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For all those looking forward to having their PC hardware pawned all over again or just looking for a game that will show how PC will always be the big daddy of gaming, Crysis: Warhead is looming just in the horizon. Crytek’s lastet game, Crysis: Warhead will be seeing a 17th September release in North America and a world-wide release the very next day.
Ofvcourse, for us poor souls here in India, release dates hardly matter. For all those prepared to relive the month long wait just like Crysis, there is some good news in form of Steam. Crysis: Warhead will be available on Steam at a price-point of INR 1601.50 (USD 34.99). If you have some more dough to spare, you can grab the combo pack of Crysis and Crysis: Warhead for INR 2745.30 (USD 59.98). Both the packs are available for pre-purchase here.
With Crysis, every day is a cold day in Hell. And what better way to celebrate a Snow Day (or rather, Flash Freeze Day) than by sending North Koreans and distant cousins of the xenomorphs to meet their respective makers? One lucky bastard, however, will get so much more, if Tech2 Gaming have their way with the “Experience Crysis” contest. Specifically, playing it for two days straight South Park style on “the best hardware money can buy”, getting to review it on CNBC / CNN-IBN, and a goodie bag that includes a limited edition copy of the game, a six-foot (Sweet Zombie Jesus!) tall exclusive Crysis poster and an NVIDIA 8800 GTS 320 MB video card.
All you gotta do to try and be The One is to head over to Tech2’s Crysis review, spot the “hidden code” (come on, guys, you can do better than that!), send an email to Tech2 and wait and pray the rest of the competition drops dead so you’ll be picked. Or, if you’re clever (like us), you can just wait outside the Tech2 offices and wait for The One to come out, stick a BB shotgun in his face and make off with the goodie bag while he’s watering the lawn. Maybe even finish him off Condemned: Criminal Origins style for good measure. After that, maybe we’ll all use the Universal Machine Language Time Code and go back in time for some frozen pizza. Yum!
Mumbai got lucky this time around as well, considering we are seeing so many events going on here, with Sony and Microsoft both vying for our attention. As we had mentioned earlier, the Mumbai Microsoft / EA Game On event was on at The Squeeze and me and my GamingIndians friends were there to take in all they could throw at us.
Sadly though, the whole event was a relatively low-key affair, with maybe just 20 to 25 people in attendence - more television channels and online / print publications than a gathering of gaming fans. Good thing the place was small, making it look crowded enough! Guess Microsoft India E&D Country Manager saw this coming and chose not to attend, even though other Microsoft execs including Sanjoy John and Xbox India’s Product Manager Vivek Kulkarni hobnobbed with the attendees.
This has been a tough couple of weeks for Indian gaming, what with games delayed every which way. But fear not, according to distributors World Wide CDROMS and Excel Interactive, our games should be here real soon.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 should be available at stores around tomorrow, along with The Orange Box for the Xbox 360, Gears of War for the PC and Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties for the PC. According to distributor Excel Interactive, though, Crysis has been delayed by another week, so expect it to be here in the first week of December. The game should retail for INR 999, but there’s no word on whether it will be the regular edition or the Collector’s Edition that will be available here. We tried contacting e-Xpress Interactive and Milestone for comments and release dates, but it looks like they’ve taken an early Christmas vacation or something, since we’re yet to get a reply from them.
To make matters sweeter, Guitar Hero III should also be available in stores at the end of the month, with the Xbox 360 version retailing for somewhere over INR 6,000, along with LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, which I just can’t wait for, even though I’ve played Lego Star Wars I and II: The Original Trilogy to death!
And let’s not forget the ultra-great Mass Effect, releasing just two days from now! We’ll have a lot more on this soon, including information and impressions from the launch party, as well as a gushing review sometime later this week.
Keep watching this space for updates for more information from other distributors, if we ever get around to getting them!
Reviewers have it tough these days. With a dozen or more games coming out each week, they’re probably under horrible pressures to deliver their goods faster than ever before, with the result that we get crazy scores for games like Need For Speed: ProStreet and Assassin’s Creed. And the latter is pretty disturbing, considering the sheer scope of the game and how it promised to deliver truly next-generation gameplay.
But it looks like dear Gabe from Penny Arcade has stumbled on to the obvious fact as to why such a promising game is getting 7-something scores.
Alternate Reality Games. They’re either done spectacularly right or horribly wrong. In Crysis‘ case, it seems to be the latter. Trying to pull off an ARG, they sent a military style document, complete with blacked-out sections and a prepaid SIM card in hopes that they’ll be able to pull off a successful viral marketing coup. Needless to say, the people who received it weren’t too amused. John Walker, of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, went against all logic and actually decided to see where this led to. Nowhere, that’s where, unless for some strange reason you love terrible voice acting. Looks like some people just don’t learn their lesson. The rest of us? We’ll stick to hacking into Dharma’s or Aperture Science’s computers, thank you very much.
Now if you’re done collecting your jaw…
With the madness of September and October behind us, one would have hoped to find some time to sit down and breathe. But do the folks at Crytek love to prove us wrong! Crysis is due out November 16, while the single-player demo was supposed to flood gamers’ desktops with happiness way back on the-day-nothing-happened. Fortunately, the demo finally found its way to the light, on the 26th of October.
The Multiplayer demo had slipped out with much less fanfare a few weeks ago. Concerns were raised over graphics and performance, and dark clouds were beginning to gather in gamers’ minds: Was the game over-hyped? Will the factors of the Valenzetti Equation never change? Are we all doomed to die and burn in hell?! The answers lie ahead… Some of them, at least.