I wanna buy PS3............

so now I'm saving most of my salary for the PlayStation 3

and I think the first games I'll buy for it is:

God of War III

Assassin's Creed

Ninja Gaiden Simga

Burnout Paradise

GTA IV

Finally got God of War: Chains of Olympus.

because GOW:COO I've got PSP

it is one of the reasons because I love this game very much

GameSpot review:

It's hard to talk about what Valve's The Orange Box offers without immediately falling into an impression of some sort of late-night pitchman for fantasy knives and alternative cleaning products. That's partially because the name "The Orange Box" sounds more like some kind of citrus-scented bathroom cleanser than a video game, and partially because this five-games-in-one package is the kind of crazy deal that almost forces you to shout "Now how much would you pay?" With three amazing new games and two classics all in one package, it's impossible to go wrong with The Orange Box.

You'll need both Alyx and the gravity gun if you want to survive.

With your purchase of The Orange Box, you'll get Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. They're all based on the same graphics engine, but they're all incredibly different games, which ensures that there's something for everyone. You'll also get 2004's Half-Life 2 and 2006's Half-Life 2: Episode One, which is handy if you aren't up to speed with what Gordon Freeman's been doing over the past few years. On the PC, you'll launch each game separately. On the Xbox 360, the game boots up to a menu where you can easily select any of the five games, and quitting out of a game brings you back to the selection menu.

Let's start with new stuff. Episode Two is the continuation of the Half-Life 2 story. It picks up right where Episode One leaves off, with Alyx helping Gordon out of the rubble of a train crash. You've escaped from City 17, which now looks more like a smoking crater in the ground with a huge, swirling portal floating over it. But you aren't safe just yet. You've escaped with information that the Combine very much wants to get back from you, so the chase is on again. Fortunately, you'll do much more than just run in Episode Two. The biggest difference here is that Alyx doesn't directly accompany you through the entire game. You'll split up much more frequently, so, for example, you'll find yourself working your way through antlion nests and crushing antlion grubs all by your lonesome. You'll also negotiate a mine with the help of a vortigaunt who happens to serve as a subtle form of comic relief. It spouts dialogue that plays off of the serious, spiritual tone that most of these aliens take, only applying it to things such as crates full of supplies that just flew down a broken mineshaft and out of reach. These bits alone give Episode Two a much different tone than the previous games, but there are also significant gameplay alterations.

Episode Two marks the return of the lengthy vehicle sequences seen in Half-Life 2. There's a large block of action that takes place with you moving from spot to spot in what appears to be a stripped-down Dodge Charger. There are also a couple of big set pieces, such as one sequence where you have to defend the center of a mine from relentless antlion attacks. Likewise, the game's final sequence takes place in a wide-open area and, without getting too specific, feels very different from anything Half-Life 2 has done so far. Although you won't encounter any new weapons in Episode Two, the developers have at least broken the flashlight power meter out from the same auxiliary power that you use to sprint. This is a smart change that doesn't make much sense in terms of continuity between episodes, but it's handy and the sort of thing you wish they'd roll back into the much darker, much more flashlight-oriented action of Episode One. At about four or five hours, Episode Two is also longer than Episode One.

With all that Half-Life, you'd think that the other two parts of this package would be minor additions thrown in to make the deal sound more attractive. But Portal is probably the greatest thing about The Orange Box. It's a clever mix that combines first-person action with very focused puzzle-solving. It's also completely hilarious. The premise is simple. You're a woman who wakes up in a tiny box inside some lab facility run by a mysterious company called Aperture Science. You're presented with a portal that lets you walk out of the room and into another. From there, the game gradually introduces you to portals and eventually gives you a gun that you can use to fire portals onto walls, ceilings, and floors. Your primary and alternate fire buttons are used to create blue and orange portals, respectively, and walking, jumping, or falling into one portal sends you out of the other one. You can also pick up objects, such as large boxes, which often must be placed on large buttons to open doors so you can proceed through a variety of test chambers.

Portal can be a real mindbender, so stop and think about what you're doing before you do it.

Along the way, a computerized female voice guides you...and misguides you. The dialogue from the computer supervising your test gets more and more overtly funny as you play and leads to a very satisfying conclusion, including what might be the best end-credit song ever written. Later puzzles force you to pull off some tricky portal maneuvers and require you to consider how much momentum you have when you enter a portal, given that the same momentum is carried with you when you come out the other side. So if you jump down into a floor portal and have the exit portal set on a side wall, you'll rocket out of that portal with the velocity you had when falling into the hole on the floor.

Upon finishing Portal, which may take you three hours or so if you're able to quickly grasp the concepts that are presented, you'll unlock a series of advanced challenges. These include six harder versions of puzzles from the main game, and challenges that ask you to finish levels under certain limits, such as the time it takes you to complete the level, the number of portals you use, or the number of steps you take. The advanced puzzles are tough, but not impossible. However, the challenges are much rougher. There are bronze, silver, and gold medals awarded for each of the three challenge types across six levels. Even after you've figured out the puzzles, Portal remains fun and is worth coming back to again and again, just to listen to the dialogue and spend a few fleeting moments with the weighted companion cube. It's a shame that it had to end this way.

Team Fortress 2 is the multiplayer component to The Orange Box, and it's been a long time coming. Almost a decade, in fact. But we'll leave out the history lesson and get right down to business. Like its predecessor, Team Fortress 2 is a ****based multiplayer shooter in which the red team dukes it out with the blue team. There are six maps in the game, each with its own set of objectives. So 2fort is your basic "capture the flag" type of game, wherein each team tries to get into the basement, collect the enemy's intelligence (a briefcase), and return it home. The rest of the maps deal with the capture and defense of control points in different ways. For example, some maps put both teams on a course to capture the enemy's base, but require you to control the other points on the map to get a shot at the final objective. Hydro is an interesting map because it takes the control-point concept a little further by breaking each point up into its own specific area of the map. After each capture, the game is reset; a different part of the level is used for the next conflict, which makes it feel like multiple maps in one level. That's a good thing, too, because the downside of TF2 is that there are only six maps to choose from, and 2fort is the only capture-the-flag map.

Capturing control points is much easier if you work as a team.

Choosing your character ****is a vitally important decision. The right answer is a mixture of personal preference and your current situation, because each ****has unique weapon loadouts and abilities. The scout can't take as much damage as other ****s, but he's faster, can double jump, and captures control points twice as quickly as other ****s, which makes him a vital but fragile man on the battlefield. The soldier is your standard no-frills **** but his default weapon is a rocket launcher, which is handy. The pyro packs a flamethrower, which is fun to use. Then there's the demo man as well as the heavy, both of whom are slower-moving, tougher targets that bring heavy firepower along with them. The engineer's main weapon is a shotgun, but he can also build things such as turrets and teleporters, which can have a huge impact on the game. The medic can heal other players and let out an ubercharge that can turn players invincible for brief periods of time. Teaming up a medic with a heavy can be an incredibly devastating combo. There's a sniper ****for those who like to shoot people in the face from long distances. Finally, there's the spy **** which you can use to disguise yourself as a member of the opposite team, turn invisible, and place sappers that eliminate pesky engineer turrets. The ****s feel as if they've been balanced out fairly well, and for each action there's an appropriate counter. But none of that sounds particularly special, does it?

The thing that makes Team Fortress 2 so special is its graphical **** Rather than going with the ultrarealistic military look that's still all the rage these days with the kids, TF2 has an over-the-top, cartoonish design to it that starts with the great-looking characters. They're really well animated, and each ****just has a ton of personality. The level design holds up its end of the bargain, with a visual ****that occasionally reminds you of old Road Runner cartoons with their rocky, Southwestern ****.

The good doctor's waiting patiently for your arrival.

In case you haven't played the two already-released games in the Half-Life 2 saga, they tell the story of Gordon Freeman, your silent protagonist. At the end of the original Half-Life, the scientist was placed into stasis by a mysterious, nameless figure known outside of the HL universe as the G-Man. This governmental-looking guy pops up right at the beginning of HL2 to awaken Gordon and, apparently, place him on a train headed into City 17. This is a very different world than the one Gordon left behind. Time has passed, though it's unclear how much. The alien invasion from the first Half-Life has resulted in the Seven Hour War, at the end of which humanity surrendered to a force now known as the Combine. But even with the human race under complete lockdown, there's still a group of rebels out there fighting for freedom. Some of these rebels are scientists that come directly from the Black Mesa facility where the original Half-Life took place. You quickly hook up with the rebels and the "good" aliens, the vortigaunts, all of whom speak of you in hushed tones, as though you were a legendary hero. Half-Life 2 is a very lengthy adventure with somewhat odd pacing. The game contains two very long vehicle sequences that perhaps go on a bit too long, but let's let sleeping dogs lie. This 2004 game is an absolute ****c that should be played and enjoyed by almost anyone that comes into contact with it.

Episode One picks up right after the events of Half-Life 2 and serves as a sort of epilogue to the Half-Life 2 story. Without going too deep into the plot events, City 17 is about to blow up and you are way too close to it to survive the blast. Joining you is Alyx Vance, a girl that pops up to fight alongside you at various points in Half-Life 2. Here, she's with you for most of the game, for better and for worse. On the one hand, she's a great computer-controlled gunner who feels almost indestructible, which means that you can sit back and let her do most of the fighting if you feel like it. On the other hand, her excitable nature can be a little grating, and it feels as if she's along for the ride just to point out stuff that the developers wanted you to see. Most of her speech seems to follow the formula of "Hey, Gordon, look at this [key item you need to interact with to proceed]" or "Whoa, look at this [scripted sequence of things falling down or exploding]!"

The story is probably the weakest point about Episode One, considering that nothing really happens. You start playing, and your goal is to delay the blast; you do that, and then escape. Along the way, though, you'll experience some neat gameplay, much of which is built around the use of the gravity gun. Compared to the huge adventure in Half-Life 2, Episode One was a weird way to continue the adventure. Now that you can play it as a three- or four-hour chunk of a larger package, it works much better.

Each Team Fortress 2 map has a little intro movie to show you the ropes.

By comparison, the graphics in the Half-Life games and in Portal are vastly different, even though all of these games are running on variations of the same engine. The Half-Life 2 games do a great job of showing you torn-apart human cities and postapocalyptic landscapes, and they still have some of the best facial animation you'll see in a video game. Portal has a pristine laboratory look to most of its levels that really fits with the game's premise, and the effects for the portals themselves are pretty cool. TF2's unique visual ****sets it apart from the cookie-cutter military shooters out there and injects some humor into the proceedings at the same time.

The package also has wonderful sound across all of its games. Half-Life 2 and its additional episodes probably have the best (and most) music of the bunch, and the soundtrack in the Half-Life games is really great. Portal and TF2 definitely have some good music, as well. Likewise, there's a healthy amount of voice acting across the five games, and most of it is quite good. The Team Fortress 2 ****s all have specific voice taunts that add to their personalities. Portal's computer voices are outstanding, and the different characters in Half-Life 2 turn in terrific and believable performances.

With The Orange Box out on both the PC and the Xbox 360, it's worth noting that there are a handful of differences between them, but it's hard to go wrong with either version. For starters, the PC version is $10 cheaper and, provided that you have modern hardware, it also looks better than the Xbox 360 version. The 360 version doesn't run as smoothly, though its frame rate is hardly a problem, either. Furthermore, the textures used throughout Half-Life 2 simply don't look as good in 2007 as they did in 2004. Consequently, viewing them on a large HDTV doesn't really do them any favors, though the 360 version utilizes high dynamic range lighting that gives you more realistic-looking effects than Half-Life 2 had on the PC at its time of release.

Of course, the 360 version has achievement points. In fact, it has 99 separate achievements, more than any other game to date, though they still total up to 1,000 points overall. Spreading the 1,000 across five games means that no single achievement is worth very much, even though some of them ask you to do some out-of-the-ordinary things, such as playing through the entire Ravenholm chapter using only the gravity gun, or finishing Episode One and firing exactly one bullet over the course of the entire game. Each game has an achievement browser that shows you the achievements that relate to that specific game, though some of the achievements for the Half-Life 2 games cross over from one game to another.

An achievement browser shows you the tasks that apply to each specific game.

The achievement browser that Valve has built also shows your progress in some cases. For example, there's an achievement for smashing every single antlion grub in Episode Two. The catch is that there are 333 grubs in all. It's nice to know how many you have left. On the PC, Valve has rolled an achievement system into Steam, its digital content delivery system. The community side of Steam now lets you look at how long players spend playing each game, and the same achievements used in Team Fortress 2, Portal, and Episode Two are also present in your Steam profile. The difference is that they don't tie back into your Microsoft-branded gamertag, and there's no point count associated with each achievement on the PC, either. It's an interesting addition to the service, which is becoming quite a service these days, though we're still patiently waiting for a fully digital burrito-delivery system to be implemented.

But that's beside the point. You don't need burritos, sealed dealer cases of baseball cards, or fully integrated fitness systems thrown in at no additional charge to make The Orange Box a great deal. It's practically guaranteed that if you enjoy video games, you'll find at least one thing to like in this collection, though there's also a very good chance that you'll really enjoy all of it.

GameSpot review:

Released near the end of the Xbox 360's first year on the market, Gears of War was a defining moment for Microsoft's console. Its gameplay relied heavily on forcing you to take cover to avoid enemy shots, which meant that it required a healthy dose of patience as well as a steady trigger finger. It then beat that mechanic into your head over the course of its quality story mode, while also letting you team up with a friend online to take on the nefarious Locust forces together. Of course, it also had an amazing team-based multiplayer mode in which up to eight shooters could connect and go at it in a variety of different modes. Over time, more multiplayer maps and modes were added to the collection via the Xbox 360's download service. All of that great stuff is now available on the PC, on which the game looks better than it ever did on the Xbox 360, and without sacrificing anything in the process. If you've never played Gears of War, or if you just haven't played it in a while, do yourself a favor and try this new version of the game.

The game scales fairly well, but when it's looking its best, Gears of War requires a pretty heavy PC.

The game's story component puts you in the shoes of Marcus Fenix, who up until the very beginning of the game was serving time in prison for treasonous behavior. But the war effort requires his special brand of badness, so he's quickly set free, dressed up in his old soldier garb, and put back into action with the members of Delta Squad. Your enemy is the menace known as the Locust, which seems to be an amalgamation of different races and creatures, all seemingly devoted to exterminating your kind and taking over your planet. The game's plot points are inconsequential and work in a number of meaningless MacGuffin devices that serve as the only impetus you need to march from point A to point B while gunning down bad guys the whole way. You'll blast even more bad guys in the PC version of the game, which has a new section at the start of the final act that fills in a blank left by the 360 version. It does a better job of explaining how you go from running away from a huge beast with rocket launchers mounted on its head and shoulders to showing up at a train station to take the battle to the enemy general before he ruins everything.

The new content in the campaign is significant because it's new, but it's not especially noteworthy in the grand scheme of things. If anything, it probably would have worked better as a separate "deleted scenes" mode than as an integrated part of the game because it changes things up a bit in ways that betray the difficulty progression of the game. The new content often takes place in wide-open areas that are larger than any areas found in the console version, and it also brings together different combinations of enemies than you see in the rest of the game. Likewise, it forces you to cover a lot of distance between most checkpoints, and it feels much harder overall than anything in the "old" sections of the game. One section even features multiple paths to get to the same location, which seems weird and out of place, given the rest of the game's extremely linear nature. The new content is pretty good, but it's not so mind-blowing that you need to drop everything immediately to see it.

Of course, the rest of Gears of War is completely intact here, as well. And the complete package, done better than it was on the Xbox 360, is exactly the sort of mind-blowing that you might need to drop everything if you haven't already played it. Aside from a few frustrating cases in which the checkpoints are a little too far apart--and perhaps the need for a difficulty setting that falls between the too-easy "casual" and the occasionally punishing "hardcore" setting--it's hard to find many faults with the campaign, which will probably take new players around 12 or 13 hours to complete. The war-torn world you navigate through looks really great, and you're always wondering what will be around the next corner.

The gameplay is really satisfying, too, thanks to a very brutal graphical ****that makes your weapons look like they're doing extreme damage. Likewise, you'll appreciate the quality control with a mouse/keyboard setup or an Xbox 360 gamepad, which is fully supported in the game. Your main tactic in the game is to run up to an object and quickly hide behind it, then occasionally pop out to fire off some shots and quickly get behind cover again before you take too much damage and explode into a bloody mist with several meaty chunks. With a mouse and keyboard, you're mostly using the standard WASD shooter control scheme, but the space bar is used to run and to get behind cover, and you can hold down the right mouse button to pop up out of cover and take aimed shots. With the gamepad, the left trigger is used to manage cover, the right trigger shoots, and A is used for running. Both setups work just fine, though holding the space bar to run feels a little awkward. Furthermore, the mouse lets you turn and aim much faster than a gamepad does, which means that the mouse will probably be the control scheme of choice for online matches.

Up to eight players can come together online and break off into two teams for a handful of different game types. Examples include warzone, which is the normal team-deathmatch ****of play, and execution, which forces you to run up and chainsaw or boot players who've been downed to finish them off. Other modes, such as king of the hill and annex, make the game a little more tactical by requiring you to claim and hold various points on the map. All in all, the multiplayer offering is just as savage and great-looking as the single-player mode, and with plenty of maps to choose from, it can keep you busy for a very long time.

About the only thing missing from the translation is split-screen multiplayer, but you won't miss that one bit.

The graphics in Gears of War have never looked better than they do in the PC version, though that, of course, depends on your machine. If you can exceed the game's system requirements, the game looks pretty amazing at higher resolutions and delivers a good, smooth frame rate. It certainly looks much better and sharper than the Xbox 360 version of the game, and it does so without looking like the typical console-to-PC translation. The game also comes with a fully featured level editor, another thing you don't typically see in console-to-PC translations. Though some players may still prefer to play it with a gamepad, this feels like a PC game, top to bottom.

With a great loadout of weapons, a healthy multiplayer package, and an action-packed story mode, Gears of War is a terrific action game that, even after a full year, still stands apart from the pack. Whether you're a superfan of the first game who is looking for some additional content, or a PC buff who's been wondering what the console kids have been up to, Gears of War on the PC is most definitely worth your time and money.

GameSpot review:

It was hard not to be completely impressed when the first images and videos of Crysis appeared about 18 months ago. Scenes of lush jungles and towering alien war machines looked light-years beyond what seemed possible. Of course, the two questions that revolved around Crysis since its announcement were whether it would deliver on those visuals and whether it would deliver a game worthy of those fancy graphics. It turns out that the answer to both those questions is a resounding yes, as Germany's Crytek has proven that its 2004 hit Far Cry was no fluke. In fact, it was just the beginning from this studio. With its sophomore effort, Crytek has managed to deliver an incredibly advanced and exciting first-person shooter that practically rewrites the rules for the entire genre.

Crysis is an alien invasion game set in the year 2020. An archeological team on a remote Pacific island is captured by an invasion force of North Koreans, and your US Special Forces team is dispatched to investigate and rescue the scientists. Clad in high-tech nanosuits capable of boosting your strength, speed, and armor, as well as cloaking you temporarily to the enemy, you're parachuted into a tropical paradise that's crawling with intelligent enemies and something else that's tearing both the North Koreans and US forces to shreds.

Like Far Cry, the first half of Crysis is essentially a "sandbox" game where you're put in the middle of incredibly large levels and tasked with an objective. How you get the job done is pretty much entirely up to you, which is part of the brilliance of the game's design. For instance, the environments are big enough to give you a wide range of latitude. Do you have to get to a certain point on the map? You can take a meandering route that avoids patrols and go stealthy, or try the up-front approach and try to blast your way through, with the danger of enemy reinforcements showing up. Need to infiltrate a North Korean-held village? You can try the front gate, or maybe explore and find a quieter way in.

Couple these huge environments with the powers of the nanosuit, and you have a ton more options. You can play like the eponymous character from the movie Predator and use your cloaking abilities to stalk North Korean patrols, picking them off one by one and watching the survivors react in confusion. That could be via a silenced rifle, or simply coming up from behind a guard and grabbing him by the throat and hurling him off a cliff, or through the roof of a building, or against a tree, or whatever catches your fancy. Enhanced speed and strength give you an amazing amount of mobility, so you can vault atop buildings and come down behind someone, or run up against a North Korean vehicle next to a cliff and push it over the side. In a heartbeat you can switch between different roles, from stealthy assassin to seemingly unstoppable death dealer. It's a game that makes you feel like a superhero, though not an invincible one, because you simply can't run roughshod over the enemy. Crysis rewards smart, fast thinking.

It helps that the game features a high degree of advanced physics and destructibility in a highly dynamic world. Getting caught in a firefight in the jungle is a cinematic treat, thanks to the way the bullets will chop down trees, while branches sway from impacts. This isn't just a visual effect, either, as falling timber can kill if it lands on someone. There's all sorts of emergent behavior like that throughout the game, events that spring up completely unintended or unforeseen. In one instance, the flaming wreckage of a chopper landed on a hut, crushing it and killing all those inside.

Meanwhile, the gunplay and ballistics modeling make this shooter feel as if you're handling real weapons. Trying to hit a target at long engagement ranges is challenging thanks to weapon recoil and other factors. The North Koreans are encased in body armor, so they take some time to gun down, unless you aim for the head, which usually puts them on the ground. At your disposal is a variety of firearms, like shotguns and assault rifles. One of the neat aspects of the game is that you can fix up your weapons on the fly, adding scopes, silencers, and grenade launchers, provided you've found them. There are trade-offs for each add-on. Silencers let you take down guys quietly, though they reduce bullet damage, meaning you've got to make every shot count. Or flashlights mounted on your weapons might help you out in dark levels, but will give you away.

Crysis gives you all of these toys and ratchets the action higher and higher the deeper you get into it. The first level of the game introduces you to the sandbox combat and the nanosuit. From then on, the battles become larger and more intense as the action escalates. You'll storm North Korean-held villages and bases; encounter their counter to your nanosuit; take part in a chaotic assault on a North Korean harbor; and from there the game accelerates. Next is a wild tank battle in a tropical mountain valley, with helicopters and jet fighters roaring overhead. There's a sheer rush as your tank plows through vegetation and knocks down trees as missiles and tank fire erupt all around you. Meanwhile, the vehicle explosions are convincing, right down to the way ammunition cooks off and sends spirals of smoke outward. It's visual poetry of destruction. You're not confined to your tank the entire time, either. You can jump out at any time and use your suit powers and rifle to take on enemy infantry. When they're dead, pick up their dropped rocket launchers and engage vehicles in a cat-and-mouse-****game.

As events in the game continue to ramp up, you'll find yourself inside the alien ship, the zero-gravity environment delivers a visually strange and yet wondrous setting. As you navigate through the environment and engage the aliens you have to figure out your way through the level. Escape the alien ship and you're tossed into a frozen environment against the alien foe. After the alien vessel, the game becomes less free form and more linear, but it also amps up the action along the way, reflecting the way that the stakes are being raised. Now you're trying to fight your way out of the alien sphere, which means dodging war machines that look like something from The Matrix. There are a few more surprises in store from that point before you get to the ultimate showdown.

The alien environment feels appropriately otherworldly, and it feels like you're under the sea.

The one criticism that can be leveled on the story is that it leaves you screaming for more. While there's an adrenaline-packed finale, you still don't want the game to end on the note that it does. The single-player campaign is around eight to 10 hours long, which is a healthy amount for a shooter. There's a lot of replay here, too, as you can experiment with a multitude of different approaches. Plus, it's fun to go back and try out the large, set-piece battles again and again, since they can unfold in different ways thanks to the dynamic nature of the combat and the artificial intelligence.

Speaking of which, the AI is generally excellent in a fight, as enemy soldiers use cover and concealment effectively. They also know how to lay down suppressing fire and are great at tossing grenades to flush you out of hiding. Getting in a firefight in the jungle with these guys is always fun, because they'll make you work for it at the default normal difficulty setting. (However, the AI can suffer from the same problem all shooters seem to have; mainly that bad guys sometimes don't know what's going on down the road from them.) When you take damage, find cover and your armor and health will regenerate. If you die, you reload to the last checkpoint or quick save. Meanwhile, Crysis includes a special hard mode called delta, which is a lot of fun, because rather than making the game tougher by cheating and giving the bad guys more powerful weapons, delta takes away some of the gameplay crutches that help you at lower difficulty levels. For instance, incoming grenades are no longer highlighted, so you've got to pay attention now, and your health regeneration is slower. And the best part about delta is that all enemy soldiers speak fully in Korean, so unless you understand Korean, you're going to have a much harder time trying to figure out what they're planning to do.

The single-player game is a considerable accomplishment by itself, but Crytek has also included a full-featured multiplayer mode called power struggle that combines the best of the Battlefield games and Counter-Strike. The goal in power struggle is that each 16-man team (for 32 players total) must destroy the opposing team's base, but to do so they have to construct alien weaponry at a central prototype facility. To power the prototype facility, though, both teams need to seize and hold power stations throughout the map. In addition, there are bunkers and factories that can be captured; capturing a bunker allows your team to spawn in forward positions, while capturing a factory allows you to purchase vehicles that can help your side. Whenever you help your team by killing the enemy or seizing an objective, you gain points that can be used to purchase more advanced weapons, vehicles, and gear. It's an excellent multiplayer mode, and it comes with five large maps to support it. Keep in mind that everyone has their suit powers as well, so in addition to all the running and gunning and vehicle driving, there's plenty of leaping and speed running and cloaking going on.

Power struggle is Battlefield meets Counter-Strike meets the powers of the nanosuit.

Then there's instant action, which is essentially deathmatch with nanosuit powers. This is a chaotic mode set in some stunning levels, including what feels like a fully modeled Nimitz-****aircraft carrier. You can run around the flight deck, a good chunk of the hanger deck, and many of the corridors. Weapons are strewn about everywhere in instant action, so it's just a crazy melee of shotguns, snipers, rocket launchers, or nanosuit-enhanced fists. However, a team deathmatch mode is missing, which seems odd. Team deathmatch would have been a welcome addition, since it would have instilled some kind of teamwork into an otherwise free-for-all frenzy. Finally, Crysis multiplayer features built-in voice support, which means that all you need is a microphone to talk to your fellow players and teammates in power struggle.

Graphically, Crysis looks photorealistic at times--it's that amazing. Crytek has managed to achieve a visual fidelity that blows away anything seen to date, and there are countless moments when you'll just stop and gape at what you're seeing. Sometimes it's just the ordinary, like the setting sun casting all sorts of shadows and rays through the jungle canopy. Other times, it's something epic, like watching a huge alien war machine stomping toward you. The impressive aspect of the graphics is just how it manages to render huge, open, dynamic, interactive levels. Everything looks amazing up close or far away. Interacting with your squadmates lets you gaze upon the mechanical sinews of their nanosuit, or the incredible facial animation that brings them to life. They're capable of the subtlest of facial gestures to help convey emotion. Then you can sit on a ridge and peer down using binoculars to a village a kilometer away, scouting the location of the patrolling guards and machine gun posts. The sheer fact that many of the trees and buildings are destructible just adds a level of realism that's staggering.

You'll need a fairly high-end system to make the game look its best. In that regard, Crysis really does embody everything that's both exciting and daunting about PC gaming. A dual-core CPU and the latest generation of video card can run the game at maximum detail settings capably, though you have to lower the resolution a bit to do so. It's doubtful that a system has been built yet that can run the game at ultra-high resolutions with all the graphical sliders maxed out. Dial down the detail settings to high, which is the next-lower setting, and Crysis still blows contemporary games out of the water. Results are a bit mixed at medium and low settings, though. At the lowest detail settings, objects pop in and out with a fair degree of consistency. It's annoying at best and frustrating at worst, as it can impact gameplay. Crysis does support both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10, though the latter requires you run the game using Windows Vista. The visuals in DX9 are impressive, but they really come to life in DX10, provided you have the hardware.

This is a backwoods redneck's worst nightmare: North Koreans, aliens, and a tornado.

The game also sounds fantastic, from the primordial "moans" that the island periodically releases, the soft crunch of dirt and branches under your feet, and all the background sounds that you'd expect in the middle of the jungle. Turn on your suit's cloak, and everything sounds muffled. The music, by composer Inon Zur, feels inspired by the scores from epic Hollywood action movies, while the voice acting is also excellent, helping to deliver some distinct characters and even a little humor.

If you put it all together, Crysis is just remarkable. This is a game that pushes the envelope in terms of both technology and gameplay and does so with aplomb. Crysis raises the expectations for every shooter to follow when it comes to graphics, interactivity, environments, immersiveness, AI, and gameplay. Quite simply, Crysis represents the first-person shooter at its finest, most evolved form.

As events in the game continue to ramp up, you'll find yourself inside the alien ship, the zero-gravity environment delivers a visually strange and yet wondrous setting. As you navigate through the environment and engage the aliens you have to figure out your way through the level. Escape the alien ship and you're tossed into a frozen environment against the alien foe. After the alien vessel, the game becomes less free form and more linear, but it also amps up the action along the way, reflecting the way that the stakes are being raised. Now you're trying to fight your way out of the alien sphere, which means dodging war machines that look like something from The Matrix. There are a few more surprises in store from that point before you get to the ultimate showdown.

The alien environment feels appropriately otherworldly, and it feels like you're under the sea.

The one criticism that can be leveled on the story is that it leaves you screaming for more. While there's an adrenaline-packed finale, you still don't want the game to end on the note that it does. The single-player campaign is around eight to 10 hours long, which is a healthy amount for a shooter. There's a lot of replay here, too, as you can experiment with a multitude of different approaches. Plus, it's fun to go back and try out the large, set-piece battles again and again, since they can unfold in different ways thanks to the dynamic nature of the combat and the artificial intelligence.

Speaking of which, the AI is generally excellent in a fight, as enemy soldiers use cover and concealment effectively. They also know how to lay down suppressing fire and are great at tossing grenades to flush you out of hiding. Getting in a firefight in the jungle with these guys is always fun, because they'll make you work for it at the default normal difficulty setting. (However, the AI can suffer from the same problem all shooters seem to have; mainly that bad guys sometimes don't know what's going on down the road from them.) When you take damage, find cover and your armor and health will regenerate. If you die, you reload to the last checkpoint or quick save. Meanwhile, Crysis includes a special hard mode called delta, which is a lot of fun, because rather than making the game tougher by cheating and giving the bad guys more powerful weapons, delta takes away some of the gameplay crutches that help you at lower difficulty levels. For instance, incoming grenades are no longer highlighted, so you've got to pay attention now, and your health regeneration is slower. And the best part about delta is that all enemy soldiers speak fully in Korean, so unless you understand Korean, you're going to have a much harder time trying to figure out what they're planning to do.