Cormac
1641
Damn… Haven’t played that much with the “new” card yet (got it used from a buddy). I supposed its possible.
I did have an odd error with Anno 1404, where the screen just went black and it stopped responding to any commands, even though the sounds chirped on. Perhaps it is the card. Whats the best way of testing the card?
Quitch
1642
Yeah, it’s probably going to get worse and it’ll start to die faster and faster. I’m currently RMAing a card with the exact same issue and it got to the point it couldn’t even play video files.
Probably the only way to test is to hit it with something like FurMark and stress test it, but if it’s a heat issue you’re going to speed up the card’s decline.
Sorry to sidetrack from all this talk of graphics cards and benchmarks, but I just wanted to mention what a blast I am having with Far Cry 2 (on 360 in my case), having just started a game over the weekend. I very often hear the word ‘immersive’ used and so very rarely actually feel immersed in a game world, but Far Cry’s Africa has me captivated. Everything is in-game, and I’m having a great time just wandering the wilds and finding cell towers, diamond suitcases and audiotapes. I haven’t even started the actual faction missions and I’m in no hurry to do so. I just feel a little sorry I let myself get distracted by worries about malaria (especially when I have a bottomless bottle of pills) and other game complexities and put off playing this for so long.
LMN8R
1644
Let us know what you think after you’ve played 7-8 hours :-)
What happens at the 7-8 hour mark that’s supposed to change? Because I think I might have missed it on my two play-throughs.
-Tom
I think that’s when some people get to the Southern region Tom, and the game gets even better. Remember?
I guess I’ll assume (it’s all I can really do at this early stage) that LMN8R is implying that all this wandering may get very samey after a while. I can see there’s possibly some risk that just wandering around and picking up diamonds and occasionally gunning people down may get old, but not yet.
So far I’ve only found one thing that irritated me, and it’s not important enough to change my opinion. But a couple of times I’ve rampaged through a checkpoint and killed all occupants, then as soon as I hop in my car I’m suddenly attacked from behind by a jeep full of armed dudes. Where the hell did they come from? Now I know how that girl felt in Final Destination when that bus totally sneaked up on her and creamed her.
Senjak
1648
Some sections of road are patrolled, and those road patrols will just drive back an forth between two checkpoints. When I’m attacking a checkpoint on a patrolled stretch of road I usually start the attack by exploding a patrol vehicle just as it hits the checkpoint, that way I don’t have to worry about the patrol surprising me during the fight.
Also, I wanted to mention that the Dart Rifle is the best weapon ever - silent, and whatever the hell is in those darts is so poisonous that it always kills in one shot, instantly. The sniper rifle ammo upgrade applies to the dart rifle too, and increases its capacity to 10 shots. The second best weapon is the AS50 - it can shoot through light cover which the dart rifle can’t, and it has the most powerful scope in the game, for really, really long shots.
Warning
1649
Shoot ammo crates from a distance with your sniper rifle. That never gets old.
Fire also. Set lots of things on fire.
I love Far Cry 2 (if played in short casual bursts, which I think is best) but had to chuckle at Pogue’s post: “immersive in-game world… where I’m totally collecting the regularly metered-out items!” Thinking about it now, the modern console game 100% OCD style actually did break the atmosphere for me. Maybe if I could keep myself from going to the options page to check my progress toward finding the 23 zebras with clown costumes or whatever, it would have been better. Just another fine and awkward line the game walks that helps explain all the love and hate for it.
Yes, that would have been better. I never thought to press Start during this game. Except for Start/pause menu, everything in the game was inside the world. Getting in and out of vehicles, looking at the map. It was all done by your in-game character. Which added a lot to the game. So even when i was looking at the map, I wasn’t out of the game, unlike Oblivion, where I usually spent more time in their menus than I did in their world.
It never occurred to me before that OCD would cause someone to voluntarily go into the pause menu, the one area where you weren’t in the game anymore.
Yeah, that was the point I was trying to get at. I love the fact that I can hop in my car and pull up my map and gps on the steering wheel and try to read the map while driving. The ocd is totally what I bring to the game – probably lots of people just pick up enough diamonds to buy just what they think they need, but I enjoy seeking them out.
Same here. I found all the diamonds in the game, and then I didn’t even get the achievement because of a glitch, but I still didn’t mind because seeking out those diamonds increased my enjoyment of Far Cry 2 a lot because it’s the excuse I needed to really explore every nook and cranny of the world they created.
Immersion in this game is really great which is why I have no idea why I could not see my legs or my body in general while not driving.
Cormac
1655
I started looking for all the diamonds, but gut pretty frustrated by frequently facing rockwalls with nowhere to climb up and circling around and around trying to find a way of getting to the diamond. Is it possible to lug around the glider later on and thus get at those places, or whats the deal there? Find a truck and drive it all the way there, so I can use it as a ladder?
No, if there’s a diamond you can’t get to, there’s always a glider nearby. Usually what I did is just scout out the local area and think about where a glider could be so that I could glide slowly downward and still get to the spot. There usually aren’t too many places around that are higher and close-by, so it wasn’t too tough to find the glider.
Cormac
1657
Thanks! Will start looking around, once I’ve found out a solution to the bloody crashes. Maybe I’ll go back to my old graphics card for now…
A gamer can bring his own OCD to Far Cry 2, but I was trying to say that the team still laid a lot of their game out with that kind of console collect-'em-all design. The world is immersive on its face but the underlying mechanics keep reminding me that I’m playing a modern era video game, which is highly distracting to me personally in terms of emergent play, exploration for its own sake, and atmosphere (even if the game is still lots of fun).
Shouldn’t have emphasized the status screen so much; the point I was trying to make is the irony of Pogue’s back-to-back sentences, which may explain a lot of the mixed reviews on this title. I harp on it and clarify because I’m a big believer in going into a game with the correct mindset in order to extract the most enjoyment out of it and avoid being disappointed.
Tim, you’ll likely be even more amused once I explain that I don’t even register any irony between my two statements. I find immersion to be so elusive a concept that I’m always slightly amazed when I find I’ve hit one of those quarter to three moments Tom talks about. For me at least, it’s so easy to get pulled out of immersion by any little thing – my wife asks me a question, I have to go to the bathroom, sound cuts out in part of the game – that it takes something really special to grab me and hold me, and I can’t hold it against a game if it can’t take me to that magical place. But wow if it does.
Anyway, as to the second part, it’s always going to be a little gamey, right? No way around some certain somethings like fetch quests, or levels, or item collection except only rarely in certain indie games. You’ve got to have some measure of success, of progress, and I can see how collectibles are a tempting extra to draw you out of the obvious avenues of exploration and see this wonderful world they’ve made. It doesn’t bother me unless the collection itself is just too burdensome to be any fun, and as I mentioned my gamer OCD can handle quite a bit of burden.
This is absolutely incorrect and makes me wonder if you’ve even played the game. There is nothing in the game remotly like your ridiculous “counting zebras” examples.
The diamonds are the game’s resource model. There are a variety of ways to get them, including the storyline missions, the side missions, and the diamonds strewn around the map to reward and encourage exploration. The only other collectible are the audio logs, which reveal bits of the Jackal’s backstory and can be turned in to the journalist. Their impact is strictly narrative, like the audio logs from System Shock, another game I presume you’re going to accuse of having “console collect-'em-all design”.
-Tom
