Finally broke down and re-bought Far Cry cause I hated dealing with 5 CD's of install, but when I try to run the game, I just get a black screen. I left it on for about 10 minutes, and nothing happened. Went to task manager and I saw the splash screen was still there, and the program was not responding. I've tried changing all the video settings to the lowest possible settings, and nothing. I've also tried to set compatibility mode, and again, nothing.
Any suggestions on how to fix it? I'm pretty much stumped at this point.

Try updating your drivers. It could be that some drivers are not compatible with the game, so make sure you have the latest installed (remember to remove the previous ones before installing the new ones).
Then update DirectX. You can get the whole package from here.

What are your system specs and OS?

Asus G73 Laptop

Wow thats a nice laptop. In compatibility mode did you try both vista and xp mode? As well as running it under administrator?
If those don't work theres a 64 bit unofficial patch for the game that is meant to work on intel chipsets as well as amd though its called amd something or other. You might have luck with that.

Tried each of these fixes, none worked. The same thing happens as before, black screen, no game.
On a side note, this is one of the more frustrating experiences that makes me wish I could just get a refund since it's non-working for some insane reason I've yet to determine.

What OS do you use?
Try turning off any antivirus that you have.
Try reinstalling the game in a folder other than Program Files.

Not sure if the game is old enough for this to perhaps help but you can also try running it on a single cpu core.

I've got the same problem. I also have a newer 64 bit machine with a quad core. So maybe that's related? I ran the game fine then I switched all the settings to very high. After I quit to restart I got the same problem you have now. Reinstalling now. Hopefully it works. All my drivers are up to date. Then again the fact that it worked and then didn't suggests to me that it's something other than drivers or OS compatibility.

Also, if anything else doesn't work, try installing:
The FCAM mod

Hey OP, in case you haven't gotten it working yet, I solved my problems by setting all of the graphics sliders to High in stead of Very High. Everything is running fine. Considering I run crysis on this machine at 1600 x 900 with everything on high and 4x AA, I don't think it was a lack of horsepower causing my problem :P
I'm going to fool around with the settings and see if I can't find out exactly what was making my computer mad. I'll let you know if I figure out where the problem was. For now, hopefully this works for you.

You might just have to change the resolution. See if you can find a configuration launcher in the Far Cry folder.

Did you set the video options to very high by any chance?
Actually, I have encountered the same issue. In the Far Cry Configuring Tool, I had set all the options to max and had a black screen. After lowering the Lighting quality from very high to high, I could run the game properly.

Running Windows 7, 64bit with an i7 processor and 9gb of memory.

I also had the issue of a Black screen on start up and, yes, I had used the Far Cry Configuration program to set my settings to "very high". Resetting the settings to "high"
solved the issue for me also.

I've experienced the same problem reported by others (black screen on startup, not even seeing the intro videos, with the PC then hanging and having to be reset) and found a workaround.

* Run farcryconfigurator.exe (in the Far Cry\Bin32 folder) to specify the settings you want;
* Look for a file named system.cfg in the Far Cry\Bin32 folder and make a backup copy of it;
* Open system.cfg using Notepad (or another text editor of your choice) and look for the line:

r_Driver = "Direct3D9"

and change it to:

r_Driver = "OpenGL"

then save the file;
* Copy this modified file from the Far Cry\Bin32 folder to the Far Cry folder, overwriting the file there previously;
* Launch game - it should now work.

The problem seems to be due to Far Cry encountering a probem changing resolution using DirectX (the log.txt file in the Far Cry folder should give more details) so switching to OpenGL for graphics rendering seems to avoid this.

There are downsides - performance on OpenGL is likely to be worse (though that should not bother many given the age of this game) and I'm seeing some missing and corrupted textures (this may be due to other things I tried to fix this problem though).

If anyone else has a similar issue, could they please note the graphics card and drivers they are using? (in my case, twin Nvidia 460GTXs with Forceware 260.89 on WinXP SP3). If this is a driver issue, then being able to tie it down to specific driver versions may help in pressuring the vendors responsible.