To put it simply, the Single Player demo of Crysis contains more than I expected, but it's partially not as good as I expected. Let me explain.

First of all, not necessarily good or bad, but it performs relatively well for me most of the time with a little over half of the settings on high and the rest (4 settings I think) on low. The frame rate gets down around 10 FPS at about the 3/4 part of the demo when there's many objects and enemies around, but most of the time it's more around 20 or 30 FPS which is good enough to play with. I haven't confirmed those frame rates though, I was only estimating.
I was skeptical about the performance. I wasn't sure if it would be playable or not and was actually rather surprised to get most of the settings on high with minimal impact on performance. The settings I found to cause the most impact on performance are textures, model quality, shader, shadows, and resolution. Since I have an LCD monitor, any resolution other than the native resolution of 1280x1024 looks like crap, so that's the one thing I sacrificed performance for quality.

I'll start with the bad. I expected the physics to be highly advanced. I thought the branches and leaves of trees would be chopped off by bullets, but that's not the case (I must've been thinking of another future game like BF: Bad Company). Palm trees and any plants with a thinner trunk than a palm tree are chopped down by bullets and vehicles, but they're composed of segments that I estimate are about 2 feet long. When shooting down trees in the distance, they fall part-way and then freeze mid-timber, which I obviously found very unusual. I guess since I wasn't close enough to hear it, it couldn't complete the fall and make a sound (joke).
Buildings are composed of objects such as steel panels basically placed together with apparently nothing other than gravity and balance holding them together. It's fun to tear them apart, but they're really the only objects that come apart aside from the palm trees.
Vehicles have their weak points. The...

I tried to get in on the Crysis beta on FilePlanet by downloading their Comrade program (which is a lot like Xfire) and waiting for the announcement for the 3rd batch of keys. Anyway, the 3rd batch was released today, much sooner than I expected since batch 2 was released yesterday and batch 1 was released about a week before. When I clicked the link in the announcement to get it, I had to put in my system specs to see if they met the requirements. As you see in my profile, I have a 512MB 7600GS, Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 4GB RAM, and cable internet. My system, which can handle every modern game I've thrown at it usually at highest settings and a good 50+ FPS, wasn't enough. I guess they only want PC's that can actually run Crysis at top settings with some 60+ FPS. Maybe it's only compatible with DX10, but then again they probably would've asked for the OS if that was the case. I've seen the physics and visuals of Crysis, so maybe I'm just expecting too much performance from my PC on it and it really does require a top-of-the-line PC to run smoothly; my hardware was top-of-the-budget-line 6 months ago. I wish they just gave out the beta requirements openly so I didn't need to go through all the trouble of installing Comrade and all that.
I guess I'll just need to wait for the demo.

If anyone reading this has any better specs than me and tried to get in the beta, please comment with your basic specs. I'd like to know what the requirements really were and how close I was to getting in. It wouldn't help anyone cheat in batch 4 since they could just lie and say they had the best specs, and it's too late for me to change mine if I wanted to.

I felt the need to express how much Blazing Angels sucks, so here's my rant. Anyone even considering it should take note of what I say here, but I'm not saying this happens to everyone, just me.

As you might have read in my last post, I wasn't very impressed of the demo and the only reason I have the full version is because I won it from Xfire. So, my expectations of the full version weren't very high either, they were actually quite low, but it turned out much worse than I expected.

Here's the basic timeline of how it unfolded...
1. I installed the game, no problems yet.
2. After quickly going through the configuration, I tried starting the game only to be met with a protection system library installation which required a reboot, so I restarted my PC.
3. After restarting, I started the game and tried to do the first training mission in the campaign. For some reason, right after the takeoff sequence, the camera was stuck on the ground showing people running around while the audio was coming from me up in the plane, making it completely unplayable. I could hear myself shooting and the instructor guy talking and giving me instructions, but that's it.
4. I decided I had to look for a patch and found that 1.02 was the latest version. I downloaded 1.02 and tried installing only to be told I needed to install the 1.01 patch first, so I did. After getting both patches installed, I tried starting the game and was met with another protection system update requiring another reboot. That's when I gave up for a few days because I hate rebooting a lot and didn't reboot until today.
5. After rebooting again, I tried starting the game and it told me to activate the game by entering in the serial number. First I tried the key on the sticker inside the box, that didn't work. Then I tried the code below it that said "Do not Enter this number to install game", obviously that didn't work. Then I tried the UPC number, that didn't work. I took out the manual to see if there were more codes in it or by chance better...

Not that I expect anyone to read this blog, but I thought I should post on it every now and then.

So, as of the past few weeks I've been working at the Command and Conquer campaigns, particularly Zero Hour and Tiberium Wars. I beat Generals a couple months ago and beat ZH about a week ago, I've gone part-way through Renegade, I still need to start the others which I'll probably be doing after I beat TW. I beat the GDI campaign on TW a couple days ago (unlocked both endings) and I'm about 1/3 through the Nod campaign; I estimate at my current rate I'll probably have that done by the end of next week and start the Scrin campaign.

On another note, today I finally received my Blazing Angels prize that I won in the Debate Club: Console Wars chat in June. I had to remind someone at Xfire about it last month. I'm not going to blame anyone at Xfire for the screwup, they just didn't really plan to give out prizes for that chat and they probably didn't have it organized. At least they got it to me.
I tried the demo of Blazing Angels a month or two before I won it and didn't really like how unrealistic it was, so I'm not really delighted to get it, but it's a free prize and I love winning stuff. The version they sent me was the 4 CD version instead of the DVD version, so for any more games I win I'll be making sure to request the DVD version if they give the option.

For those of you who actually read the whole post, I'm sorry it came to that.

This is a typical test post, nothing special...