OK, so I *finally* have a new PC, over 8 years after I built the old 
one. My sister got my the astonishingly expensive CPU for Christmas, I 
reused the recently upgraded GPU from my old PC, and I bought myself a 
roomy new case to house it all.

Naturally, having built the monster, the first thing I did with it was 
to install Crysis. ;-)

We recently had our broadband upgraded, so rather than taking several 
hours to download, Crysis took only 15 minutes to download, despite 
being over 6GB in size. (!!) That was the first surprise.

I went into the options screen and told it to select the best graphics 
settings for my system. So it decided to turn every single setting up to 
maximum. Squeeeee! :-D More to the point, unlike last time I played, it 
now runs smoothly.

(So 4 *years* after the game's original release, a high-end PC can just 
about handle it? That's nice. What the *hell* did they develop this 
thing one?!)

All is not perfect, however.

While playing through Core, I tried to shoot one of the enemies, and the 
screen turned bright green and my headphones nearly blasted my hears off 
with a loud buzzing tone. I had to reboot the PC to get it to respond 
again. Putting the pain back into crashing, eh?

Best of all, when I loaded up the game again, all of the game saves from 
the last two hours were gone. I had to replay the entire level. Not that 
the levels aren't cool or anything, but redoing several hours of work 
just because of a computer glitch is *not* my idea of a fun time. >:-[

Then I got to that level where you pilot a VTOL. It was impossibly 
difficult the first time, and it doesn't seem to have gotten any easier. 
I don't understand why the controls do not work as advertised. It says 
"press [Space] to climb". Yet sometimes pressing [Space] makes the craft 
go on, and sometimes it makes it go *down*. WTF?

The afterburner has no effect that I can detect, other than making lots 
of noise. And, worst of all, the craft keeps doing this thing where it 
goes slower and slower and eventually completely stops. I can rotate 
around, I can fire, but I CANNOT MOVE AT ALL. Tell me, in which universe 
is that fair? How am I supposed to do anything if I'm pinned to the 
spot?! I've got people screaming in my ear "We need help here! Where's 
our air support?!" BUT I CANNOT ****ING MOVE!!

After repeatedly replying the same half mile of airspace, I eventually 
managed to get the plane to the end of the mission. And then the game 
crashed. Just dumped me back onto the desktop, without so much as an 
error message. So now I have to play this hateful infuriating level ALL 
OVER AGAIN! >_<

Six separate times I struggled to the end of this miserable level that I 
hate more than any other in the entire game. And five times the game 
crashed as soon as the level ended. Only on the sixth attempt did it 
*finally* load the next level - like it should have ****ing done in the 
first place! >8-[

Playing through the last level, I noticed something strange: from time 
to time, usually when a new sound needs to play, the game video will 
lock up for several seconds. (The audio continues to play normally.) And 
then the game continues like nothing happened.

Usually this indicates the system paging data back in from disk. Except 
that this is impossible. My PC has an insane EIGHT GIGABYTES OF RAM! 
(Yes, I know it's excessive, but it was surprisingly cheap.) The entire 
game is only 6GB. I don't even *need* a harddrive; THE ENTIRE GAME FITS 
IN RAM! Even though it's Crysis! Amazing, but true. So... WTF is pausing 
it?!

I made it to the end of the game without too much difficulty. But the 
final stage caused me severe problems. Trapped on the deck of the 
carrier, I ran out of ammo for everything. And there's no ammo anywhere. 
So I'm basically being chased around the burning deck with absolutely no 
way of fighting back.

It took multiple plays, but eventually I managed to defeat the final 
challenge. Except... here is the ultimate insult. To complete the game, 
you blow open the pod doors on the underside of the monster, lock on to 
the hole with your tac cannon, and fire a single shot to take it out. 
But you know what? I blew the doors off, pointed the tac cannon at it... 
and it WILL... NOT... LOCK... ON!!! >_<

Literally, I'm casually strolling around the empty deck, there's this 
huge hole above my head lit up like a Christmas tree, I've got a voice 
in my ears yelling "Nomad, use the tac cannon to take out the ship!", 
and the gun WILL NOT FIRE. No reason, it just won't.

Five times I replayed this punishingly difficult segment, and five times 
the cannon refused to fire. I've tried taking aim from every possible 
angle, I've explored every inch of desk. Nothing.

In summary, I've completed the game, but it keeps pretending that I 
haven't won. This, surely, must be the ultimate in unfairness.

I wish I could say it's the first time this has ever happened to me. I 
still remember completing HalfLife, killing the Nihilanth, and then 
spending several hours walking around the room trying to figure out what 
I'm supposed to do next. When I restarted that level and killed the 
Nihilanth again, the next level loaded. It seems the first time, the 
end-of-game script glitched and didn't run like it's supposed to. So *I* 
didn't do *anything* wrong - the game was buggy.

More recently, I attempted to complete Batman: Arkham Asylum. I ended up 
on the roof battling the Joker, except that he just stood there frozen 
to the spot. Nothing I did seemed to have any effect. Eventually I 
reloaded the previous level and struggled to complete it again. This 
time I ended up back on the roof, except now the Joker actually attacks. 
And if you hit him enough, you win the game.

Nothing is more rage-inducing than just barely making it to the end of a 
game, only to have the game stubbornly pretend that you haven't won. 
IT'S NOT FAIR!

Hmm, that's a thought... My new PC can handle Crysis, I wonder if it can 
run Batman on lowest detail settings? (Stupid, isn't it? Crysis was a 
cutting-edge masterpiece, whereas Batman has quite low graphical 
quality. And yet, Batman takes more compute power than Crysis? WTF?)

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