SpiderMonkey

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

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Is anyone playing Stalker here? I've read some good comments on it on Shacknews, but I'm still on the fence. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone here who's playing it, since I think you guys are a bit closer to my taste in games.

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I just realised that acronymbased names that are not spoofs are horrible. What does S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stand for?

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I agree completely. I think S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stands for

Stalker: The Acronymised Label Kiev Excogitated Rashly

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It seems like a great game. I had to pirate it before buying (can't just buy something that's gone through six years of tumultuous development), but it seems like a very good purchase. Cheap, too. Don't get me wrong, there are some things about it that annoy me, but on the whole it has been a very positive experience so far.

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I'm totally loving it. If I had to describe it in 2 seconds, I'd say it's Oblivion+Fallout. A fairly major generalization, but it gets the idea across.

Coolest thing so far? When you pick up more than your inventory weight limit, it doesn't make you just stop moving at first. It just takes your walking energy away until you're 10kg above, then it nails you to the ground. I liked that touch.

Biggest complaint? The head bob when you move. It gives me a headache.

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I'd try it - FPS are my thing for sure - but I'm concerned that it'd run like shit on my creaking laptop. For instance, it really choked on F.E.A.R. with the visuals above Medium - how demanding is S.T.A.L.K.E.R.?

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Not very, unless you use dynamic lighting (which in Stalkerverse includes HDR and such niceties). Without dynamic lighting, it'll run better than Half-Life 2. With dynamic lighting it feels a bit like being mugged.

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What does S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stand for?

Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers, and Robbers.

I don't know why they put that, there is no alternate meaning. At least F.E.A.R. made sense.

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I'd try it - FPS are my thing for sure - but I'm concerned that it'd run like shit on my creaking laptop. For instance, it really choked on F.E.A.R. with the visuals above Medium - how demanding is S.T.A.L.K.E.R.?

About three letters and a bunch of punctuation more demanding than F.E.A.R.

Anyway, as F.E.A.R. is almost a year and a half old now, I'm pretty sure S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s requirements would kick the crap out of it. Time to upgrade, perchance? Not that I would for this game in particular, but there it is. I'll say this much for my transition over to (primarily) console gaming, it's sure saved me a crapton of money on hardware.

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They don't, miffy. Stalker was in development for six years. It uses old tech and will absolutely run better than FEAR, just as long as you don't enable the high tech stuff they slapped on the engine.

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I've been playing STALKER for a couple of days and this game is fantastic. I mean, the world you play in is so scary even when nothing happens. This is the best setting since Silent Hill for me. And then you have all the ukrainian voices that really add to the feeling of realism...sound is great, graphics are great, AI too and gamepay blends FPS and RPG quite well. And there's the day/night cycle that really changes the way you have to play...:tup:

only problem is that the game is full of bugs, the patches sorted most of them out but I really had a hard time to make it work with my ATI card.:tdown:

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Warning: there may be spoilers ahead

This game is absolutely brilliant and a totally fucked up piece of shit at the same time.

The atmosphere is incredible at times, with all the anomalies, roaming monsters, weather effects and stuff. Especially in the beginning of the game, the strangeness of the world really hit me, and going deeper into the zone really felt like adventuring, probably more than anything in Oblivion or Morrowind. This feeling obviously waned towards the end, but it still felt like getting off the beaten path was an adventure every time.

It's also scary. Not at all times, but some moments make it probably the scariest game I've played. I haven't played a lot of survival horror games so I don't know how it compares to those, but it's definitely right up there with the Thief series (kind of).

But these are just moments that eventually get marred by overall lack of quality. Such as bugs in the AI, ridiculous respawning times for enemies. The game is also rather short, and supringsingly linear. The linearity is a really really bad surprise after all the hype of how open ended this game was going to be.

I rushed through the end a bit so I might have missed something, but it seemed like the town of Pripyat got ridiculously little play time and visibility compared to what all the previews led me to believe. From all the screenshots and movies released over the years, Pripyat seemed like one of the coolest places in the game, so it was another really bad disappointment to find out that you just rush through it once (and half of it during a battle!) and practically don't spend any time there at all.

Another disappointment at first was that driveable vehicles didn't make it into the final game, but in the end that is completely understandable considering the linearity and other things and I'm glad they left that out.

The combat in the game can be interesting and I liked the weapons, but actually it gets quite repetitive at times. You really have to worry about running out of ammo some times and other times you have to think about which weapons and ammo to carry because you can't carry everything you'd want.

The story, characters and the plot -- all are kind of lame, and in the end it feels like it's all about removing obstacles on your way to the center of the zone. The endings are somewhat crappy. Some endings you choose right at the end, but some endings are affected by your actions during the game. I think this could work well theoretically, but this implementation feels kind of random and the movies themselves are somewhat unsatisfying.

In conclusion: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. hints at greatness, and has an overall level of quality that is almost suitable for an AAA title, but the many flaws mar the experience. It makes me sad thinking about how much potential this had.

I would like to see another treatment of this, but I'm afraid that it would get something else wrong.

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Play.com had this for £13 in their sale the other day, but it turns out that by "in stock" they actually meant "out of stock". I'm looking forward to it...

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I wrote this short little bit on another forum a while back, might as well post it here:

A beautifully broken game -- the fact that it crashes randomly and its interface is sluggish and unresponsive seems appropriate for a game that concerns a society of scavengers whose tools are all old, misappropriated, and falling apart. The inexplicable monsters (a humanoid with tentacles for a mouth that can turn invisible?), the random or nonexistent exposition (you've just gained a new Encyclopedia entry on controllers for no reason whatsoever!), and the splintered, piecemeal nature of the playing area contribute to this feeling as well. Its tone is spot on, and the fact that everything else misses the mark somehow makes it better.

Since then as I've played it more my opinion has changed somewhat, but I'm not willing to go to the effort of typing it out at the moment, so that'll do for now.

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I actually really liked this game, especially the ends. I also think I got lucky; I got one bugged save game and occasional stutters, but it didn't actually crash once.

***Warning! this post is absolutely chuffing full of spoilers. So many I couldn't be arsed to pluck them out for spoiler tags***

I think this game does a lot with storytelling that I've not seen before. There's an absolute shitload of subtle stuff in it that I think is way more sophisticated than yer average game.

The storyline that can explain everything is largely optional. You can complete the game without learning a thing about Strelok, the origins of the Zone, or who you are. Absolute knowledge of the plot is, effectively, a giant easter egg.

That one of the missions gets you to loot the corpse of someone specifically identified, before you learn he was a former friend. This is a narrative trick I've not seen before in a game.

The inside of the sarcophagus at Chernobyl is beautiful and feels almost sacred. I got the "I want to be rich" end first, and thinking back to some of the things I did to get all of the money I had, thought "Why wouldn't he deserve that?". Some of the endings are less clear, but all of them try to contextualise the way you've acted throughout the game, rather than giving you a clumsy multiple choice junction right at the end.

The hidden, explain-all, noosphere plot just reeks of sci-fi bollocks, but who cares? The zone and c-consciousness project work as an allegory of hubris and sublimated aggression.

That unearthing the full story of C-consciousness also reveals the story of the protagonist to be a tragedy is deftly done. That story needs to be hunted for, and both the folklore picked up from NPCs and the later mission structure divert attention from it. This gives the world a lot of internal consistency, given that the main purpose of the wish granter is to camouflage something else. You aren't fed privileged info, you really are dumped in that world with it's rules and conditions.

That you only see the protagonist from outside at the very beginning, when he dies in a fight, or at an ending cutscene. Rumoured to be one of the greatest Stalkers in the Zone, at the rare times you do see his face, he's never doing the gruff alpha male thing, but instead looks weary, uncertain, and as if he might just break down and cry. As far as takes on celebrity/reputation go, in the West this perspective is pretty alien.

That the joining c-consciousness project ending hinted at a lost friendship, and showed the kind of mutie dog I'd been murdering with no other option throughout the game as a domesticated animal.

That the last, most positive ending was still shot through with moral ambiguity rather than any clear sense of right or wrong, and the mood of the character is simply relief at surviving. That it finished with a beautiful, symmetrical animal that looked a bit wrong after all of the lumpen mutants I'd been dealing with.

It's a better game than many I've played. I think it borrowed some very good, subtle stuff from film, without sacrificing any of it's gameness. Instead of being told a story, you collect it as a series of chunks, and the way they add up is sometimes brilliant. Ultimately, the more comprehensive and less puzzling of the stories it offers depends on a very traditional game mechanic: Find the key to open the door. But by having just one key and one door tied to the fate and history of so much, it invests them with a hell of a lot of meaning.

Maybe it's more my interpretation rather than the developer's intent, but this is the first game I've ever played where it felt like the nature of the world and the meaning of my actions in it were playing off each other.

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I just finished this (went back to it after completing Oblivion). I pretty much agree with everything Nachimir and Erkki said above. I'm not going to go over the endings again, except to say it was a lot more satisfying than most games these days. I got the "make me rich" ending and both the "secret" ones.

I really liked the game, most notably during the middle. It was all a bit so-so up until the secret lab in the Dark Valley. That scared the shit out of me and I was impressed. All the underground labs are terrifying, each being slightly different. This makes it the scariest game I've played since System Shock 2. The realistic weapon physics and combat added a lot to this. Oh, and also this game has the most terrifying night-vision mode I have ever seen in a game. Seriously, it's so convincing and also unnerving, right down to the whirring noise it makes, that most of the time I had to switch it off and use the torch instead, even though it gave away my position.

Those are the parts where the game really shines, and when you're exploring mysterious, hazardous terrain. The NPC stuff bored me after a while - I totally skipped the whole Duty vs Freedom faction war thing and chose to remain neutral. Likewise I stopped taking random jobs. I did however enjoy searching out the secret stashes of the people whose dead bodies I searched. I realised afterwards that this little feature really meshed well with one of the messages of the game, that information is the most valuable resource.

So yeah, the second act was brilliant. The third act did that thing which lots of FPS's seem to do and dumped all the eeriness and became a war game. From Pripyat onwards the game felt very different. Not bad - the realistic combat again gave it its own unique feel - but not the aspect of the game that I liked the most. But I kept going because by that point I desperately wanted to reach the monolith sarcophagus (which was fantastically done I must say) and discover its secrets.

From what I hear the expansion/prequal, Clear Sky, is focussing on the faction war thing. If the reviews indicate that I can ignore that and go hunting more scary stuff as well then I'll probably pick it up.

All in all, a very different FPS game to most, and well deserving of praise despite it's flaws.

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Play.com had this for £13 in their sale the other day, but it turns out that by "in stock" they actually meant "out of stock". I'm looking forward to it...

It's also available on steam now. I'm still on the fence about getting this. But when I do it will most likely be via steam.

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I'd say it's worth it. The game is interesting, and the sarcophagus, also the whole last level if you go for the other end, are beautiful. (Edit: It's now down to a tenner including delivery at play.com)

@Dan: Yeah, it's weird that Pripyat seems to be the biggest urban part of the game and also the most detailed and complex, yet the amount of mission they have in it is tiny, just pushing you right on through. I would have liked time to poke around it in peace, like at Rostok (West of the Duty camp).

Sounds like we played the game in exactly the same way too :shifty:

I ended up getting the rich man ending, then going for the other two, and watched the rest of the sarcophagus endings here (spoilertastic).

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It was pretty inevitable that I would get the make-me-rich ending, seeing as a decade or so of RPGs has taught me to load up with as many expensive items and weaponry as I can possibly carry, and then sell them off at a merchant - this being the only way to afford the decent stuff that you will need later. As it turned out this is absolutely not the case in STALKER, the shopkeepers being a much more minor feature and really there for flavour and emergency ammo replacement. You can find everything you need (including the best stuff) lying about and on corpses, really. This is fine by me but I wish I'd known sooner rather than trying to balance my load-bearing restrictions on a knife edge.

I actually loaded up a save before Pripyat earlier and started backtracking. I'm going to thoroughly explore the Zone and see if there are any cool nooks and crannies that I missed. Then I might try pacifying Pripyat itself :tup:

Get it ysbreker, you might just love it.

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I had no idea that there was such a heavy story and role-playing element to this game. Wrote it off a while back as a generic post-apocalyptic shooter. I'll have to check it out when the deluge of games and work subsides.

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You can find everything you need (including the best stuff) lying about and on corpses, really. This is fine by me but I wish I'd known sooner rather than trying to balance my load-bearing restrictions on a knife edge.

Yeah, I ended up toting 5 of the more powerful endurance artifacts. At first it was to carry loads of stuff to sell later, but later it was just so I could get to places faster, and also carry a stupid amount of ammo for a vintar rifle (full auto + silencer + scope FTW).

The last rooftop was also fucking me off a bit, until I realised I'd hoarded about a dozen of the more powerful grenades :)

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Heheh, I had a similar experience.

Another little note, I really like the use of visual and sound effects in the game. Not just the night vision I mentioned earlier, but stuff like the visual noise from radiation and other emissions, the blurring effects and muffled sound following nearby explosions (gotta love when an enemy gets stunned by a nade and goes for a little wander across your gunsights - reminds me of Saving Private Ryan) and psychic attacks. It's all part of the atmosphere, but more than that it becomes part of the gameplay - the noise acts as a visual giger-counter, and you have to learn how to deal with the disorientation. For instance:

Getting close to the Brain Scorcher really felt like being in a pressure cooker after a while, it was so intense. The sense of relief when I shut it down was palpable. Until a few moment slater when everybody and their grandma started racing north.

Also the blowouts really were alarming, shame there weren't more of them.

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