Stolen Pixels #92: Crysis Demo, Part 1

Not everyone has the kind of endurance it takes to play the Crysis demo.

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It's bad enough when it's the demo. When it's the ACTUAL RETAIL GAME? It makes me want to reach through the Internet and squeeze the throat of whatever marketing genius decided we need to be advertised to every time we start up their game.

Thank heavens for editable config files!

To add to the injury, I can't even skip the movie. My Crysis takes like 5 minutes to start. Needless to say it's collecting dust now.

They should put these ads in Commander Keen. Because that's someone who needs to upgrade.

Haha. Hilarious.

You have obviously never player Warhammer Online.

At least a minute before you get through the ads, then more loading. Yeah, it doesn't load during the cutscenes...

That's longer than it takes to reboot my computer

Well then you obviously don't have vista, I could go grocery shopping during the start up loading times.

Huh. And here I was thinking of buying Crysis 'cause I found it with a 15€ price tag. Getting second thoughts now.

Crysis isn't the second coming, but its not a bad game either. If you won't be playing in 1min sessions, this shouldn't matter much.

Although these 'splashes' are annoying. I don't mind them telling me that they're proud of their engine or their connections with nvidia or intel or whatever, as long as they don't block my game. Why can't they put these somewhere in a menu background or something. You know: this pointless movie many games show at the left or right side of a game. Well replace it with another pointless movie that show your logos. I don't mind them, but i do mind looking a bunch of logos without the ability to proceed to the game.

Skipping with the spacebar is no excuse either.

All those POS videos should be skippable with ANY key or a mouse click, and then never played again unless you click in some "Intro" button in the menu.

Especially Crytek's. I have enough already listening to Cevat Yerli's deranged comments every 2 months.

I feel your pain.

If publishers don't revise their unskippable splash & ad screen policy, I'm going to die from a heart attack before I'm 30.

Tiamat666:
I feel your pain.

If publishers don't revise their unskippable splash & ad screen policy, I'm going to die from a heart attack before I'm 30.

I know, right?

Why do they bother trying to sell their game to us when we already have the game?

I did'nt notice these, i was too busy reading the manuel.

Unskippable splash screens are akin to showing advertisements before a movie. You're essentially a captive audience.

I absolutely hate both.

But at least your comic made me laugh about it. Good work, Shamus!

Leslee

Danny Ocean:

Tiamat666:
I feel your pain.

If publishers don't revise their unskippable splash & ad screen policy, I'm going to die from a heart attack before I'm 30.

I know, right?

Why do they bother trying to sell their game to us when we already have the game?

To influence pirates to buy the game I guess! I would like to know why I can't press escape ONCE to skip the logos, then once more to skip the intros. (not counting movie style intros like Westwood tends to put in).

But, I've downloaded a demo: presumedly I know about the game a little and I want to try the it before I part with my money. LET ME SKIP THE INTRO, and don't give me "oh, you can skip with spacebar." I have other games that can occupy my time, I don't really feel like playing 20 questions with my keyboard to skip some adverts, either any key skips, or the escape key, those are your choices.

Or even worse, I've parted with $110 of my skinny Australian Dollars, spent 20 minutes INSTALLING THE DAMN THING, and now, every time I get the urge to open the game, it spends 2 minutes telling me who made it. I do not care who made it. When I click my NWN2 button, it is not because I want to see the ad for Bioware, it is because I want to...play NWN2. I in fact, paid $90 (+~$100 in expansions) for the privilege of playing NWN2, not watch ads!
Your game does not load instantly though, that's fine. this means you can put in a splash screen with the game title with all the developers and sponsors logos arrayed around it. This gets me playing quicker, and still gets your logos in my face WITHOUT making me RAGE.

Ahem.

I think that.. Was it Battlefield 2 or Battle For Middle-Earth? Anyways, one of those had some weird shit, at least for me, so I had to start the game like 20 times before I could skip the shit.

Remember when Commander Keen had splash screens telling you to upgrade? The demo would tell you that Episode 3 had "SMOOTH SCROLLING 256 COLOR GRAPHICS" which was pretty sweet at the time.

Has anyone seen anyone other than EA pull this shit? I've noticed it in Battlefield 1942 and Mirror's Edge, too. It makes me feel like they just don't value my time. Fortunately, as someone mentioned, you can usually do a small hack to get rid of it. In BF1942, there was a flag you could add to the game shortcut to make it skip. It's still ridiculous though.

Brotherofwill:

That's longer than it takes to reboot my computer

Well then you obviously don't have vista, I could go grocery shopping during the start up loading times.

That's odd. I have Vista, and my PC gets to the point where I'm browsing the internet in around 45 seconds from initial power-button pressing. And I have quite a few of programs that run at startup.

oneplus999:
Has anyone seen anyone other than EA pull this shit? I've noticed it in Battlefield 1942 and Mirror's Edge, too. It makes me feel like they just don't value my time. Fortunately, as someone mentioned, you can usually do a small hack to get rid of it. In BF1942, there was a flag you could add to the game shortcut to make it skip. It's still ridiculous though.

I think you can do that with all games. -intro I think?

Liverandbacon:

Brotherofwill:

That's longer than it takes to reboot my computer

Well then you obviously don't have vista, I could go grocery shopping during the start up loading times.

That's odd. I have Vista, and my PC gets to the point where I'm browsing the internet in around 45 seconds from initial power-button pressing. And I have quite a few of programs that run at startup.

Yeah, I never get this either. I run Vista, and my time from hitting the power switch to being able to actually use the computer is less than 30 seconds (closer to 20), which is a few times faster than XP ever was for me. I have to wonder how much of the Vista hate that gets posted is just crap repeated from early reputation, because I've been running it for over a year and a half, and it's been smooth and fast the whole way without a crash.

Here's a tip for operating systems that has always served me well: Never (and I mean never) buy an OS when it first hits the shelves. Always give it at least a few months for the major bugs to be worked out, preferaby wait until the first service pack is released (you know there will be one). Why? Because whatever OS you've been using has most likely been on the market for years, during which time it has been patched and fixed many times over to reach it's current incarnation, while any new OS will be very buggy (swuch is the nature of the PC and its variety of confiburations, there is no avoiding it). The result is that if you install a new OS before it has been properly vetted and repaired, you will always be disappointed when comparing it to your experience with your older "tried and true" OS. This approach should be common sense, and anyone violating it has only themselves, not the OS, to blame for the subsequent frustration.

I think the Core Duo add is to tell you what to go buy when you find out that Crysis wont run on anything less...

The only thing I can't skip is the EA cutscene.

YOU POOR SOULS!

Dev Null:
I think the Core Duo add is to tell you what to go buy when you find out that Crysis wont run on anything less...

Well I was stubborn and managed to run it on a 5 year old Pentium D - har har, take that "unskippable" ad.

Isn't this sort of thing normally Paul and Graham's job?

If your computer boot time is less than the time to boot the game, then it is obvious that your computer is too weak. Real machines take hours to boot! If you wanted a low boot time then you would get a microwave.

yeah i know what you mean. I hate unskippale opening splashes. and Crysis is very proud of itself for butt-screwing processors into the 10th ring of hell.

droid:
If your computer boot time is less than the time to boot the game, then it is obvious that your computer is too weak. Real machines take hours to boot! If you wanted a low boot time then you would get a microwave.

You sheltered person. The microwave I got stuck with for over a year at my new place took 5 minutes for one refrigerated burrito, and sometimes longer if it felt like procrastinating.

I think i recall this experience when i played the crytek demo. I had a trackball rather than a proper mouse.. so my experience with crysis demo
1) ooh, this is pretty
2) let's monkey around with the settings to get my framerate up a bit.
3) whee! I'm jumping around!
4) this is an awesome animal cruelty simulator
5) hey those guys are shooting ba..

and then it got uninstalled. sure was pretty though. mostly i just wanted to see if crysis would run on my new 200$ gaming rig. was ok.

When I tried to download the demo it pretty much, nope your PC is too shitty to even play this demo. Go back to playing browser games, cheapass. And this PC is almost 6 months old.

They should put these ads in Commander Keen. Because that's someone who needs to upgrade.

Am I the only person who read that and thought DAMN! I need to get my hands on a copy of that again? Actually more keane5e than anything else.

I know you mentioned it in the description, but I read the comic before the description and the same thing kept going through my head: "Yeah... You don't skip it with Esc because you skip it with space..."

...If I remember correctly you can skip all of them too...

Liverandbacon:
That's odd. I have Vista, and my PC gets to the point where I'm browsing the internet in around 45 seconds from initial power-button pressing. And I have quite a few of programs that run at startup.

Is that a full boot or just start up from Hibernate?

Start up from Hibernate is quite snappy and by default the button on the Start menu which looks like a power button actually hibernates your machine.

However doing a full boot is like waiting for the second coming...

Yeah, this always annoys the shit out of me. Thankfully you can skip them by moving the movie files, but it's still awkward that they can't be skipped at all by default. Whoever thought of that needs to be shot.

Have you not figured out that you can just delete all the videos called trailers from the instal directory and that works for almost every game on the market.

Brotherofwill:

That's longer than it takes to reboot my computer

Well then you obviously don't have vista, I could go grocery shopping during the start up loading times.

Exactly what I was thinking. :(