Philoking.comfrom Jason Burns’ perspective…

Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare has been a blast to play!  In fact, the one major downside of the game is how short the single player campaign is.   So I started over on veteran with the intention of getting the mile high club achievement rumored to be almost impossible. 

I am about halfway through this difficulty mode and it could be one of the most frustrating in my FPS gaming career.  I’ve died a 100 times to make one checkpoint and its figuratively and literally a long slow crawl from level to level.  The game has enough variety and required concentration to keep it interesting but sometimes its like sticking hot pencils in your eyes to make any progress.

So my question is…has ANYBODY reached the unlockable mile high mission at the end of Veteran game completion?  Will I find myself entirely disappointed after working so hard to get there?  At some point, I have to return the game to its owner ( thanks Leif! ) and I would love to get some feedback from those of you that have tried to make it.

Kiss Kiss,

 
Dawngrrl Gametart

You bought Crysis, fell in love with it, then you downloaded the Jan 08 patch for all the cool fixes and tweaks and all of a sudden it takes 30 minutes to load your saved game or 45 minutes to recover from the freeze at every checkpoint! Ubersuck! Disturbing isn’t it? EA should thank its shooting stars that the game is stellar enough to send people out searching for a fix otherwise we’d all give up and toss it into the pile of unplayable trash games we wish we could turn in for a refund.

I was resolved, but everywhere I virtually turned, I read tales of woe from numerous people having the same problem. The Internet geek squad responds to our desperate gamespot bulletins with instructions to clean our temp files and defrag our hard drives. *eyeroll*

Without further ado:

Behavior:

· At the end of Onslaught, the game freezes and you are unable to save the last checkpoint to move onto the next level; Awakening.

· Once you get into Awakening, you start to load your saved game, and you might as well go rebuild an engine or knit a sweater while you wait for it to finish.

· Every checkpoint takes 30 to 45 minutes to save and move forward.

Resolution:

STEP 1: Delete your superfluous saved games located in:

(XP) “C:\Documents and Settings\yourprofile\My Documents\My Games\Crysis\Savegames” or (Vista) “C:\Users\yourprofile\Documents\My Games\Crysis\Savegames”.

Make sure you only delete the multiple entries for each level. Your saved game will include a file for each level such as “dawngrrl_Onslaught_crysis.crysisjmsf” and then you will see some with a date included in the filename such as “dawngrrl_13_Onslaught_crysis_03m_32s.crysisjmsf. These are the interim save points within your game. Delete them all save for the most recent (highest number order).  If this doesn’t work, your saved games are likely corrupted. Yuck!

STEP 2: Head over to Incrysis, because thankfully, from somewhere in nowhere Kansas, Luigi has been hard at work so you can yank a saved game from him. Download the level you’re stuck on and replace it with the one in your profile (You will need to change Luigi_ to YourProfile_, of course.) and then start the level without any delays. Moo Chess Grassy Ass, Luigi, I for one am most grateful and hopefully you can help the rest of the sad searching crysians find their way!

Alternatively, you could just uninstall and reinstall the game without adding the 1.1 patch and your stuck yuck should go away - but the patch has some sweet memory leak fixes that are beneficial enough to be worth it.

Kiss Kiss,

 
Dawngrrl Gametart

When the Boy Genius bought me a (pink) DS for Christmas in 2006, I blew through Tomb Raider, which is awesome on any platform, then spent a good chunk of my DS game time on the casual games like Brain Age, that test your basic IQ skills and serve up a myriad of Sudoku puzzles. I have canoodled with a few titles since, like World Championship Poker, King Kong, Over the Hedge, Pirates of the Caribbean, and of course Mario World and a walk down memory lane with A Link to the Past.  I popped in Call of Duty 4 and took it out a Friday night spin and I was really surprised with what can be done on such a small device. This popular Activision title was developed for the DS by N-Space, an Orlando based dev shop that is also pumping out Star Wars, The Force Unleashed, for DS later this year.

This is my first FPS on the DS and it could be critically dangerous in contrast as I am simultaneously soaring through the graphical superiority summarily paved by Crysis. Impossible comparison notwithstanding, I was pretty impressed. The graphics are nothing close to the crispy clear HD next gen shooters we play on the PS3 and Xbox 360 of course, but they are surprisingly good for 3D rendering squished onto 3 itty bitty inches.

So the gist of the story is actually a step or two away from the Papa versions, in that your missions are on a smaller scale and you don’t directly affect the outcome of the war. You play as several different soldier characters totaling 11 levels in all to complete the campaign, on missions varying from escapes to weapon detonation prevention. Some of the cool DS playability features are touch screen pick ups and bomb arming and disarming with flip panel wiring screens that ad a little bit of flair to your game play.

I was shocked by how good the sound and audio effects are; even the voice recording has a really high production quality and totally adds to the games class level. Over all I think that CD4 on DS is a really great game for its genre and platform, but the bigger question is would I play through it all? No. The game comes in a great looking and sounding package, but it just doesn’t deliver on play. 

• Uncomfortable controls. The D pad moves you directionally but your camera is touch screen, and your triggers are the left or right bumper. While in theory that might sound cool, your right hand is pretty much rendered useless because the touch screen isn’t yet accurate enough for this kind of navigation with fingers so you really have to use the stylus to get any decent control. This leaves either your ring or pinky finger for right hand trigger action or your left hand index finger to trigger, which is counter intuitive to our trusty console controllers we are used to, and difficult to balance the dpad moving on the same hand.
• Lots of inaccuracy on the movement. Tapping for scope view doesn’t always work right; neither does double tapping to remove it. This tends to get you off on vertical visuals of the sky of ground while you’re being riddled with baddie bullets which also adds to the games vertigo induction.
• I am not usually one to bitch about unrealistic shot per kill behavior, but I at least need consistency. Headshots are more effective, as it should be, but you can still hammer 20 or 30 rounds into a enemy soldier before he drops and other times, one shot in the foot will drop him like rock. The Boy Genius and I oft debate about this issue in gaming as a whole and I feel sure it would be the game downfall for his approval.
• It’s an FPS on a DS. There are just too many great games for the PC, 360, PS3, and even the Wii that offer such a great experience without trying to fit it into such a tiny area. One of the other big complaints is that the DS version doesn’t have online play which nowadays is bad news bears for the cyber social addicts of the gaming world.

The DS will never be able to complete for my FPS attention because the competition is just too stiff. Its my waiting room entertainment, my in-the-meantime distraction, and served up best by Brain age, poker, and Mario. Though for many, like the mini BG with his endless capacity for Pokemon, it’s their main attraction and if you are uber skilled with your touchscreen and trigger fingering - it might be your portable shooter dream game.  I feel sure that if it was my only system, I would give Call of Duty 4 DS a second date. 

Kiss Kiss

Dawngrrl Gametart