So I finally got a PC that was good enough to play Crysis, which in 2007 was the game of all games.  I download the demo and honestly the game just rocks.  I really would like to see this game come to the Xbox 360.  The controls would definitely work well since they resemble Gears of War.

 

This is where the story takes a turn for the worse.

 

I decide that I like this game so much that I purchase it for $29.99 off GameStop.com using the direct download option so I can play the game instantly instead of waiting for a disk to ship in the mail.  The game downloads fine (which is crazy fast on my U-Verse connection of 12Mb down, woot) and seems to install fine.  I go to run the game and can’t find it on the Programs menu.  No biggie I think so I go find the file manually and launch the game.  Then I remember, what if there is a patch or something for the game to fix bugs found after release.  Yea, I better download those.  So I go to EA’s site that redirects me all over the place finally to a mirror site that has the updates.  The updates seem to all conflict saying that some require this update first, but on another page it says it can be installed solely, etc.  OK, starting to get frustrated here.  So I get what I think patches I need, I go to install them and I get some cryptic MSI installer error with just a code.  I start to research the code online and find some people saying that the code can be caused by not installing the PunkBuster anti-cheat in multiplayer option.  I didn’t install this because I’m not much of a first person shooter multplayer person and will probably never play online.  But whatever, I’ll go install PunkBuster.  So I kick off the Crysis installer again but now it’s looking for crysis.msi which it can’t find.  I make sure show all files is on and I go searching for the file, it’s not on my system.   I think it’s because the game is already totally installed so the install files were cleared, but who really knows.  So I am like, screw it, I just want to play the game.  So I go to launch the game and I see an EA logo screen that asks me for my game registration code which can be found on the manual for the product…… Uh…… I downloaded it…..there is no manual!  So I try my product key, no joy.  I even go as far as to try to register the game on EA’s website.   After EA’s registration site times out about 10 times, I finally get in.  I set up an account and all that crap then it says "Thanks for registering!".  No place to put you install key, no game registration code, nothing.  So screw it, I decide to uninstall.  I go to uninstall the game and it fails.  Sweet.  Oh but it really succeeded since now I can run the set up again and instead of getting the old "Repair, remove, change" options, it reinstalls the game.  So now the game is reinstalled and it launches fine now.  One little funny gag I noticed is that it asks you at the end of the install if you want to remove the downloaded files, I click no but it deletes them anyway which is where the crysis.msi was.  Hah, real funny.

 

So now I just launched the game which is about 2 working hours from when the download completed to my machine and the game starts.  No idea if it’s patched yet and considering one of the patches is for a security hole, I think I’m still going to need to figure that out before I run this on my system.

 

So let me compare this to the Xbox 360 experience if I bought this game from Gamestop or even downloaded it off Xbox Live (yes you can download full games off Xbox live).

 

1) I download the game.

2) I start the game.

3) Game automatically checks for updates and downloads them.

4) I play the game.

 

Probably 5 minutes of good, hard work in there to get it working.

 

Glad to see that my choice to go console for gaming is still a good one.  The PC world has a loooooong way to go to catch up.  Perhaps EA should check out World of Warcraft, they autoupdate, handle group play, etc all within the game itself.  That’s really how PC gaming should work.

 

Mowpow