think of that targeted PC specs without any consideration for how it would run on home consoles. Ever since then, PC gaming has been less about games that will only run on the latest CPUs and GPUs and more about playing console games at higher frame rates and resolutions. Digital Foundry made a video about how Crysis’s technology dominated even the most capable of gaming PCs when it came out in 2007. But 19 year old me was hardly aware of all the technicalities. All I knew was that when you had an expensive computer, you got Crysis. It was the most lavish and advanced game available. The meme, “But can it run Crysis?” lasted for years after Crysis’s release.
Now, as of June 2019, I have been playing NES games for 6 months. Those games are generally skill-based. They entail mastering enemy movement patterns and sharpening one’s reflexes to overcome a challenge. This is because during the NES era, memory and processing power were limited, so they had to make the games difficult. If they didn’t, players would complete them in 30 minutes and feel they wasted their money.
Crysis, in contrast, is an ego shooter. It’s mostly a power fantasy where you’re outnumbered by enemy forces with more soldiers, tanks, and helicopters than you, but you’re so powerful you can kill them all anyway. The install size is something north of 10 gigabytes, making it possible to include geographically accurate miles and miles of terrain. This also removes the need for scenarios like Castlevania (1987) where the actual campaign is stupefyingly short, no more than a few small rooms, but the practice needed to master it creates the illusion of length.
In Crysis your character is downright over-powered. He is a special forces soldier in a cyborg suit with a variety of powers. Pressing the middle mouse button lets you choose from a wheel with super speed, super strength, super armor, and a cloaking device. This trailer embellishes somewhat but is mostly accurate to the gameplay:
Unlike Doom (1992) where I felt like prey, in Crysis, I felt like the predator from the 1987 movie of the same name. Choosing weapons felt less like a matter of life and death and more like I’d get bored with my current weapon and would want to change for novelty’s sake. I should also add this game shamelessly sings to the tune of Far Cry (2004), another Ubisoft game where you’re on an island fighting soldiers which I played when I was 15. The similarities between both games’ tropical island setting and guerrilla warfare style gameplay is impossible for me to overlook.
Stuff I still like about Crysis:
-The trees and foliage look very pretty, especially from far away.
-The lighting effects are pretty.
-The destructible scenery is limited, but what’s there is way cool. I like how sniper towers fly into pieces when you shoot them with an RPG.
Stuff I don’t like very much about Crysis 10 years later:
-Under close scrutiny the graphics don’t look as tangible as I remember. Often it looks like 3D geometry with an image stamped on it.
-When I first played Fallout 3 I loved how I could pick up random objects in the environment. But the more I played, the more I noticed the touchable objects were all repeated from the same library. In Fallout 3 I remember seeing the same teddy bear and tin can a hundred times. This happens a lot in Crysis.
-Enemies don’t always respond when they get shot. This is a little hard to describe but it’s like they have an unseen health bar and no matter how much you shoot them, they don’t react until the bar reaches zero. This has always bothered me about games from this era. In 007 Goldeneye I can accept that an origami man with a JPEG painted to his face can’t get wounded. It’s a little harder to swallow when I shoot a hyper-detailed, lifelike North Korean soldier in the leg and he runs away like everything’s OK.
-This game has some bugs. At one point my save file got corrupted. I had to go 4 save files back in order to keep playing. On the final boss, I was supposed to get a special weapon to defeat him. I unwittingly skipped this weapon. Then while fighting the boss, Dr. So-and-so kept yelling at me to “Use the TAC cannon!”, which I didn’t have and couldn’t pick up at that point. I had reload like 6 saves prior and get it.
-The ending is anticlimactic. I wasn’t exactly timing my play through, but it feels like the shareware version of a full game. I would have been pissed off if I paid full retail price for this.
-I like the parts where you come across a compound of North Korean soldiers and organically figure out how to slaughter them all. I also like when you pilot big, powerful vehicles, like a tank or a gunship. When Crisis tries any other kind of gameplay it feels weird. I’m referring to a strange out-of-place boss fight with a North Korean general, a part where you go solo into an alien structure while your character explains everything in tone-deaf borderline fourth-wall breaking narration (“I notice that this door might open. Maybe I should try it!”), and a mercifully brief escort mission. I just tolerated those parts so I could get back to the cool parts.
To me it’s weird how close Crysis comes to something that would come out in 2019. If you were to play a 12 year old game in 2007, it would not look and play like a slightly more modest version of whatever people were playing in 2007. You’d be playing a very early Playstation game or a very late 16-bit game. Maybe this is because the Cambrian explosion of Moore’s Law started slowing down in the 2010’s. Or maybe it’s because better-looking graphics started requiring exponentially more and more computational power. But it still feels weird to me. At every point in my life, I can remember electronics changing drastically from one decade to the next. In the 90’s, everyone listened to music on CD players. Then by the 2000’s everyone wanted iPods until the 2010’s when those merged into the digital Swiss army knife of the smart phone. Playing Crysis 10 years later is kind of like using a 10 year old smart phone. It’s not as lavish as what’s available today, but it’s still eerily similar.
Crysis’s “ego-shooter” design philosophy left me wondering why I was enjoying it so much. I’m really vocal about how modern gaming killed challenge and skill, but I still kept coming back to it, playing an hour or so after work. Then I started thinking about what it means to “play” and I came to the conclusion that Crysis has less to do with this:
and more to do with this:
The boys in that commercial are all in their 40’s now, but I’d wager that the impulse to drive little plastic figurines around in jeeps and helicopters and have imaginary wars never completely went away. They would just simulate it on a supercomputer because it’s more convenient and socially acceptable now.