Far Cry Instincts (Demo)

[Kotatsu Neko]

Just got this today (came free with Fahrenheit) and I'm impressed. Of course there are some things which have suffered in the conversion, but other things have improved (general colour balance, bloom lighting) and of course Ubi have basically made an all new game out of it.

Certainly a very tidy bit of coding too. I'm amazed Ubi have got it all running so well on the humble Xbox. Looks like I'll be picking up the full game...

[Yoshimax]

From posts on RLLM it appears this game has drastically improved between demo & release - particularly on the AI front (seems to have been the biggest bugbear to date).

I've not heard more about multiplayer but from the videos over at gametrailers I'd say this is a cert to pick up this week.

There was me thinking xbox was going all quiet too.....

Evaluation time

[marcus]

Half of the enjoyment from Far Cry on a (high end) pc came through its astounding visuals, remove that and replace with comparitively shoddy visuals for the Xbox and you lose a lot in the translation. If you can get past that then I reckon theres a lot here to enjoy, for me though it feels like a poor relation to its big brother, although I do like some of the console-refined aspects of the game so far.

[Concept]

You can appreciate it from a technical perspective though. Along with Burnout Revenge, it's a great example of the Xbox being pushed in all the right places. It'll be interesting to see how the port of Half-Life 2 holds up in comparison, considering it's a bit of stuttery mess from most videos shown so far.

[Yoshimax]

Half of the enjoyment from Far Cry on a (high end) pc came through its astounding visuals, remove that and replace with comparitively shoddy visuals for the Xbox and you lose a lot in the translation.

Not if you saw it running on my PC at the time 8)

And I was hoping that a big widescreen & 5.1 might lift it somewhat.

[marcus]

Id say BO Revenge is ten times more impressive visually than Far Cry or GTASA for example, of course Ive not seen the full Far Cry at this point but typically I find that despite being virtually the same game, playing the PC version and then the Xbox version is almost like stepping back in time. Perhaps one of the reasons BORev is so impressive at this time is that there isnt a PC rival to it, but in its own right the game looks magnificent in any case. These findings are no surprise and Im just stating the obvious really, but as someone who is able to compare the two side-by-side its hard to play a game on the one hand which looks so good it hurts on the PC, and another tweaked version of the same game albeit far less visually impressive.

Still, Id much happier to be having problems like this than moaning about colour-clash and poor collision detection. Us gamers these days dont even know we were born do we :P