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I loved Crysis on the PC, and I think I might actually like it more on the consoles. After playing around with a preview build for thirty-minutes or so, I'm astounded that Crytek managed to fit the controls and powers from the original game onto a gamepad in such an intuitive way. By mapping the armor and stealth abilities to shoulder buttons à la Crysis 2, and integrating other powers like speed and power jumping into their respective functions -- e.g. you hold jump button longer to jump high instead of switching to a special mode to do so -- Crytek has smoothed out the slightly clunky controls of the original. It's actually easier to switch between powers now. Crysis plays better on consoles, but given the graphical reputation of the original, the real question is "how does it look?"
The short answer is that sometimes it looks better and sometimes it looks worse. Which is actually rather frustrating, because it's the best playing version of Crysis, and sometimes it's the best looking version of Crysis, but it doesn't meet that last criterion often enough to be the hands down ultimate version of the game. It's not like the original game featured horrendous controls, it's just that the new console ones arebetter.
Mods designed to enhance the appearance of the game seal the deal in favor of the PC in terms of graphics, but when you compare the unaltered original to the 360 version I played it's kind of a toss-up. The console version uses the new lighting model from the Crytek 3 engine, while the PC version uses Crytek 2. The sky, light through the trees, and reflections on the water look better than ever. Explosions and other lighted effects look fantastic, even if they lack some of the fancy post-processing effects of the original.
I played a DVD version of Crysis for consoles, and I was told that the texture quality had been reduced to facilitate data streaming from the disc. The final downloadable version will be played from a hard drive and have higher resolution textures as a result. That said, there's still no way that the 360 or the PS3 is going to match the texture quality of PC Crysis with their limited video RAM.
Four years have passed since the first release of Crysis and in that's time it's gone from the best looking game ever made to "merely" a good looking one; several graphical rivals have been release in the interim. While individual aspects look better, overall the new console version looks like the PC version on medium or high quality, which is to say it still looks great. What hasn't appeared since 2007 is a game that matches the open world genius of Crysis. Even Crysis 2 was a far more guided experience than its predecessor, and other shooters are too busy chasing after the thrill-a-minute Call of Duty model to learn from the slower, yet more open and rewarding open world, choose-your-own-path gameplay of Crysis (at least the first two-thirds of the game). Console owners will get the chance to try the game in October for $20.
http://www.1up.com/previews/original-crysis-plays-consoles
