Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The winners of our excellent Crysis competition are David McLaughlin, James Glover and Si Wharton. No, we’re not going to print their crises because they’re of rather variable length and family quality, and we may need them as… evidence. Thanks, however, to everyone who entered. And thanks to EA for providing the booty. Fresh competitions coming up soon.

Electronic Arts have kindly volunteered to give away copies of Crysis and its soundtrack CD to three RPS readers. Well, we say “give away”, but there has to be an element of vying for the prize. We require a small imaginative penance by which we can judge the worthy recipients. Crysis, in case you weren’t paying attention, was one of last year’s most splendid first-person shooters, and spiritual sequel to Far Cry. And it’s a beauty.

And so we ask a competition question: There’s a crisis on planet Earth! But what is the nature of the crisis? And don’t just give us the old “martians are coming for our women”, or “greenhouse gases are causing catastrophic climate change”, because we want original crises: the clever, the funny, and the weird. Have shoes suddenly become a vital food group? Did cats learn to use the internet to post pictures of their owners? The most entertaining, terrifying, and imaginative crises will earn these splendid Crysis bundles. Understand? Email us your crisis, and it’d help if you included a postal address, just in case you’re one of the talented winners. The editor’s judgment is absolute, and final. Competition ends on 20th of March.

There’s a bunch of these Crysis editing tool vids bouncing about, but I like how this water-physics one takes on a kind absurdist performance art feel:

GameTrailers, we’re drowning in Gametrailers.

Now, this is an interesting twist in a tale. Ever since people described its first month sales figures as disappointing, it’s been one of those accepted gamer beliefs that the PC-punishing FPS was a flop at retail. Except Joystiq brings to our attention that Crysis has been announced as going Platinum. That is, a million copies sold, worldwide. I’ve been expecting this – I recently saw the UK figures for PC retail, and Crysis wasn’t exactly that far down the list. It kind of shows that we really shouldn’t jump to conclusions, especially when even then those original conclusions were pretty untenable if examined closer. Those who actually looked would have realised that “first month” was actually just over two weeks on sale, and the NPD figures put that 86K actually over what they estimated it would.

An amazing work in progress is being unveiled over at Digital Urban, the blog of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London. They’re importing models from the Big Smoke into the Crysis engine, with astounding results. “Our London model goes out to the M25 covering 3 million buildings,” says Andy from Digital Urban, in the comments thread following this piece.

GameTrailers, you’re the capital city of the internet.

What a lot of words we posted yesterday. You must be exhausted from all that reading, bless you. Is ickle baby tired? Does ‘is ickle eyes need a resty-poos? Well, why not take some time out to play some games instead? Here’s a quick round up of recent free digi-delights (and, um, some more reading. Sorry.) potentially worthy of your exacting attention… Read the rest of this entry »

We don’t write about PC hardware all that often on RPS, unless it’s something absolutely batshit or doomed to failure. In the parts of my life that don’t involve obssessively checking whether anyone’s said something rude about us in our comments threads though, I keep a detached eye on what’s new in silicon heaven.

Today, it’s leaked details on the next card from current 3D champs NVIDIA. Read the rest of this entry »

Sad tidings for fans of heavily normal-mapped pretend-man-shoots. Seems both Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 haven’t exactly stormed up the charts, which is a tragic and strange state of affairs for what were seemingly two of the most eagerly-anticipated PC games of the year.
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Now, this is the Crysis I want to play – far more exciting than all that rubbish alien stuff.

(With apologies for the music.)

I’m playing dilettante this weekend, dabbling with some of the bigger games of the moment which I haven’t had a chance to play properly yet. Some of them are on Televisual Pleasure Boxes (Mario Galaxy and Assassin’s Creed) but one’s home is on the Personal Thinking Machines whose progress we like to chart at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It’s Crysis.

Which is a case where I’m last guy to the party but – hey – it’s Saturday. We can all chill together.
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I spotted this over on GameTrailers’ featured user’s movies, where they explain: “The “CORE-X Graphical Benchmark” is a render Video by “Blur Studio” for CryTek that shows how they wanted Crysis to be like.”

So it’s the ideal visual experience that CryTek were aiming for. Compare and contrast that with the game you actually ended up playing:

Thanks, GameTrailers’ users’.