Yantelope

Site was freaking out for a little while when it was going live. I do love the summer steam sale.

What is a basic feature that was left out of Crysis 2?

Texas is the complete opposite. Everything is either bread or a bun. Bun is if you put meat on it (hotdog bun, hamburger bun). Everything else is bread. It's kind of how anything on your feet are shoes and all soda is coke.

Just beat L.A. Noire last weekend.

That's what opens the door to elitism. Blaming console games when a game doesn't live up to "potential" is where the elitism begins.

I totally agree. I also agree about getting the most out of our PCs and think it would have been best if Crysis 2 had launched with all the features it has now. What I believe console gamers resent is when they are blamed for a PC game not living up to the standards PC gamers have. I don't think EA would see it that way though. I still think that because consoles are more profitable they see PC games as a secondary market. A PC gamer's $60 is still $60 but it's far more rare to see a PC game sell 6 million copies than it is to see a console game do the same. Also, I'm not defending EA, that's just my guess on how they see it. Thursdaynext might know better.

Sorry, I didn't intend to say anyone here was elitist. I was more referring to people on many other forums who are calling crysis 2 garbage. I agree that loosing the sandbox design is a legitimate complaint. I don't think the developers made that change to accommodate consoles thou though. I think they were just trying to make the game more like call of duty. That is even more evident in the multipayer. Blaming the design changes on console integration seems elitist. Is there any evidence that the design changes were because of consoles? Also, "pc features" is elitist. It implies that pc games have a different standard. That is the heart of the argument.

"It wasn't terrible but it wasn't what it could have been and should have been and that's what PC gamers are angry about." That's kind of the heart of the elitism. You said it yourself, you have standards. When those standards are set too high that can be elitism. Who says whether they are too high? Well it's all subjective but personally, I think Crysis 2 is a better game than the first but critically it got very good reviews as well so most critics think it's a pretty good game too.

Dean, If VG Chartz is unreliable then are there any better numbers to go on? MMO market is considerable but that's kind of a different market from multiplatform AAA titles. The sense of entitlement I'm referring to is how people get pissed if you don't include mod support, dedicated server support, every control scheme imaginable, quicksaves and so on. If you leave one of these features out then it's just a crappy console port. Also, with respect to the manual having xbox controls. Well, you can use an xbox controller on the PC version, something a fair number of people do including myself. Additionally there have been Playstation games with xbox controls in the manual and people laugh at that. Laziness in a manual still doesn't speak about the quality of a port. Now there have been poor ports before, GTA IV comes to mind, but what I don't get is when you have a genuinely high quality game like Crysis 2 that looks and plays flawless on a computer and did look considerably better than its console counterpart (I played both) PC gamers still get all pissed off. @Masterdex, The elitism that people hate is when "console port" is a pejorative.

I'm basing this on comparative sales of major game series such as Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed or Mass effect. http://www.vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php?name=black%20ops http://www.vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php?name=Mass%20effect%202 http://www.vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php?name=Assassin%27s+Creed+Brotherhood&publisher=&console=&genre=&minSales=0&results=50&sort=Total You have a good point that this doesn't include steam sales so I wonder how that skews the result. Also, nitpicking over stupid things like "press start" doesn't qualify something as a crappy port in my book. Crysis 2 plays beautifully and looks beautiful.

The other thing that's kind of worth discussing is the unpleasable elitist PC gamer crowd out there that Crytek is trying to please. Crysis came out and the response was "Crap, this game is so unoptimized, it runs like garbage!". Crysis 2 comes out and the response is "This game looks like crap, it was consolized!" Crysis 2 DX11 ultra patch comes out and fans say "This thing is crap and unoptimized!" (or at least that's what the forums on mycrysis look like right now). There's a lot more entitlement associated with PC gaming than there is on a console as is demonstrated by the 10 commandments posted above. What I think PC gamers generally fail to see is how small of a percentage PC game sales are and what a niche market it really is.

It seems these days just wanting HL3 in and of itself is something of a wish. I predict that Half-Life 3 will be the next major piece of vapor ware. The more I've thought about HL3 the more I've had to realize that Valve has just been making it up as they go along this whole time and they have no idea how to tie things together or finish the story and as such the game will never be finished.

Yeah, usually when you're a trader you don't mind buying used because you're just going to trade it back anyway. I suppose the exception would be if you're buying games at launch.

Both the Ace Venture and the video are hilarious. The console had a few glorious days of hack free online play. Those were the 6 months between Halo 2 and it's map packs.

I think the difference between used cars and used games is that the used game usually is every bit as good as a new one. Still, it's all a semantic argument which makes me angry. They say "Used games are robbing us of revenue that we've earned". The truth is more, "We could make so much more money than we used to without doing any more work by taking away people's ability to sell games." That's the heart of what pisses me off so much. The developers whine and moan like they're being abused. The way they compare used game sales to piracy is just sickening. Here's an idea: make a game that's good enough that people keep it.

Anyone downloaded the patch yet? I'm going to give it a go when I get home. http://www.viddler.com/explore/Joystiq/videos/6132/

Yeah, I'm fuzzy on what the implications of one game save are. I mean, what kind of unlocks would you be stuck with? Surely it won't be such that you can only play the game one time through. I wonder if it'd be like having Red Dead Redemption but once your ticker hits 100% then it stays there forever. If that were true then that would be pretty lame. Honestly though, isn't the battle on used games already won? Once things go all digital distribution it's over.

I just finished the game yesterday.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/27/eek-online-ccp-apologises/#more-63632

I love metacritic just because it gives me a very quick snapshot of the buzz around games. Most games are going to fall in the 75-85 range and if it's in that range then you've definitely got to do some reading to figure out if the game is actually good or not. If it's in the 90 range then there's pretty general concensus across the board that it's awesome and that's why publishers covet this tier so much. Usually only about 6-8 games/year on xbox get a 90 or higher and a few of those are usually just XBL arcade games. PSP didn't have a single game over 90 for years. If a game gets a 50 then you can guarantee that everyone hates it and I love those because negative reviews are fun to read. I completely agree that making a snap judgement that a game with an 85 metascore is better than a game with an 80 is dumb but for a quick glance of all the recent releases it's a little helpful. Sometimes it helps me notice games with great reviews that I haven't heard much press about. Beyond Good and Evil is one of those. The whole publishers trying to get higher metascores seems to me an issue of don't hate the player hate the game. Metacritic just publishes the aggregate it's others who abuse it. I do hate the marketing people who live and die by the metascores.

My bad, for some reason I thought it was F2P. F2P should always have an asterisk next to it.

Sorry, it's late to chime in on the whole splinter cell thing but the reason it looks so much better is because the Xbox and PC versions were way better than the crappy PS2 port that came much later. A screenshot of the PS2 version and the XBox version would look that different too.

I enjoy looking at metacritic to see what the overall gist of the public is toward games. I do think it's funny seeing which few games breach the rare 90 barrier. I just noticed that Bioshock got a 96. I found that somewhat hilarious in retrospect. What exactly pushes a game from an 8/10 to a 9/10? (we all know nothing is ever a 10/10) critics are so shy of ever giving anything that coveted 9. Metacritic also seems to get highly skewed by the few eurogamers and 5 star ratings magazines. If you're a 5 star publication that you either give a game an 80 or a 100 and nothing in-between. This seems to really affect the metascore.