That bit where... Crysis

I've been looking through my collection for the "That bit where..." feature, and seeing if a particular moment jumps out at me for each game. If nothing immediately pops into my head, I disregard it and move onto the next one. It also made me realise that I should really organise my game collection in alphabetical order (I'm talking about my physical game collection, remember those weird discs you got in plastic cases?). The first stand out moment that came up while I was looking through was a bit in Crysis.

Crysis - The Mountain

A monumental deal was made of the tech on show in that game, about how pretty it looked, and how you could chop down the trees, and that even the current top of the range gaming PCs couldn't run it on it's highest graphical setting (which was really dumb, by the way). It's a good job that the game itself was pretty good for the most part, I mean it wasn't perfect, it became a pretty run of the mill shooter by the end where it turned into basically a corridor shooter, but the early parts played really well.

What stuck with me the most in Crysis, was the tank mission. The gameplay part of that sequence was most definitely not the best part of the game, but I do remember trundling along, checking out the scenery, firing off a few shells and then THAT MOUNTAIN IS COLLAPSING.

I hadn't really seen something happen of this magnitude before in a game, which I guess makes all the hype about the new CryEngine stuff seem worthwhile now. I'm trying to think back now to where exactly in the storyline this took place, but I do believe it was before you knew that there were aliens on the island (don't quote me on that). This made it all the more cool simply because THE MOUNTAIN IS COLLAPSING and THERE IS AN ALIEN SHIP INSIDE THE MOUNTAIN.

Obviously this was a scripted set piece, but sometimes they are the most magical moments in games when you don't know what to expect. If I think about it, I do remember this cool bit that wasn't scripted at all. It happened in the big sort of bay area, and I believe you had to destroy some AA guns... Anyway, at one point this helicopter started coming after me, so obviously, I ran. The chase took me over the beach, under water, through trees and over bridges as I desperately searched for something to take out this thing. As I was swimming underwater, trying to evade bullets I suddenly heard a muffled explosion. When I came up for air, I saw that the helicopter had accidentally crashed into a cliff, destroying itself and everyone inside it. Again, this was something I had never really seen in a game before, sure, I'd seen my share of exploding helicopters, but they usually came along at a scripted moment and followed a set path until you shot them enough times with your rocket launcher that was handily placed nearby. The fact that I could've gone anywhere I liked, and that the helicopter was just as prone to error as I was, was just really cool to me at the time, and still is.

So there are my favourite moments from Crysis. I've got a list of future ones lined up, but I think my next one will be Bioshock... can you guess what moment I'm going to talk about?

Thanks for reading.