oh, it's r? Thanks. Now I can actually see where the hell I'm going when it's off the local map.

lol...man, I wouldn't even know wtf to do if I couldn't check the bigger map from time to time.

I played a while yesterday before going out, and it's pretty damn awesome so far. I still need to figure out the proper dynamics of the buddy system and the whole weapons buying-safe houses thing, but I'll get there.

The beginning was a bit confusing, but then that's how it's supposed to be...I hauled my malaria-ridden ass out of there and got saved my Marty Alancar, the Brazilo-American. He and the American guy, Warren, are my two buddies for now. Warren even saved my ass on the quest with the Belgian guy, heh. And then i saved his ass. Pretty cool. Your buddy isn't quite capable of taking 10 shots to the face as in so many games, which makes the thrill/fear of getting him killed very real.

Apart from that I mostly drove around exploring, sometimes killing people when they started shooting at me...I'm actually kinda scared I may have accidentally killed someone important. But I love the sheer chaos of combat man, really. After blowing up some stash Marty's 'camp' got attacked by one of the rebel factions, and I had to help clear them. But you don't have any clue who's friendly and who's hostile because you just came driving in...really cool and visceral.

Oh and I did an assassination mission for the anonymous cell phone tipster, at the airport. I drive in with my jeep, full speed through the barriers, hit 2 guys, drive up to the hangar and bail. I shoot 3 people and i see a guy in a suit in the hangar firing at me with a pistol. I figure he's the target and frag him, turns out I was right. Hop back in the jeep and speed out of the camp, under heavy fire...the jeep starts catching fire when i'm relatively clear and I bail, hiding behind a rock and killing two guys in a patrol car going after me. More guys are coming up so I run, as the savannah caught fire and I can get the fire between me and my pursuiters if I can get there fast enough. And I do.

Looking forward to a lot more fun Oh and I chose the kosovar guy, Josip. who's your best buddy Satsi? The immersion effects are pretty great btw, I imagined for a split second I was in the game when going out and sitting in a driving car. Kewl.

Ahaa, it appears my eyes work afterall, Far Cry 2 is now available on Steam.

Might want to wait a while though, its nearly 15$ cheaper to order from game.co.uk.

Calculation for me.
On steam:
55$ +10$ Vat. = 65$ x 11 = 715EEK

on Game:
25£ + 2.50£ delivery. = 28£ x 20 = 560EEK

Steam is seriously becoming the nr. 1 service in the pc gaming business...I was sceptic about Steam when it first started a few years ago but now there's hardly anything to dislike about it except for the online activating. It's a blessing for indie developers and for people in relatively remote countries like Peltz.

Anyway, FC2...lovin' it. Played pretty much the entire day on and off, and made it to Act 2. It's hard to stop playing at this point because things have been flowing at a very fast pace, but I think I reached a lull. So I decided to take a break and come here.

In the beginning I was a little annoyed with some of the travelling, but once I started making good use of the bus system it wasn't much of an issue anymore. If you're gonna use a car (let alone your feet) to get around to every mission area you're gonna be making a lot of miles though! It takes a while to get used to the entire game mechanic, as things aren't always very clear. I'm talking about how the weapon merchants operate (do more missions for them = get kewler weapons), what the role of the underground exactly is, how your buddies can be used etc. But now I'm on a roll. My first buddy, Marty Alencar, is still alive after all this time even though we pulled a ton of crazy shit together already. I guess he's a hard-ass. Warren died though, trying to save my ass. I think he was run over by an enemy jeep, but I'm not sure. Either way, I had to put him down as he still wasn't getting up after two syringes. Brutal. He begged me to shoot him.

The story seems to be evolving into something straight out of Heart of Darkness, with the Jackall as some sort of col. Kurtz. And the mess of the entire conflict is hard to oversee - the feeling of being IN the action but not really knowing what or how, just that you need to do what you do to survive, is nice.

But perhaps most important is that the game is jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Rarely do 5 minutes go by that I'm not thinking "damn!". And the fire...dude. Awesome. Enemies still sometimes do crazy shit, but overall the AI is crazily good. Sometimes a little bit too good, as sneaking tends to be hard. But the machete is a wonderfully effective weapon so it ain't all that bad when they catch you off guard.

It ain't perfect, though. One major point of criticism is the respawning of enemies on every lousy guard post every other 15 minutes or so. It makes moving from point A to B more of a pain than it should be. By now I seem to have perfected my ability to bypass these points without much of a hassle, but it's still lame. Oh and the fact that fucking everyone seems to be out to get you the moment you leave a ceasefire zone isn't cool either. I mean, I know Africa ain't exactly a nursery and all that, but I don't think that it's realistic that everyone and their grandma will chase you down and shoot you for no apparent reason other than you just being there. I usually go offroad or travel on the river to avoid too much hassle. Enemies aren't nearly as likely to chase you on the river as they are on the land.

Still, wonderful game so far. Deadly and beautiful.

Dude, im gonna fly there and bitchslap you if you dont put spoiler warnings.

lol, sorry man. I don't think there are any real spoilers in there though! If you mean Warren dying: that's just my own fuck-up. He doesn't have to die. In fact, you might never even really meet him while playing.

Is it possible to select the buddies or is it predetermined?

The buddies you meet (or more precisely, the order in which you meet them) is random. You can't 'choose' them per se, but if you don't like a particular buddy you can get rid of them easily. Just pop a bullet between his eyes when you're both out in the field, or finish him off when he's down or abandon him. Either way he'll die and you'll be told about another mercenary being holed up somewhere. Bust them out and you'll have a new buddy.

You only really have two buddies at a time: there's your 'best' buddy who will offer you sidequests in their own interest and who will often call you once you're doing a major operation with an offer to help. Sometimes their offer doesn't actually make the mission easier, though, depending on their own interests. I usually let it depend on a combination of how much I liked my buddy, if I liked their alternative solution and whether or not it involved driving an extra 30 minutes. And then there's your second-best buddy who will show up and drag you out of the line of fire if you get near-KIA'd...IF you ask him to do so before going out fighting, that is. At this point in the game I have/had two-three buddies I can/could relate to. The other ones died too fast or were just lame.

I'm nearing the final part of this game I think. Still having fun doing missions in different ways (and GOD does the biggest rocket launcher cause some mad damage ) but it's starting to become ever clearer that the console-oriented parts of this game are pulling down its overall worth. Some of the sidequests are uninspired after doing the same thing 2-3 times, leading me to feel like they're meant to prolong the game length instead of adding to the "feel" or immersion. Same with the 'collectable' safe houses, diamond suitcases you can find and the guard posts you can scout. I mean, all very nice and all, but I and every normal adult without a serious Obsessive-Compulsive disorder don't care for that shit. I don't have the time nor gusto to complete these completely random and rewardless (I assume) tasks, and I have a hunch they're just there because the console gamer needs his achievement fix.

Having said that, they don't actively HURT the game, it's just that every time you do find a suitcase/clear a guard post you're confronted with the fact that some design could have gone into other parts of the game that actually matter instead of thinking up and executing these ideas.

Funny, my best buddy is the Kosovar guy, Josip. He's saved my ass on several occasions and I've similarly saved him. My second buddy is the Mauritian guy... he's also saved my ass. I'm not sure why one guy comes sometimes and the other guy comes other times, but whatever. I've also rescued the French chick and the Brazilian-American guy.

I love this game, btw. It's freakin' awesome. I love running around with the flame thrower and setting the savannah on fire.

I'm still in Act 1.... I spent a lot of time doing missions for the arms dealer and assassination missions... plus just driving around unlocking safe houses and crap. Scouting the guard posts is helpful so you can restock when you're low on ammo or whatever... by scouting them you know what kind of stuff they hold (ammo, explosives or fuel). Though I agree, their magically respawning gets kinda old. Like you, I just drive around the guard posts most of the time now.

The Mauritian guy died on me He saved me once or twice, but on the third rescue he croaked. Actually, he was hurt and I more or less accidentally abandoned his poor ass. It was that or get killed. I swear that place was positivelt SWARMING with enemies.

I hear ya on the flamethrower. I managed to fry myself by being careless about the wind direction or terrain, though, so it requires some attention. Yesterday night I snuck up to an enemy camp in the night and started fires in 4-5 different places, which then caught ammo piles and cars and started a chain reaction. Glorious to see everything burn in the night with enemies going apeshit and freaking out about being on fire all around me. I actually only barely survived myself. And my target was in a wooden shed that caught fire, it was even burning on the inside and didn't look like stopping anytime soon...I was afraid he'd die before I could talk to him. In the end I let him live and made a deal with him. After performing emergency suregery on myself by swatting out the fire on my clothes.

You have the guided missile launcher yet? Thanks for the tip on the guard posts, now I know why some of them show a "flame" icon and others a "bullets" one. I think you 'best' buddy comes and saves you every time btw, so maybe your buddies are on par in likeability?

I am/was thick as thieves with the Brazilo-American and the Iranian girl. Ah, Nasreen...what a woman. Btw: I have the idea that the game/characters react differently depending on your playing style to an extent...after going through the first part of the game like Rambo himself, guns blazing and blowing shit up I noticed that several characters referred to me or my style as "not very subtle" or "heavy-handed". Neat-o.

heh...no guided missile launcher yet. I alternately cart around the RPG or the flamethrower now... I unlocked the big machinegun, but I never use that thing. And most of the really cool weapons are still locked.

Looks like you start with different buddies depending on what character you choose to play as. That's cool. I'm looking forward to replaying this game. I just need to ignore the fact that Fallout 3 is now out.

My main buddy is Ferenc, the hippy backpacker from europe . Current rescuer is the black chick. I use silenced weapons mostly. Especially the pistol, the accuracy on that thing is positivly ridiculous.

Ah, cool, I haven't tried that. My current loadout is the M1903 sniper rifle for primary, Mac-10 for secondary and flamethrower/RPG for special. Other than running out of bullets a lot on my MAC-10, it's working out very well for me. Most missions I snipe everything I can, then mop up with the MAC-10. I usually end up ditching either the mac-10 or sniper rifle (or both) for dropped weapons though. I need to upgrade the ammo I can hold.

I mostly have the same basic setup Satis, only I carry around the rocket launcher ever since I bought the camo outfit (45 diamonds, wtf? You saying a camo suit costs twice as much as a rocket launcher? ).

I'm playing guerilla warfare right now, basically. I wait until nightfall and park my car/buggy (love those things) nearby and start sneaking through the foliage for some sort of high ground or spotting area. I scout for ammo stacks or other explosive materials and see if I can cause some chaos by hitting them. After that, I change position and start taking out clueless guards. If there are a few grouped together or if my target is in sight (like a generator that needs blowing up) I'll just get out my rocket launcher and blast the crap out of them or it. Alternatively, you could also fire a rocket IN a hut or building. Good fun. Of course, once you fire a rocket relocating becomes necessary. It kinda stands out in nighttime.

If you get good high ground with a LONG distance using the mortar is fun too. AI can be a bastard though, they're not afraid to use sniper rifles or rocket launchers. Or mortars. I was using my mortar on a hill, when suddenly I heard the "fiiiieeeeuww" sound of a mortar shell. Bang. Owned.


Has anyone used the "dart gun" yet? Is it like a silent sniper? Only less powerful? I should probably just buy one. Btw, the journey from Act 1 to Act 2 is really cool...at least, the path I took. No idea what happens in the other case.

Damn Ferenc sucks, he uses a shotgun and subsequently is owned by the baddies, well he's peacfully pushing up daisies now.