On the Subject of Far Cry 2

Krista Allen

Yay, it's out. Unfortunately Ubisoft are one of those idiot companies who won't let you preload games on Steam, so it wasn't until I returned from the Front that I was able to even start downloading, let alone playing. Still, it's only 3 gigs, which didn't take too long.

Once downloaded and installed, things didn't get off to a great start, unfortunately. It doesn't seem to be FC2's fault so much as Vista x64's fault for being a fucking pile of shit. I'm not the only one who got the "black window" which requires a seemingly random combination of turning off Aero, fiddling with compatibility mode settings and rolling back to previous nvidia drivers to solve. Fuck's sake, I expect it would have worked fine on XP. Even when I could finally run the game full-screen and see things happening, if I turn on DX10 mode (and restart) even the splash videos play at about 1fps. Well, that's just wonderful. Remind me, what is the point of Vista if you can't use DX10?

So I give up and start playing in DX9 mode and it seems ok. I didn't expect the graphics to be Crysis-quality, and they're not, but they do the job and it looks pretty smart even if everything is a shade of brown. There's a satisfying feeling of scale and space which is refreshing compared with corridor shooters like CoD4.

After the fairly long intro sequence of being driven to a hotel and run through the basics of moving and shooting... I had a CTD. Nice. Which meant I had to sit through the intro again. Second time round I saved, just in case, but in the end it didn't crash. Well, not until later. In the meantime there was more introductory "here's how you fix a car, here's how you use a map and answer your phone" hand-holding. A couple of basic enemy encounters to get you in the mood, before moving on to the more RPG-style elements, mostly to do with buying guns. Reminded me a bit of Strike Commander, that bit. But then it crashed again and I had some more good news to hand out on the front line, so that's where I had to leave it for the day.

So it's been a mixed bag so far. It looks like it has potential, and hopefully Ubisoft/Microsoft/nvidia will knock out some patches in the near future to iron out the various bugs. Frequent crashes tend to put a dampener on the fun-factor, I find.

I'm not even going to comment on the wide screen drama that is beginning to erupt. Other than to say yes, FC2 implements the wide screen mode just like pre-patch Bioshock did, no there isn't a field of view adjustment option and no, there's no such thing as the "wrong" way to do it so shut the fuck up, morons.