I played great gobs of Crysis 2 over the weekend. Enjoying it still, for the most part. I’m seven hours in, according to my Steam stats.

I think I’ve been a little too sloppy with posting spoilers, blatantly listing out the storyline and such, so sorry about that. I’ll try to be a little more general with my descriptions from here on out, for those of you who haven’t played but are interested.

• So, when I last checked in I was getting killed repeatedly.
• I am still there, doing that. Or having that done to me.
• My third attempt at surviving the current blitzkrieg is successful. It’s one of those fights where you’re stuck in a relatively enclosed area, and have to stand your ground until everyone is dead. These are my least favorite types of fights, as I prefer to be able to run away and hide and regenerate.
• Though I kind of liked them in Bioshock 2, because you could set up defensive perimeters and such. The stand-and-fight sequences in Crysis 2 are sprung on you, though. As I suppose they would be in real life.
• Some street skirmishes follow. I can once again run away and hide and kill people at my leisure.

• Remember the intro movie I talked about? I am now sitting in a chair watching an NPC watch it. He watches some of it twice. Take your time. Maybe you could watch some Portal 2 promo movies while you’re at it.
• More fighting after a too-long bout of not-fighting.
• I realize I am the type of person who complains about lack of story in games, but am also the type of person who, when forced to sit and listen to story, gets impatient and doesn’t listen very closely. This isn’t really fair.
• Though in my defense, the story is not being explained interestingly.
• Heh. I go to try to open an apartment door, but wind up just ringing the doorbell. Bing-bong! Cute. The apartment is full of soldiers, who have been alerted to my presence by my ringing the doorbell like I’m delivering a pizza.
• I am not delivering a pizza. I am delivering BULLETS and a six-pack of GRENADES with your choice of DEATH and a side order of GARLIC TWISTY-BREAD.
• A few more street skirmishes, including some involving aliens. Some of them kill me, and I am brought back to the last checkpoint, which is miles away. Gnurf.
• Killed again. Shit. It’s like three blocks of jumping over rooftops just to get back to the start of the fight that I keep losing.

• Alien ship flies through the city, pursued by choppers. Again, I hope I get to fly a chopper soon.
• The plot now calls for me creating a diversion.
• I kill twenty soldiers and blow a couple things up. This somehow does not count as a diversion.
• Ohhh, okay. There’s specific designated diversion targets I have to blow up. Gotcha. Thanks to the enemy soldiers for planting Diversion Bombs everywhere. I wonder what they were going to do with them.
• I’m, um… getting a little bored with fighting soldiers. Some of it is me, not being more imaginative with how I’m killing them, some of it is the game. But this bunch of soldiers I’m killing aren’t much different than the last few hundred.
• I take it back. I just got to snipe a ton of soldiers from a very high rooftop. That was fun. They are not terribly bright, these soldiers.
• Ahhh. Okay. I owe Crysis 2 a big apology. I’ve been complaining that all this killing could be avoided if only I would open my mouth and tell the enemy army I’m not who they think I am. The game just explained why I can’t do that. And it wasn’t even like an NPC looked into camera and said it, it was done very naturally through some dialogue that wasn’t even addressed to me personally. Very good.  Sorry, Crysis 2! You were right and I was wrong. I am a jerk.
• A bunch of things happen. Now, a new NPC is talking to me on the radio. I don’t like him.

• I have a bunch of alien cooties collected now, so I buy a power for my suit that will show me the routes the enemies have taken. A tracking program, in other words. As a stealth machine, I am interested in tracking.
• Wait, I shouldn’t have bought this. It’s very easy to tell what routes my enemies take because I am usually watching them from a distance through a sniper scope.
• I think this power would be useful in a jungle setting where I foliage obscures everything. Not so much in the city. Buyer’s remorse.
• Some fun fights with a bunch of friendlies and a bunch of aliens. I think these friendlies are indestructible, because I just watched one getting whaled on by an alien for a couple minutes and he didn’t die.
• Another stand-and-fight section involving loads of aliens. Stressful. By the end I’m just running around my little area firing wildly with whatever weapon I happen to be holding. I don’t care for these parts.
• Major, major me-vs-alien stuff. I am so desperate for a checkpoint because I’ve killed tons of them and don’t want to have to do it again because I killed a lot of them by sheer luck.
• For instance, I tried to switch guns, and accidentally switched to C4. I tried to fire the gun I didn’t switch to, and wound up throwing C4, which landed in the perfect spot to blow up an alien.
• If anyone was watching, it probably looked cool, but in reality I was just clicking my mouse like a total spaz.
• Checkpoint. Whew. Good place to stop.

Review Score, Part 5: Some entertaining fights, some not-so, more checkpoint woes. B

I’m starting to realize that the stuff Prophet was doing in the intro movie is a bit different than the stuff I’m doing. He was jumping off buildings and blowing up trucks and ripping giant guns off vehicles and staring down helicopters like they couldn’t even hurt him. Me, I mainly sneak around, invisible, shooting people when they’re not paying attention and then scamper off and hide.

Not that I’m not having fun, I am. But if we were both in The Fantastic Four, Prophet would be The Thing and I’d be The Invisible Woman, if the invisible woman had a machine gun.

• Okay! I’m in a new area, creeping though a building.
• The game makes me look through a window so I can witness a conversation between a man and a woman. I can’t do anything but watch them and listen, so they must be important characters and the game doesn’t trust me to not kill them immediately. Honestly, I wouldn’t kill them. I’m a good listener. I love eavesdropping in games.
• Okay, I might try to kill them, but not until they had stopped talking.
• They are in disagreement about whether or not to kill me. Well, not me, but Prophet, who they have mistaken me for.
• I sort of can’t believe this is the entire reason that I’ve been killing people for four days, simply because they all think I’m someone else. Surely, at this moment, I should be yelling to them: “LOOK I’M NOT PROPHET ALREADY YOU JERKS” but I continue to not do that. I’m sure I have my reasons.

• The woman doesn’t want to kill me, the man does. I assume I’ll be teaming up with the woman later in some fashion. I fully expect her to be calling me on the radio at some point. “Hello, Prophet? This is [whatever her name is]. Look, I don’t have much time to talk. I can help you, but only if you [whatever the thing is she wants me to do].” This is my prediction.
• After they leave in a helicopter, I sneak around killing everyone like The Invisible Woman again.

• There’s an earthquake that kicks up a ton of dust, giving me a reason to use my infrared to kill everyone. This is fun and a nice use of what had until this point seemed to be a useless visor function.
• The scientist keeps calling me, telling me to hurry up. He tells me to find a vehicle.
• In video games, the guy calling you on the radio always knows everything about everything you’re doing, somehow.
• In real life, the guy calling you on the radio would be all “Hey, where are you now? What street are you on? FDR Drive? What’s the cross street? Is that, like, by the place with the coffee shop on the corner? Not the coffee shop  with all the window planters, the other one, that looks like maybe it used to be a Taco Bell? With the big windows and weird roof? No? Then I don’t know where the hell you are. Call me back when you’re on the corner by the record store near where there used to be a yogurt shop that’s now a shoe repair.”

• As instructed, I steal a tank thing and drive, blowing up everything in my path. It’s very explodey in an arcade game way.
• The driving is sort of blah. It should be more like FarCry 2’s driving, which was great.
• I think the driving bits are in here so the box can proclaim “drivable vehicles!” or something.
• Blew up everything, and now I’m in a new area.

• Picked up a ranged scope for one of my guns! These noisy soldiers don’t have a chance now. I can kill them from miles away without moving. I’m basically griefing an entire military organization.
• Where’d all the aliens go? I haven’t seen any today.
• These soldiers are really dumb. I kill one, then listen. If I hear someone yell “Man down!” I know there’s another one coming. I kill him, then listen. “Man down!” Wait. Kill. Listen. “Man down!” Wait. Kill. Listen. Nothing? Then I’m done and can move on.
• One of the soldiers says “Man down!” in a way that makes him sound genuinely upset. I think I just killed a very good friend of his. Maybe they grew up together. Maybe they were in love. Maybe they — oh there he is. Now he’s dead too.
• It’s a shame these two soldiers were in love and now they’re dead simply because I can’t bother to tell anyone I’m not the guy they think I am. I hope I never have to explain this to a jury.
• Ugh. Okay, dumb plot device. I basically reached the science lab where I was going to find the scientist, but he left, but before he left he forgot to do something, so now I have to do what he forgot to do and then go find him in the new spot he’s in.
• Games need a better way to motivate you from point A to point B besides the “Find the guy who is talking to you on the radio who can somehow see your every move.”
• The scientist calls me all scared, warning me that there are THREE SOLDIERS IN THE LAB. Three? Come on, man, I’ve killed hundreds of them already.
• I go up to the lab in a slow, noisy elevator, but I’m invisible so the soldiers in the lab don’t think anything is wrong. They are stupid. They would never be in The Fantastic Four.
• I eventually do the thing I’m supposed to do, prompting the game to try to start killing me again.
• Chopper attack in the science lab! That’s my cue to look for a conveniently placed, helicopter destroying  weapon.
• Sniper rifle in the corner three feet away! That’ll do. I kill a gunner and the chopper flies away.
• Died while trying to figure out where I’m supposed to go now. There are soldiers all over the damn place now and the chopper is back and they killed me.
• Died again, same place. Also I forgot to take any screenshots of this part. Think I’ll stop here.

Review Score, Part 4: Hm. It was okay, I guess. Got a ranged scope and sniper rifle, so I can shoot guys from far away. No aliens this time around. The driving wasn’t much fun. Stupid plot is stupid. I give it a B-

CRYSIS 2, PART 3

• Starting the level over from last time.

• Ooh, I just found “reflex sights” for my guns. Now we’re talking! It’s like a laser sight and an iron sight combined. This is my favorite kind of gun sight.
• I also found silencers for my machine guns. I need to start examining these dropped guns more closely, they seem to have goodies I may have been missing.
• Killed some soldiers, and discovered I can get into their car and drive around!

• I’m driving. The dead gunner is still flopping around in the gun turret.
• Whoops. Now I’m dead after running into two other cars that both had live gunners manning their guns instead of floppy corpses. Well played, enemy soldiers.
• Note to self: figure out which button lets me jump into the gun position.
• Okay, starting the level over again. I will be more careful this time. I will not mess around with cars. Wait. That seems like it’s wrong.
• You know what, here’s some thoughts on what’s wrong with a checkpoint-only save system in Crysis 2:
• The checkpoint saves are completely discouraging me from experimenting/exploring. I’d love to mess around with some new tactics and take some silly chances and, in general, goof around more. I’d love to get back in that car and tear around the city and try to run over soldiers and smash up my car, but to get to the car again I have to redo the entire first part of the level and take out all of those guys (and collect my new weapons upgrades again) before I can steal the car. And I just don’t feel like going through that only to die stupidly and go through all that again.
• Checkpoint saves are bad. Quicksaves are good. Quicksaves means you can try stupid shit all you want, experiment, explore more, whatever.
• Hm. Let me amend that a little, because I just had a really great, long, drawn-out firefight with a bunch of soldiers that was more tense than it would have been if I wasn’t so worried about dying, and I was more worried about dying because I knew I’d have to redo everything if I did. So. There is a benefit to checkpoint saves — it means you’ve got a stake in surviving, just like in real life when you get into shootouts with soldiers.
• I guess for me, it boils down to this: I’d sacrifice some of the tension for less frustration and more experimenting. PC games should always both have auto and manual saves.
• Found the crash site. Very low on ammo, so I’m sneaking up behind dudes and killing them with my hands.
• When I kill dudes, melee style, it looks like sometimes I break their necks and sometimes maybe I stab them with a knife? It’s hard to tell. It’s also sort of weird to not know how I’m about to kill someone. I guess my nanosuit makes the decision for me. My nanosuit is pretty smart.
• Scientist had me examine the crash site and, I dunno, he said something about something. Now I have to go back outside again.
• Chopper! Attacking me! I immediately look around for a rocket launcher because I know how games work.
• Here it is, lying three feet away from me. I wish life was like that. The DVD drive on my laptop is always getting stuck closed, but there’s never a paperclip lying conveniently three feet away. Or a rocket launcher, for that matter.

• Killed the helicopter.
• Heh. Literally seconds after I take out the chopper with a rocket, a soldier pops his head out on a ledge above me and says “I think I heard something!” It makes me laugh. That soldier is funny. (He’s dead now.)

• Whoah! An alien! It is very fast and cool looking and sounding.
• Oh shit! Hah, I thought the game was going to tease me with the alien for a bit. Sometimes games show you a new enemy from a distance a few times, and then it doesn’t attack you right off (like the Hunter in HL2: Ep 2). But no, this fucker ran right up and started kicking the shit out of me.

• This is where it becomes apparent that I’m not very good at games. The alien is fast and jumps around and I empty clip after clip and miss a lot. This is why I stink at multiplayer shooters.
• He came in close and I beat him to death. Welcome to earth!
• Oh, neat. I took some alien DNA (or whatever) and my nanosuit slurped it up and now I can upgrade. So, there are some RPG elements here. I’m down with that.

• I can’t wait to stealth-enhance my pinkie.
• Wait. Didn’t Prophet become infected with alien glop? And now I’m just smearing it willy-nilly all over my nanosuit? Seems like a bad idea. Maybe my nanosuit isn’t that smart after all.
• Sneaking around, now. Aliens are pretty tough. Watching them kill soldiers is fun.
• Cloaking, sneaking up on aliens, shooting them while they’re standing still. Running out of ammo since I can’t get ammo off the dead aliens. Could be a problem. Collecting more DNA for my suit, but I don’t want to spend it yet.
• Got to a checkpoint, stopping here.

Review Score, Part 3: This was a really fun night of playing! Got into a nice long fight with some soldiers, took down a chopper, fought some aliens, got some cool upgrades for my guns, and learned that I can upgrade my fingers. If it weren’t for the annoyances of the checkpoint saves, I’d be an A+ but it’s only an  A

Picking up where I left off: there’s an alien virus in Manhattan, which somehow causes aliens to invade, and there’s a bunch of enemy soldiers, and I still don’t really get the plot because I was too busy kicking things to pay attention.

Reading the Wikipedia page helps a little. The enemy soldiers are military contractors who want to kill me because they think I’m Prophet, who they were trying to kill because he was infected with the alien virus. So, it’s just a wacky case of mistaken identity that could be cleared up by me telling everyone that I’m not Prophet. Or, you know, I could just keep killing them. I think I’ll do that!

CRYSIS 2, PART 2

• I’m in a new area where there are many more yelling soldiers.
• My strategy is, shoot at them until I start taking damage, turn invisible, flank them, shoot at them again. It’s fun, but it’s starting to feel a little same-y.
• I found a new machine gun, but to take it I have to give up my pistol. I miss the days when you could carry every single weapon you found. I don’t like being without a pistol. Doesn’t this $300 million nanosuit have a holster?
• I was going to give some points to Crysis 2 because it hasn’t crashed and there haven’t been any graphical glitches. But that’s kind of weird. That’s like buying a Prius and saying “Well, it didn’t explode when I used the turn signal and the airbags didn’t go off in my face when I turned on the radio, so it’s a good car.” PC gamers just have such low expectations for games, I guess. I need to break that habit of awarding points for simply working properly.
• Still… it hasn’t crashed!
• Grenades! I have grenades now. I immediately throw four of them and completely miss everyone I’m throwing them at. I’ve never been good at throwing grenades.
• Also I’m not good that those grenade launcher weapons, where you sort of have a distance-based iron sight thing? And your grenade flies in an arc? And you sort of have to aim using the correct notch on the distance sight thing? I’m not explaining it well, but do you know the ones I mean? I’m terrible with those.
• My friend Joe told me I’m probably talking about an M203.
• The enemy in Crysis 2 are pretty good at throwing their grenades.
• I think I miss the jungle from the first game. Half-destroyed cities are cool, but jungles are cooler.
• I remember in the first game, I could shoot a tree until it fell down, then shoot the trunk into smaller pieces, then pick up the smaller pieces and throw them at people. That was fun.

• I’m in a subway. There’s a bunch of people who I guess are infected with the virus. I try to punch them and shoot them and the game won’t let me. I know it’s weird to complain that I can’t punch or kill innocent sick people, but come on. I’m not saying it’s a GOOD thing to kill civilians, but there’s no explanation why I can’t.
• Some helicopters just shot down an alien spaceship, which crashed through a building. That looked like fun, shooting down alien spaceships. I don’t like when NPCs in games are doing cooler things than I’m doing. I’m the player so I should be having all the fun, not some stupid NPCs.
• Like Alyx in the HL2 Episodes. She could climb buildings and kick zombies in the face and whack them with the butt of her shotgun and use sniper rifles. And I’m just standing there with a stupid crowbar going DUHHHHHHH.

• The scientist calls me. He’s very excited about the crashed spaceship, and wants me to find it and bring him samples. I will do it for him! If I can’t find the spaceship parts, I will just bring him some old junk I find and see if he can tell the difference using science.
• I’m in a parking garage, which is definitely not as cool as a jungle. Tired of the cloak-and-shoot plan, I decide to try power-kicking a car into a couple soldiers. I kick the car and it explodes in my face. I guess it’s not a Prius.
• I can slide! If I run and then crouch it turns into a slide! It reminds me of Mirror’s Edge. I am going to slide all over this goddamn city now. That scientist is going to be calling me on the radio going “Prophet! Where’s my exploded spaceship parts!” and I’m gonna be all “Not now. Sliding.”
• So, the deal is, the nanosuit was tied into Prophet’s DNA, and now that I’m wearing it, it’s slowly beginning to integrate my DNA, giving me access to more abilities one at a time, I guess. Like sliding. I think the idea is, the developers wanted to slowly give you more power as you play, which is pretty common for games. The original game, if I remember correctly,  just gave you the suit and said, “You’re a badass, have fun,” and I don’t remember that being overwhelming or a problem, so this new approach is maybe a little unnecessary. This is probably something everyone but me has already realized.
• Picked up some lasers sights for my machine guns. Cool! No, wait, they suck. I take them off immediately and stick with iron sights.
• I just died after trying to take a close-up screenshot of me killing a soldier. Now I have to do this level over. I hate checkpoint saves.
• I don’t feel like re-doing this whole level right now, so I’m stopping here.
• Sorry there aren’t more screenshots. I took a ton of them but they’re all of really stupid, boring things and none of them have anything to do with any of the bullet points.

Review Score, Part 2: Pros: I can slide, and shooting is still fun but I hope there’s some new types of fights to have coming up. Cons: I’m missing the jungle and checkpoint saves are annoying me. B

Video game reviews are tricky for non-professional (or, in my case, unprofessional) game writers. Unlike career game journalists, the hobby gamer doesn’t get an early look at most games. We have to buy them ourselves, which can get expensive. And, when a game contains ten or twenty or more hours of playtime, it may take us weeks to play through them, trying to find time to play among our other obligations, such as our real paying jobs and visits to our parole officers. Even if we do finish a game in a timely manner, there are already dozens of reviews already online, rendering our thoughts a bit moot.

There’s also the fact that I don’t finish playing every game, or even most games, I buy. Sometimes they’re just not fun, sometimes they’re too hard, and sometimes they start out okay but get boring. Should I even be reviewing a game that I’ve only played partially, weeks after it’s been released?

Yes, because I want to. (See the “unprofessional” note above.) So, I’m gonna tackle game reviews the same way one might tackle a television series review. If you want to review Parks and Recreation, you probably wouldn’t wait for the entire season to be complete before you put pen to paper; you’d review it episode by episode, knowing full well that each chunk you review is just a bit of the whole. I’m gonna sit down, play as much of a game as I can manage, consider that an “episode”, and write about it, saving the rest for the next session. Okay? Okay.

CRYSIS 2, PART 1

• After a bunch of logos I can’t skip past, it’s intro movie time! The movie tells me there’s an alien virus in Manhattan, and some company denies it, and gas is expensive. They use real footage of riots, which I kinda wish they wouldn’t. You shouldn’t put video of real people getting hurt into your video game about aliens.

• Now I’m sitting in a submarine with a bunch of other soldiers, who are trash-talking and ribbing each other. Where have I seen this before? Oh, right, every video game ever made. Let me guess, we’re going to get attacked and there will be explosions and we’ll all try to escape and we’ll get separated and I’ll wind up alone.
• Everything I just said would happen is now happening. I mean, it’s still a neat sequence, it’s just been done to death by now.
• My name is Alcatraz. I just learned how to crouch, which means I’m now pretty much fully qualified to save the world from aliens.
• I kind of don’t like these in-game sequences where I can’t move my body but I can look around a little. Either give me full control, or just show me a movie.
• A guy in a nanosuit pulled me out of the water, and now they’re showing me a movie. I guess I just asked for it. This movie is showing me all the cool stuff I’ll be able to do in the game, like shoot people and jump around and be invisible. It appears I will be kicking a lot of ass. They may call me Alcatraz, but my real name is Jake Asskicker.

• Man, this is like a fetish video. Hot nanosuit upskirts! Have to admit, though, the nanosuit is really cool looking.
• Okay, the movie is over and the guy who pulled me out of the ocean apparently stuffed me into the nanosuit he was wearing. I wonder if he took off my pants first and saw all my business. Either way, it’s a little creepy to take an unconscious soldier and play dress-up with him.
• The guy who put me in his suit, named Prophet, was infected with the alien virus. It’s kinda unsettling that he’s been infected with alien germs and now I’m wearing his suit, including his face mask. Doesn’t seem entirely hygienic. I bet it smells all gross.
• I got a gun! Hooray. I swear it’s been about twenty minutes since I sat down to play and I finally have something I can shoot at somebody. There’s nobody around to shoot, though, so I pick up some random objects and throw them around. I miss the turtles from the first game.
• Every time I come close to a big crate, the game suggests I give it a “Power Kick”, and every time it suggests I do that, I do that. The game could show me a puddle of rancid milk and rat droppings and if it suggested “Lick Puddle” I bet I would do that, too. I do whatever video games tell me to do. I am such a sucker.
• I activate a laptop, which starts talking, telling me everything that’s happening. I get bored and wander off looking for someone to shoot, throwing and kicking things as I go. Apparently, I’m supposed to find and rescue some scientist. Tired: damsels in distress. Wired: scientists in distress.
• The scientist calls me on the radio. He keeps calling me Prophet, even though my name is Alcatraz. I don’t bother correcting him for some reason. That seems weird of me. Why am I so weird? In real life, I’d be all, “Hey, scientist? FYI: I’m not Prophet. I’m just a guy Prophet undressed while I was asleep.”

• This game is pretty.
• The aliens bombed the Statue of Liberty, because aliens, like natural disasters, hate our national landmarks.
• My first fight! I shoot some enemy soldiers in the head and it’s fun. Despite the long introduction, I’m not sure who the enemy soldiers are or what their deal is. Maybe the laptop tried to tell me before I walked away. It’s the sign of an elite soldier that when someone starts laying out the details of the mission he wanders off and starts kicking boxes and throwing things around.
• It’d be weird to do that in real life. Say you get a new job. You’re sitting through your orientation with the human resources person. You get bored so you start jumping on top of desks, throwing chairs, kicking stuff around, looking down at your legs as if you’ve never seen them before, examining your shadow on the wall and seeing if it jumps at the same time you do (it does!).
• Something else to not do at a new job: lick rancid puddles.
• I learned how to turn invisible. Cloaking is an easy way to completely kill everyone without getting hurt. Too easy? Yeah, probably.
• See, the title of this feature is called “Bullet Points” and these entries are all arranged into bullet points and video games have bullets in them. And I am making some points about the game. I just wanted to make sure you realized how clever I am.
• Oh, enemy soldiers. You’re adorable. That’s it, keep yelling things about me to each other so I know exactly where you are at all times.
• One of them just yelled “He’s cloaked!” Yeah, that means I’m invisible, doofus. That means I might be standing right beside your giant loud yelling mouth. And I AM! Hah-HA! And now you’re dead from me killing you.
• Hm. Having killed a couple soldiers to death, there’s no one else around in this enormous section of the war-torn city. It’s all very lovely, but there’s seemingly nothing to do here but look at it and then find the exit.

• Entered a new area with a bunch more guys in it, killed them. Fun!
• Entered another new area, and some alien ship flew by a couple blocks away, and the video game didn’t want me to miss it, so it told me to press ‘E’ to look at it. I wonder if that was originally how they planned it, or they found during play-testing that no one was looking in the right direction, so they added that. Probably the latter. I still can’t really see the thing I’m supposed to be looking at.
• I want to stop playing now but I don’t see a ‘save game’ option anywhere. Checkpoint saves only? Bleah.

That’s as far as I got.

Review Score, Part 1: I am mostly enjoying Crysis 2 so far! Once they stop showing you movies, the combat is fun, the nanosuit is neat, and the game is very smooth and pretty. If it did feature a puddle of rancid milk and rat droppings I’m sure it would be beautifully rendered and I would enjoy licking it. A-