Far Cry – Jack the lad…

A Far Cry from paradise…

OK, down to the willy waving of PC gaming, the PC arms race (my Pentium 4 was better than your Athlon 64), the master race of not playing games on a controller and swearing by mouse and keyboard.  Who out there, back in 2004 managed to max out Far Cry and not bring their PC to a fiery blue standstill?

Before Crysis and that overly used quote, German developers Crytek had created the CryEngine with an accompanying tech demo (X-Isle: Dinosaur Island) aimed specially towards Nvidia graphic processors, which showcased at the 1999 E3 expo. Seeing the potential for large open world environments, a fully fledged game deal was secured and the tech demo X-Isle: Dinosaur Island released with Nvidia GPUs as bench marking software – unfortunately the publishing rights were picked up by Ubisoft. Time to imagine how another Far Cry would have turned out if developed by Crytek?

My PC back in 2004 went something like this. AMD 64 3200+ paired with a PNY Verto Nvidia 5700 LE, the graphics card was bought new specifically because Far Cry was bundle with it, having seen a trailer for the game via a DVD-ROM disc bundled with a popular gaming magazines of the time I was sold and so some quick saving up was put into action. Along with my ViewSonic CRT monitor that weighed around 24kg and Windows XP, my gaming was sorted – apart from the BSOD that frequented my adventures, banter over TeamSpeak was, it’s happening because I had an AMD CPU and not Intel and Pentium.

Overall, I managed to play Far Cry at a resolution of 1024 x 768 on medium setting and thoroughly enjoyed the game, especially emptying a full P90 magazine into a dead strung up shark. A year or so later, having saved up to upgrade to an Nvidia 6600 GT as the 6800 Ultra was out of my price range and the prospect of Battlefield 2 going back to games like Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising, Doom 3 and Rome: Total War was refreshing at a slightly better settings.

Today, my lowly PC with an ageing Nvidia 1050 TI and Intel i3 Alder Lake can comfortably play at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 on high setting – awesome! Enjoy some Far Cry sped up and slowed down for those dodgy M16 Kills.

You in the corner, hold your hand up if you owned an ATI (model number) XT graphics card.

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