KILLZONE 3,CRYSIS 2 BETAS and BATTLEFIELD 3 a triple Kill Streak for European code houses : total PWNage of the FPS genre ?

Thegameveda has been playing the betas for Killzone 3 and Crysis 2 this weekend , whilst monitoring the gathering buzz around Battlefield 3. All these games have one thing in common they are games series originated by European devcos. Some of my coding heroes in fact  Guerilla Games, Crytek and of course D.I.C.E.

So whilst I was getting shivved for the nth time by some cloaked Helghan , or  Crynet Security Force trooper , waiting another 23 seconds for the insanely addictive map that each of these betas has to play to reload I had an epiphany : I was having more fun with the the one map  Betas of EU developed FPS games  than full FPS games released by USA developers... This is not new , I had the same feeling whilst playing the Beta of Battlefield Bad Company 2 last year . 

The FPS genre used to be owned by USA devcos Valve  ,iD and Digital Extremes, and errh upstarts Bungie pre Halo 3 and Infinity Ward pre Modern Warfare 2. Even  great Japanese code houses could never make a dent in what was considered THE "Western" game genre , your average run of the mill USA developed WSAD controlled FPS . 

Today, USA developed FPS games are simply no fun , with  5 hour single player campaigns (the 3 level  original  Doom demo lasted longer than most modern day FPS campaigns) ,  multiplayer on closed servers ,  and a mandatory DLC tithe on all who chose to go online. Rock star development teams , with a Sophomore album done and break up the band mentality , together with narcissistic celebrity managers  that would have impressed Colonel Tom Parker...

The Fall of The USA FPS Empire : The demise started with Half Life 2 , introducing us to the criminally short single player campaign and DLC tithe , but which it turned out had the nice side effect of launching Steam which is awesome for downloading my favourite EU devloped FPS games.....

On the PC the greatest buzz created by any FPS game was when Crytek released Crysis , this is the AAA of all AAA FPS games, the excuse ,justification and raison d'etre for that bank crisis inducing gaming rig purchase that barely runs the menu screen..even today!..... not Unreal 3 , not Half Life 2 , and not anything coming from our heroes Carmack , Romero , or "Jazz Jackrabbit" Bleszinski .

On console  Bungie , had great initial success with  Halo and Digital Extremes chose to forgoe the FPS genre altogether and go all no neck 3rd person with Gears , the ensuing sequels really just paid the fees to release both softcos from slavery . Will Bungie fly now they are sort of free ? And are you really impressed with Bulletstorm's Unreal 3 Engine stale looks and desperate kill with skill bolt ons attempting to make it stand out from every other Unreal 3 based game?

Meanwhile quietly in the EU developer corner D.I.C.E. have practically saved E.A, Guerilla's Killzone 3 and Cryteks multiplatform  Crysis 2 easily outdo COD and Halo , even in their Betas.  Go play them and see....

It is no wonder that the big M is readying a 3d hidef re release of the original Halo , they need to relaunch a dwindling brand , as horror of horrors more and more people leave USA developed FPS games to gather dust , whilst  innovative no nonsense EU developers push the FPS genre forwards and their games like Crysis 2 , Killzone 3 and eventually Battlefield 3 take up the hard disk space that used to be reserved for the next id , Valve , Digital Extremes, Bungie, or Infinity Ward classic. 

All in all the USA developed FPS genre looks stale , I venture even those talented French Canadians will come up with a Ghost Recon or three that will again show up the USA  FPS developers ... 

Can the USA FPS developing giants of old survive this killstreak from younger hungrier ,talented and now equally funded foreign developers? Or will they be content making iOS and Android apps in their old age? Why not give them a tweet or two and ask them to crawl out of their own egos....


Ahh it takes me back to when I almost reduced Romero to tears , or at least someone who did a good impression of Romero , detailing what made Goldeneye the greatest FPS , and how the game he was demoing ,  Daikatana , was not , well he did ask me why ....

Right back to my red light sabre coloured controller , there's a backstabbing Helghan I need to wreak thegameveda Playstation Move controlled vengeance upon...

fyi :

the multiplayer Beta of Killzone 3 is live till the 15th of February , with a single player demo out on the 16th of Feb , a whopping 9 days before the release of the game in the UK!

the mulitplayer Beta of Crysis 2 is live now on Xbox Live for 360 owners and rumoured to be coming to a PC soon. 

Battlefield 3 had a big hype fest earlier this week , and launches in Autumn 2011. 

Rage , iD softwares last great hope hits September 13 2011


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CRYSIS 2 PC DEMO DOWNLOAD IT NOW FROM STEAM!

Tired of that 360 nojoypad ? PC fans your time is now , right now Steam servers are crashing as thegameveda and millions of other Crytek fans download the PC demo of Crysis  2 , do not fret tis a tiny download by today's standards so you will have it soon ,,, just as soon as me and the other million infront of you finish ....


later 5120 1600 screens and tomorrow Crysis 2 running on the joojoo ! and maybe even Toshiba Libretto ..... 

buy Crysis 2 here 


first impressions:

Well it is 5 am and thegameveda and half of Europe are up playing the game....

the demo flies at 2560 by 1600 , run at Hardcore settings , you can tell they optimised for this setting. It is nice how PC games launch these days working on existing hardware , not like the old days , where you got to install the game , but had to wait 2 to 3 years before your hardware could run the menu screen .... at 25 fps ....

Unsurprisingly the gameplay on PC far outshines the joypad frenzy of the console versions. 

At 5120 by 1600 the Peer level runs impressively fast, so fast in fact that I could happily play the single player campaign at this res , the Skyline level needs optimisation for extreme resolutions  . The game is not yet fully optimised for beyond 2560 by 1600. Then again Crytek are hardly known for squeezing the most out of current hardware , they will expect the next gen of GPUS to tackle the higher resolutions. Still the engine is way more refined than the old Crysis one . How do I know this  , because for the last hour I have been playing Crysis 2 on the ion /atom powered joojoo.   You would expect all the textures , and detail to go missing with bland low res shapes and colours replacing the high res ones , Crysis 2 is having none of that , even at 800 by 600 the game looks pretty fine  on the joojoo.  

Well I could not resist showing it running on the Joojoo , not that it is supposed to ! there is a dire start up warning re the ion gpu , which I chose to ignore. So here are some teasers it its too late to film , here so that will follow tomorrow . Meanwhile here are some teaser shots : sorry thegameveda needs three hands to film take pictures and play at the same time! And sleep....

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Acer Iconia dual screen tablet test XIII FPS games part 1: Crysis 2 on Steam

Time to move onto testing FPS games , and naturally we should start with the one that is most demanding , none other than Crysis  2 .  When you start the game on Steam you get a warning message about non support of the Intel GPU , simply ignore it and start the game , which you can see running quite happily in the top screen whilst the official website is open in an IE9 window in the second screen  : (forgive my vga camera , the game itself looks a lot nicer in real life as you can see from the picture at the top of the post )

More fps tests to follow ...

get an  acer iconia     now!

 

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Crysis 2 played on the Joojoo and Iconia tablets welcome to the age of the il33t3rati!

Cryteks Crysis 2  played by thegameveda on an Atom powered nVidia Ion GPU'd  Windows 7 Ultimate Fusion Garage Joojoo Tablet , running on Steam of course! 

A year ago all the blogs were telling you this could not even run Flash , now we all know which tablet cannot run Flash even into it's second generation... even with a 9 times faster gpu ...! Seriously I am constantly impressed by what the Ion and Atom pairing in the joojoo can do , I was expecting the game to be a total frame by frame slide show , but take a look see. Now if only some manufacturer could wake up to the idea that we want an i7 Windows 7 tablet with discrete ( or equivalent ) graphics. Ironically 1 year after the "blogs" declared joojoo dead , it is currently the most powerful gaming tablet in the world ,with more compatibility and choice of real games than any rival , from DOS to Unreal Engine to Cryengine 3 , all are possible on the humble Atom powered Fusion Garage Joojoo. If any one can help with tweaking the settings for Crysis 2 further please let me know  and I will post a follow up . So forget l33t gaming and welcome the dawn of the il33t3rati !


How far are we away from a true Windows 7 gaming tablet ? That is what I need to know , this  is the second Windows  7 tablet I have running Crysis 2 ( see the video below for the i5 dual screen Acer Iconia playing Crysis 2 with Intel HD GPU), it is the 3rd ( counting Libretto , Iconia and Joojoo) that I have running full games  , developers and hardware designers can no longer ignore the vast hunger for tablets , tablets that run FULL PC games , on FULL OS like Windows 7 , this time next year or in fact maybe later this month thegameveda WILL be playing Crysis 2 at 30fps + on a fourth Windows 7 tablet , the tech is getting better every day , the joojoo with Windows 7 is 1 year  old technology but still outdoes any other tablet for straight up PC gaming .

We used to spend 1000s upgrading l33t pcs to play major releases , I could show you the same game running at 100fps at 5120 by 1600 , but that is so.. boring! I want a game optimized so  I can run it from a Windows 7 tablet , or at least stream it through onlive or Gaikai  as well as being able to play on a gaming rig.


Why? well I am from the Crysis generation  and Crysis still barely runs on today's hardware , only recently beginning to achieve the fps  that every other game engine managed almost a decade ago ( and that is on today`s hardware). 


Cryengine 3 and Crytek will survive on how they optimize Cryengine 3 , and not on pushing sales of l33t gaming rigs . Console game sales will not be enough , you need to tap into the vast PC gaming and now PC tablet gaming fan base . 


In 2007  thegameveda felt it cool to build a 3k rig to get a few more fps from the chugfest that still is Crysis ( whilst every other game ran at 200 fps!)  in 2011 thegameveda finds it uber cool to call for the formation of the il33t3rati ( no hoody or Animus required), a gaming brother/sisterhood that strives to run the most high spec games on the lowliest of hardware thereby forcing lazy coders who depend on the endless hardware upgrade cycle to wake up to the future , optimize their code , or if too lazy then at least stream their games using services like  onlive and Gaikai that make hardware irrelevant 








    


































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Crysis on the NVIDIA Ion Intel Atom Windows 7 Joojoo tablet ! Can a tablet play Crysis?

Do I like my joojoo tablet, hell yes , it lets me play all the games on a Windows tablet , that  l usually  spend close to 10 k building gaming rigs for , rigs that end up editing video of my playing ancient games on said ion powered tablet !

Here we see Crysis , the thing to remember about Crytek is they are genius gameplay designers , but take a couple , sorry around 5 years for their engine to mature like a fine wine ..vinegar....  

That's why I am not bothered about Crysis 2 trying to induce epilepsy every time I run it at 5120 by 1600 on AMD/Hardware  , hey give em 5 years they will have it sorted out by then...it runs fine at 2560 by 1600 ,but that's like so last decade .... Feeling the betrayal by Cryteks focus on consoles ,  thegameveda empathises with  the few hundred PC core gamers left in this world and in another il33t3rati protest   decided to take the mick and play Cryteks second FPS Crysis on a 12.1 inch Windows 7 Tablet ... after earlier playing Crysis 2 on the same tablet ! Well if Crytek can dumb things down I feel inspired to do the same .....

This is a play through of  the seminal opening level of Crysis , it is one of the sweetest opening levels of any FPS , possibly since Goldeneye or Half Life .  Towards the end of it you have learnt the basic uses of the nanosuit without realising any one was teaching you , and you start to figure out nifty little variations on completing your mission , experiencing how open the fps genre is in the hands of Crytek designers compared to the corridors and walled gardens (hi Steve) of the competition . 

Crytek games are not just technical monstrosities , they are not just vanilla fps games , they are Sandbox FPS games , and you can go back and replay , and replay a thousand times finding a different and cooler way to complete the simplest task.

We really used to spend over 3k to play this game , now you can do so on a Windows 7 Tablet , the joojoo packing a desktop Ion , with 4gb of DDR 3 , is THE most impressive gaming tablet on the planet . It is astonishing to me that something with such a lowly CPU can pull off a game that used to require a 3k rig to get the cut scenes working . Intel and Microsoft really should push the gaming tablet field , and if nVidia do  not want to join in ( not Tegra ! ) there is always room for AMD and Ati , 1 year from now we will be playing Crysis 2 on a Windows 8 tablet with discrete gpu - just an Ion can elevate an Atom CPU powered Windows 7 tablet . Just think what an i7 or i8 coupled with a real GPU could pull off . 

But that machine still will not have one thing a Windows 7 joojoo does , and that is compatibility , as it is 32 bit limited , there are around a million games and apps , the games of your misspent youth that work without a glitch on this tablet , speaking of which  Freelancer and Throne of Blood  to follow! 


this is thegameveda way , the way of the il33t3rati!

Well I had to do something it's not like Steve's gonna get me my iPad 2 any time soon!

    

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Lenovo X220T Tablet Test No.9 : Crysis 2 played and or conducted with Pen

So I had to try this playing Crysis 2 with pen , and as you can see any kind of attempt at playing games with a pen that does not touch a touch screen , takes a bit of practice .. but perservere and you will get there in the end ... plus the best thing of all ....is the PEN NEVER RUNS OUT OF JUICE .. there are no batteries ...it will keep going as long as your Lenovo X220T ...



 

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Lenovo X220 T Tablet test No. 11 : Big screen 50 inch Plasma gaming Crysis 2 , Diablo 2 . Team Fortress 2 and Onlive and more errh tests ...

Test 1 : Crysis 2 on Steam running on an LG 50 inch Plasma and the Lenovo X220T !


What we see here is mine Lenovo X220T linked with a VGA lead ( Industrial !) to one of the few Plasma screens still  attached to a wall after last weeks UK Riots .... any way this will serve as thegamevedas next great test paradigm for the 12.5 inch screened Intel HD 3000 powered Lenovo X220T that you see in the bottom right corner of the picture .. this is an old Plasma ( 13 if I am correct)  but a bold Plasma ... and the res is 1366 by 768 , the screen refresh is 60 hz so you will see flickering my ageing vga camera ( circa 1999) , but rest assured when you actually play there is no ghosting or flickering the game play is as razor sharp as the picture above .. and I was certainly surprised how fast the game moves  


I am playing  Cryisis 2 from Steam  with a wireless Xbox 360 pad ( well it never gets any console use ) and just think the X220T is actually running 2 screens at 1366 by 768 as you can see 


The reason I test Crysis 2 so much is because it is really a Sandbox game hidden in an FPS , there are so many ways to take down the bad guys it deserves to be played again and again and again.... hhhmmh OK back to the serious work of testing the X220 T : 

Test 2 : Diablo 2  demo played with Pen and touch and mirrored on a 50 inch Plasma ... you know ...for budding Blizzcon demonstrators ..... 


In this test for those trying to impress Blizzard at one of their cons ... we use pen and touch to control Diablo 2  which is being mirrored onto the big 50 inch Plasma ...  and as the pen only needs to hover over the screen and never touch it no more mouse clicking .... although there is a lot of pen clicking .....

Test 3 : Team Fortress 2 : because someone requested it and we need to challenge the Lenovo X220Ts wifi , Intel HD3000 , and have some fun whilst where at it ... 

Test 4 : Onlive gaming on a 50 inch Plasma screen using the Lenovo X220 T 


Onlive is  a very good test of the broadband stability of the X220T and during the almost 20 minute test the machine NEVER drops a connection once , even though it is powering 2 screens ! including a 50 inch Plasma ....   I am playing with my trusty 360 pad ...  may be I will try using Kinect next time around ... And so you do not even need the onlive console if you have a nifty tablet PC like the Lenovo X220T as you can see from the video....

NB there is no actual flickering or ghosting on the plasma , this is due to the feeble vga camera I have at my disposal ....






   

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Crysis 2 Nano Edition ...or should that be M-A-X-I-M-U-M E-D-I-T-I-O-N ...?

In an age of  digital downloading and instantly streaming games,and of course rampant  piracy,the collectors editions of our favourite games still see surprsingly healthy business.  And none is so amazingly incorrectly monickered as the Crysis 2 Nano edition .. I mean take a look at this beast , the box is bigger than most of the near monster rigs it needs (allegedly) to run it .. Nano ? should this not have been called the M-A-X-I-M-U-M E-D-I-T-I-O-N?

AND THE CONTENTS

FOR ONCE THE ART BOOK IS ACTUALLY AN ART BOOK AND NOT A PAMPHLET , IT IS EVEN HARD BACK ! NO REALLY

AND THIS IS ALCTATRAZ , WHO ALONG WITH THE TAXI LIGHTS UP WHEN YOU ADD BATTERIES TO THE BASE OF THE FIGURE !

THE HEROES IN A HALF SHELL ESQUE BACKPACK WITH CRYTEK AND EA TAGS

MORE ALCATRAZ WHO WORKS THE CAMERA WELL

AND LET US NOT FORGET THE NANO EDITION CRYSIS 2 GAME ITSELF SEALED WITH BONUSES INSIDE

EAT YOUR HEART OUT EZZIO!

BUY NOW FROM THEGAMEVEDA EBAY STORE

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Gaikai used to play Crysis 2 on the Lenovo X220 T tablet PC

Hey I just clicked on Crysis 2 on Gaikai , and what do you know it fired up and suddenly I am playing Crysis 2 through java streamed by Gaikai  , the game is running in what looks like ultra high settings and the speed .. whoa . I downloaded litecam 3.0 to film the game play as I am too tired to fire up my old vga cam .. Thegameveda cannot wait until someone lets Dave Perry stream full games this way , it is interersting to note that whilst EA seem to be at odds with Steam , they are quite happy to allow streaming demos through Gaikai .  

I experienced a lot of server queuing yesterday on Gaikai , asked Dave to do something about that , and it looks like he listened , although I may just be suffering from a delusion that he did .. any way what are you waiting for get on over to Gaikai and you too can play Crysis 2 maxed out from a humble netbook:  like this
 

check out litecam3.0 , also consider that the video shows 16 minutes of constant gameplay without a drop in the stream , no network problems and zero lag , most impressive ... and this is on wifi !

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