So, all through college and grad school, Amazon.com kept trying to sell me FarCry. However I just got it super cheap a few days ago off Steam. Woohoo for saving money!

All in all FarCry seems like a really good game. With the island setting and the very smooth vehicle piloting and abandonment, it really reminds me of Midwinter 2: The Flames of Freedom. Midwinter 1 was a hard-nosed strategy and FPS game which was very hardcore and awesome and difficult, and you used to play it on a 386 machine. Midwinter 2 took a lot of the gameplay elements from Midwinter 1 and got rid of a lot of the irritating aspects, and became like this crazy vehicle-jumping espionage arcade shoot-em-up with broad strategic aspects. It was broken in some ways but in many ways also represented some very good concepts in gaming, like seamless transitions to and from vehicles. FarCry kind of seems like they took the best aspects of Midwinter 2, ditched the strategic stuff, and then focused on refining the FPS play.

I lived in Micronesia for 2 years. FarCry is supposedly set in Micronesia. FarCry didn't get Micronesia perfectly, and to be fair a round trip ticket to Micronesia on Continental Airlines costs like $2000 so the devs probably never were in Micronesia, but they got enough things right probably modeling from photographs that from time to time I felt myself slipping into memory lane and feeling kind of sentimental while playing. They got the banana trees right, with the bunches of bananas and the banana flowers. They got the vibrant green-ness of the jungle right, and the reddish brown muddy dirt of the trails winding through the growth.

There were more big woody trees in FarCry than I ever saw in Micronesia. There weren't very many big woody trees there at all. There isn't enough rain. FarCry is sunny with blue water and white sand, but the real Micronesia is usually overcast, pouring rain, with beautiful cool looking clouds on the horizon over the mountains. The sand tends to be coral sand that cuts you up, but the water is blue, and the coral is beautiful. Finally, the jungle tends to be much more dense than any games ever portray. Truthfully, Micronesias work every weekend cutting the jungle back from their property and maintaining the trails that they use. Unless you work to maintain pathways and clear spaces the jungle will grow back and take it over in a matter of weeks. The jungle where nobody goes can become nearly impassable. Well, I could go on forever about the details but it's all a tangent.

The FPS play is satisfying to me. There are grenades and flashbangs, and you can set your rifle to semi-auto mode and go prone for accurate shooting, so it means that you have the ability to implement tactics. It's not as good as Operation Flashpoint where you have to compensate for bullet drop, or the low-budget sniper games available nowadays where they implement pulse rate, elevation, windage, concealment, etc (try Sniper Elite which has all those things), but it's one of those games where they just have a hint of all these things that makes for a satisfying casual FPS gaming experience. You have to think a little bit about your tactics but it's not as punishing as the old Rainbow Six games, SWAT 4, or ARMA.

Too bad the sequel was so panned. Oh well I'm enjoying the original right now.

I agree that Far Cry is a generally excellent game. The only really glaring flaw comes later on when you start to run into the... without wanting to give too much away, I'll just call them the "special" enemies. All the bits where you're fighting humans are brilliant. Crysis (also by Crytek) is the same way, in case you ever decide to pick it up. Far Cry 2... eh. It's basically Grand Theft Auto: Africa, without the humor or self-awareness of the GTA games. Also, the ending is idiotic.

Let me guess : monsters/aliens/genetic experimentation?
I hate it when "pseudo-realistic" FPS switch to a survival-horror style. I hate it even more than when they have these stupid stealth levels where being spotted means having to restart.

Mercifully, the "special" enemies aren't noticeably tougher than the human foes, with the exception of one particular variety which you will come to fear and loathe. They're pretty rare, though.

heh, I know what you're talking about after seeing those vids on youtube. There was the one where they guy stayed on the rowboat and they just kept on coming, aggressive little effers. sheesh.

What about F.E.A.R.?

F.E.A.R. is distilled awesomeness. Don't ever play it in the dark, though.

Heh, yeah. It didn't try to come off as a normal military shooter then throw in supernatural or extraterrestrial crap at you. Crysis was you being a badass supersoldier beating on your enemy, then blamo, alien invasion.

I don't know I just tried the demo and didn't like the fell of the combat (and the AI felt completely stupid)... and I'm also tired of the abuse of creepy little girls. Can't people think of a way to do something creepy without having to use a creepy little girl?

Anyway, what I don't like is the horror elements. I'm perfectly fine with blasting monsters in Doom, Serious Sam or Sin Emergence (a good example of a use of monsters I actually enjoy). In Half-Life 2, I far preferred shooting combine soldiers or big monsters (such as the things in the forest in episode 2) to walking in dark hallways with facehuggers crawling everywhere.

I thought FEAR was reasonably fun as a game but not scary at all.

Especially in the supplements they put out, there was too much inexplicable horror that never happened to you. If your buddy can be telekinetically ripped apart with no defense, but you can't, it's too obvious it's scripted, and therefore you don't feel scared when playing. Clive Barker's Undying was scary because horrific stuff could happen to you and it was clearly part of the game. You never would look at some cutscene and say, "Nice animation, but that's obviously not part of gameplay."

This thread reminds me of a particular XKCD comic:
http://xkcd.com/606/

It's never too late to say ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.

I think we can agree that it's always appropriate to talk about the most classic games. I still think "Dracula In London" is awesome.

*smacks forehead* Wounded Ronin, you'd be so topical if we built a time machine and sent you back to 5 years ago. I suppose that's what we get for playing a roleplaying game that still thinks mirror shades are cool.

Hey, mirror shades will always be cool.

On the topic of classic games, I have to mention System Shock 2. I continue to crave System Shock 3. Bioshock is good, but it just isn't the same.

I also crave Homeworld 3 and No One Lives Forever 3. Why do so many great franchises die after the second installment?

Hell, man, I have no idea why we decided to move past the 80s. Not a whole lot of cultural value has emerged since then.

No One Lives Forever 2 was better in terms of gameplay than #1, but #1 was far more hardcore Austin Powers and an actual storyline that someone had evidently thought about. The fact they had an alpine village level and a train level filled me with awe and wonder for lo, clearly someone had actually read and watched 1960s spy thrillers. Probably lots of people didn't think #2 was as culturally authentic.

(I liked both, but #1 is extremely hard to top in terms of authenticity and faithfulness to the 1960s throwaway spy novel genre.)

Agreed. The atmosphere was much better in the first one, it was funnier, and overall I enjoyed it far more than I enjoyed the second one.
The upgradable stats introduced in the second made it difficult to play some scenes as they were intended in the highest difficulty level if you didn't spend points in some stats. Oh, and I hated those invincible power-armors.

Okay, Dracula In London now deserves its fair shake/reference. I love this game, although I played the original DOS version: http://www.mobygames.com/game/win3x/dracula-in-london-

****SPOILERS******

I think I cheated past that part. You're right, it's idiotic and incredibly frustrating.

Uninstalled it, finally, because I felt like I had better things to do with my free time than play through that segment.

It's a phenomenon that I've run into (fairly) recently with stuff like the infamous Star Destroyer Level in Force Unleashed, or Poison Ivy's Silly Super Plant Boss Fight in the otherwise superb Batman: Arkham Asylum.

The better a game is, the worse it sucks when any one part utterly fails to be entertaining. Not because the "any one part" is worse than a poor level in a mediocre game, but because when the rest of the game is fun, that one level that's not fun hits all the harder by comparison. The impact is jarring when you're otherwise really enjoying a game.

Ha ha, I wonder if when devs finally heard "no more jumping puzzles" they were fated to find stuff even more obnoxious to add to games.

Glad to see someone is still playing it. Crysis was also quite good. Farcry 2 however, was a sad sad sequel. It had some interesting qualities, but the initial weapon degradation system was rather bad, and I wasn't fond of the 'everyone hates you and will shoot at you cause they can see you from 5 miles away' AI behavior too. Overall I got the sense that for Farcry 2, they ran out of money before they released it, and had to cut stuff, like the excellent stealth model of the 1st game, persistent environmental results.

Fortunately, when they got to Crysis they pretty much put back all the things I liked about the 1st farcry.

It's important to note that Far Cry 2 was not made by Crytek (the guys who made Far Cry and Crysis).