It’s all been recorded with a camcorder, kinda like the first tech demo of the CryEngine 2 many months before Crysis was announced. Ironic, huh? Far Cry was developed by Crytek, who learned a lot from it including the fact that the first half of the game rocked and the last half of the game sucked some major balls. Ubisoft however owns the rights to the name “Far Cry”, so Crytek moved onto Crysis. I wouldn’t be surprised if their next game included “cry” somewhere, or maybe they should just make Cry their next game’s title just to get the whole thing over with. Anyway, Far Cry 2 is now being developed by some other developer which isn’t big enough to actually get any mentions and I’m way too lazy to look it up since the time and energy versus relevance ratio isn’t good enough. You can’t really judge the graphics from the video but there are some screen shots or at least some scans out there that show the actual graphics from the in-game engine. The graphics remind me of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. a lot in both poly count and texture resolution. It looks like STALKER with more post-processing effects, which in my opinion is just a cheap way of improving the look of a game. I’m not saying that I don’t like today’s HDR, motion blur, depth of field etc. I don’t think Far Cry 2 has depth of field… Which makes it look even more like a quicky on the rendering engine department. Regardless of all my initial criticism, watch the video and see for yourself.

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Oh and please don’t criticize me for critiquing again. Simply state your arguments rather than try to look smart whilst being a total jackass. Thanks in advance.

We all know that gaming has become something much more mainstream than 20 years ago when it was only for basement, Dungeons And Dragons playing nerds. In fact, it has become so mainstream that almost everyone has played at least one game. Today there isn’t a single kid in the western world that hasn’t played a game at one point in time. So with this huge step forward for gaming as a hobby and the industry behind it now comes a new milestone. A wax model of Master Chief from the Halo franchise is currently being assembled in the Madame Tussauds waxwork museum! This museum is a world famous landmark with tons of celebrities and popular cult icons, and now it even has a game character. That’s pretty damn amazing. I never really thought it would all go so fast but hey, I’m not complaining.

Click on the image to get a slight bigger resolution. (Original image)

Tomorrow everyone is going back to school, which means I’m going to be working on school whenever I see no way to avoid doing so. I’ve never liked going to school and this year isn’t going to be any different since I’ll be getting up way too early and I’ll be in school most of the week wasting precious hours of my life I could be spending elsewhere. This year is going to be like a little test drive for me as I’ve been wanting to get into the French Foreign Legion for quite some time and next year I’ll be 18, which means I’ll get to drop out of school and get into the legion without anyone able to stop me. For now though, I’m forced to stay in school. If, however, this year turns out to be OK I’ll stick around for another three years. I highly doubt it but it’s a possibility.

I haven’t gotten around to getting BioShock yet but I will very soon and I’ll have a review up in no-time. I’m considering Medal Of Honor: Airborne but since all the previous MoH games turned out to be total shit (except for Allied Assault) I’m still sitting on the fence. I’ll install the demo somewhere today or tomorrow but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Stranglehold has been delayed for PC and X360 and I believe it was going to be released somewhere late September. Great. Next up is Half-Life 2: Episode Two along with the Orange Box that’ll be released on the 9th of October. I’m really looking forward to that as I’m quite the Half-Life fan. I’ll probably download the Black Box or whatever they’ll call it on Steam because I don’t feel like paying for HL2 and HL2: Ep1 again nor do I want them again. Valve already said they’d have a package similar to the original Black Box available on Steam so I guess this’ll be my first big Steam purchase with many to follow. Retail box? Meh, who needs it. The Orange Box cover looks like shit anyway.

I’ll try to blog more often as the news summaries get delayed over and over again. I think I’ll just start including small news items in blog posts soon.

In a genius move by Ubisoft, Haze has officially become a PS3 exclusive! It was supposed to be released in November on PC, X-Box 360 and PS3 but now they simply canceled the first two. I wasn’t really looking forward to playing this game as much as some of the other November releases, but I would have definitely tried it out. Oh well, it looked like another Halo clone anyway so who cares. This is what Gamespot (source) says:

Ubisoft has told GameSpot that First Radical’s sci-fi first-person shooter Haze is now being planned solely for Sony’s PlayStation 3 platform.

Originally, Haze was slated as a multiplatform release for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 in spring, but back in May Ubisoft announced that the PS3 had become the “lead platform” for the title, which would be released in November on the PS3-only, although “no exclusivity for any platform has been officially announced.”

Today, Ubisoft said that currently no other versions in development, and although it was still leaving the door open in the future for “new partnerships,” currently the game is indeed only planned for the PS3. A spokesperson said, “The official statement on PC and Xbox 360 is that these platforms are not confirmed.”

The Web sites of Free Radical, the Official Haze site, and Ubisoft site, all now only list the PS3 version of the game.

I bet Sony thinks this game is going to boost PS3 sales, which only makes their stupidity more obvious to the rest of the world. Now if they had Assassin’s Creed as a PS3 exclusive, THAT would have made huge difference. Fuck Haze.

I guess I should have expected this but for some reason it hadn’t crossed my mind ’till I read the news. There is a Crysis demo and it’s due September 25th! Yeah that’s pretty fucking amazing, I’ll finally get at least a little taste of the game before I buy it. Not that I needed a demo because I was gonna buy it anyway, games like these are pretty much a no-brainer anyways. Don’t download the game you cheap bastards! Buy it!

PC gamers now have a reason to mark a big circle around September 25th on their calendars as the single player demo for Crysis will be lighting up rigs worldwide in just 30 days.

Consisting of the entire first level in Crysis’ epic single player campaign, “Contact,” gamers will get to finally experience first-hand the stunning visuals, revolutionary Nanosuit gameplay and open-ended level design that make Crysis one of the most anticipated shooters and PC games of all time. The demo is also poised to include a huge surprise from Crytek, but for now you’ll just have to wait and check out the latest Crysis Nanosuit trailer by following the link below.

Huge surprise… Well fuck you very much, now I’ll think about this huge surprise all the time until I finally get my hands on that demo!

There’s a lot of obvious pre-rendered stuff in here but that’s what makes this trailer so amazing, check it out!!

Is this awesome or what!?

I was really anticipating this game at first, but RTS games just don’t have the magic they had back in the 1990’s for me. The exception to the matter would be Company of Heroes because of the intense action close-ups are everything. This is just another RTS with better graphics, but who said that was a bad thing? If you’re an avid RTS player than get the demo and check the game out!

The World in Conflict demo includes new content never before seen in the beta tests, including the first playable look at the expansive single-player campaign. The demo also includes multiplayer, skirmish, and tutorial modes.

You can find a list of mirrors right here. Don’t know what World In Conflict is?! Then you can always check out the Wikipedia page or the official website.

I’ve never been anticipating this Medal of Honor game since every MoH ever made after MoH: Allied Assault sucked major ass, but nevertheless I’ll give it a spin. Here’s the demo for all of you to try out.  The game seems to be using Ageia PhysX, so those of you who were stupid rich enough to get a PhysX card way before it was even useful in mainstream games can now give that a spin.

A joint allied operation into the island of Sicily, Operation Husky follows Boyd Travers and the 82nd Airborne on their first combat jump on July 11, 1943. After securing and sabotaging four anti-aircraft guns, Boyd is sent to rendezvous with a group of Airborne paratroopers at the edge of the village.

Here, they run into the German Heer army, who is attempting to recapture the village from the Airborne. Boyd must push to the end of this small hamlet, eliminating Germans along the way, then find a sniper rifle and eliminate the German commander. He’s successful, but not before the commander has successfully called in reinforcements.

Mirrors:

• Filefront
• EA (direct link)
• Fileplanet (Don’t use… But if all else fails…)

From WorthPlaying:

Like the original Mafia title, Mafia 2 immerses players in the mob underworld of a fictitious late 1940’s-early 1950’s scenario. Players will easily become engaged in the game’s cinematic Hollywood movie experience with strong, believable characters in a living, breathing city. By fusing high octane gunplay with white knuckle driving and an engaging narrative, Mafia 2 looks to be the industry’s most compelling Mafia title to date.

“As the original Mafia was a big success, we are excited to leverage the power of next generation console technology to create an all-new experience, while embracing the elements that resonated with the previous game’s fans,” said Christoph Hartmann, President of 2K. “The ‘wow’ factor of Mafia 2 is definitely the benchmark-setting visual quality and action that you expect to see only in Hollywood movies.”

And there are screeeeeen shooooots! I didn’t see any mention of a PC version but surely they won’t forget about the market that made the original game a big success in the first place! Right?! There’s not a lot of info available right now but as soon as there’s more I’ll be sure to let you all know about it.

Impression so far: I see that the main character (don’t tell me he’s not) looks A LOT like Tommy from the original game. They’ve also added the new and hip Gears of War style ‘back against the wall leaning while shooting’ move to make the step to the nextgen official. I don’t mind, but it’s getting really really lame because EVERY game is doing it now. The LOD (level of detail) on distant objects is crap. I mean it looks worse than the LOD of distant objects in the original game! Even characters look like shit even from a few meters away! Apart from that there’s soft-shadows but I can’t see which type of shadow they’re using. The overall game’s models are low on polygon’s but the textures make up for that due to parallax mapping (again, I don’t know what type of map is being used) and the textures all seem to be pretty high-res except for a few props that no one is gonna be looking at anyway. NPC’s have pretty damn amazing faces, nothing like Crysis but they’re very impressive nevertheless. Do I see Phong shaders on human skin?!?! That would be awesome. The only thing bothering me is the debris coming off the walls in the second screenshot. They look kinda Photoshopped in there but that may turn out to be quite the complement as soon as more of the game is shown! Surely they won’t be making this a prequel or anything, I mean with the end of the original Mafia I wouldn’t want to be some other random dude in the same mob as Tommy or something as lame as that. This had better not be the City of Lost Heaven! I look forward to those adrenaline pumping car chases whilst aiming your gun out of the window and having no idea where you’re going. Some people that the GTA drive-by’s were better, but that bullshit. In Mafia you could actually aim and thus lose sight of the road ahead of you which made it waaaay more intense than anything I’ve ever seen in GTA. In my opinion Mafia still beats GTA at pretty much everything. CAN’T WAIT FOR MAFIA 2!!

Yes, it is finally really happening.

The wait is nearly over. At 7 PM EST the BioShock PC demo will go live for you to enjoy. We will have exclusive pre-loading at Fileplanet. Set your watches for 7 o’clock!

IMPORTANT: Please be sure to download the latest drivers from ATI and Nvidia that will be available Monday for best performance with your video cards.

And this is official! No ShackNews articles which I, from now on, will never trust again. Don’t believe me? See for yourself!

Yes I will continue to use Big Daddy pictures in every BioShock related post at least until I start to hate them later on in the game. But their name alone is like… Awesome and awesome combined! Their AWESOME.