Be Excellent To Each Other

So, having heard mixed, but largely positive, or at least interesting things about the first STALKER game, I decided to give it a go, thinking it should now run respectably on my PC. It does. As a game though, it's really very annoying and frustrating and broken.

I should have known not to carry on when I had to click on the menu buttons two or three times before anything happened, but no. Utterly useless guns, however carefully you aim and whatever the range, you will miss 9 shots ouf of ten, useless stealth, however carefully and slowly you creep up on someone, useless knife that doesn't even register a hit 70% of the time even when standing as close to your unaware target as possible and aiming squarely at their heart, forcing you to stab and slash repeatedly before the game realises that actually, that knife should be hitting the fucker, constantly and comically respawning NPCs - so you guys are quite happy to camp down and play your guitar next to the six corpses that have mounted in the last day (one of which is perched neatly on the blazing fire you're surrounding) are you? - and sometimes blatantly obviously, too (ah, good, there's nobody in the room, I'll just take a WAAARGH JESUS FUCK TELEPORT BANDIT).

A generally poor interface, with tonnes of random beeps that seem to urgently want to tell you something, but when you check your diary there's nothing new whatsoever, a map that doesn't know what the hell it's doing, enemies that are immune to anything but headshots (which are next to impossible with the shit guns anyway), grenades that take a fortnight to detonate, rendering them almost entirely useless, confusing, arbitrary win conditions (defeat the bandits! There they ar-MISSION FAILED. What? What? I killed every one I saw... oh. Oh, so if one bandit reaches an arbitrary, invisible line in the scrapyard's ground, you fail, even if you singlehandedly kill every bandit on the map with no casualties. Great. Thanks. It would have helped if you'd, y'know, TOLD ME THAT BEFOREHAND, you cunts), 'rewards' for fighting a bajillion bandits and giving all your medkits to ungrateful bastards who remain neutral (not that 'friendly' people act any differently anyway) that are in an area you can't access yet, a general lack of any feeling that you're being injured, so without an eye constantly on your health you'll have no clue, and kills that are deeply lacking in satisfaction - however skilfully you kill someone, it won't feel at all like you're realyl shooting someone down. You just see a shape and drill at it endlessly until it stops shooting back, and then that's it.

In short... what the fuck? I've been trying my hardest for two days to like this, and it's so far been utterly shit. It's quite the most irritating game I've played all year - I've damn nearly screamed at the cieling after being forced to storm the same building for the ninth time after my careful aiming from two feet away did fuck all to even a two-bit bandit who apparently is quite unfazed by having seventeen bullets lodged in his chest. Am I doing something wrong?

You're absolutely right, it's shit. Apparently guns are useful only a 4' range - who'd have thought. Still, at least there's loads of ammo around at the start of the game. Oh.

Thirded (though it should be turded)

Stalker is an ugly, stupid, not even finished game that was totally and utterly over rated.

Thank teh lord I only spended a fiver on it.

The film and the book its based on, however, are head mongingly brilliant.

Is the book also called Stalker? I am nearly at the bottom of my "stuff to read" pile.

I'm sure I heard it was a perfect example of "broken but good game that can be very much fixed with copious use of mods".

Not played it myself though.

I was really hoping someone would say "no you twat, you're doing it wrong. Go to x and pick up y, and then it'll z and you're away". But yeah, it seems that what's annoying me now is going to make me delete it in a day or two, so I'm looking around for some mods. Any recommendations? I've got a few bookmarked from RPS comments, but they're all 200Mb+ and I want to start small.

Oi, get yourself into the Wii homebrew thread

The book's called 'Roadside Picnic'. Damningly I forget the authors. The film is by Sergei Tartovsky. It has a crushingly tragic production history, and the film is sort of Last of the Summer Wine meets Half Life 2 meets 2001: A Space Odyssey. But really slow. And unforgetable.

Like 2001 but really slow? Are you sure?

Well right from the off when the dialogue all bled out of the boxes it was supposed to be in I knew something wasn't quite right.

Man, I've been on dates like that.

I've seen the film Stalker. It's hours of nothing happening. I really wanted to like it as well.

Completely.

It's great though. Not to watch - although beautiful it's pretty boring - but it keeps popping into your head again and again afterwards, and there's all this stuff you have to work out. But yeah, really, really, really slow.

With a game that broken, I'm not sure you can start small with the fixing mods.

It's by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, and is very good indeed. It is slow, though, and even so not all that long a book. I'd highly recommend it.

That's not true. I found a really good one that does everything I want to that's tiny, and called "uninstall".

RPS has failed me. That's never happened before. Now I know how that jesus fellow must have felt.

I bought that Clear Sky one... it was also shit.

All of the pistols are completely useless. When you get yourself an AK that's in good nick, then you can get somewhere. When assaulting a base or installation, you have to use whatever guns the bad guys are using, because that's the only ammo you'll get. The search for Strelok's AK is fun, and so is assaulting a couple of buildings after you get it. After that though, you'll realise that you have the best gun and there's no point playing any more.

Don't bother waiting for the shops to have anything good in stock, they never do. There's very few good rocks, which is frustrating considering the guys you meet all say "I HEARD THAT IN THE ZOOHHHHN, THERE ARE THESE ARTIFACTS THAT LET YOU DODGE BULLETS AND BE AS A GHOST. GET OUT OF HERE STALKER".

Edit - This is Strelok's AK and where to find it.

This is coming to consoles at some point this year, so we can all be disappointed too.

I didn't coin the term S.T.I.N.K.E.R. for nothing.

it's the best fps ever. You're all morons.

What's good about it, exactly? Why are three quarters of the guns entirely useless, and the rest still useless at a range exceeding fifteen feet? Why does the knife do literally nothing three quarters of the time? Why have I had to fight off the same bandit attack every single time I've passed through every area, never being rewarded (because the area the reward is in is apparently off limits), but getting a 'mission failed' if I ever let them pass an arbitrary line, despite having been told seven times that I've succeeded, only for the mission to restart next time I walk past? Why should I have to waste medkits on wounds caused by people that teleport directly behind me?

ETC.

I can see at least two FPS games that are far better just from where I'm sitting, and I don't even have many games up here. And both are years old. And we have at least two better ones downstairs wth the funsquare, too. Pah.

all those are valid points, except that nothing of that happened to me. At all. For me the only annoyance was the short time limit for each quest, so you had to go back and forth many times instead of doing many at once. But that can be modded anyway. Are you playing Clear Sky or Shadow of Chernobyl?

I'm playing the first one, shadow of chernobyl. The respawning is surely the way it's been made, not a bug? It seems pretty clearly done by design - when I go back to the area where the first mission takes place, there are an extra half a dozen bodies piled back each time. If it carries on like that the place'll be stacked to the ceiling with corpses by the time the plot's done. And the fighting is still rubbish.

So, two years on, and having stumbled across an old gamersgate account (I had two on the same email address - no idea how or how they allowed that, but they rather obligingly put them together immediately when I asked. Second time they've helped me out after I did something stupid, and with no fuss. I like them more now, coincidentally enough), I thought I'd give this another go.

Surprisingly, it's still fucking broken, unplayable shite. Respawning enemies wherever you go (even as you're picking through the corpses in a room you've just emptied, one will teleport in five feet away), terrible, utterly useless guns, broken stealth, a knife that apparently functions by the power of hypnotic suggestion, and a lousy, bugged to hell UI.

But mods, eh? A good modding community can work wonders for a game. And there are several big name mods for Stalker. So after a bit of research, I'm giving them a try.

The verdict so far:

"LURK":

AI changes! Ballistics modelling! REAL WORLD WEAPONS!!! (I wish, I wish,I wish game modders would stop doing this. For fuck's sake, stop making every single video game's arsenal not only identical, but modelled on the most boring thing you possibly could) Graphics! Weather! Sleeping! Changes to eating and stuff! New UI!

What it does: Makes everything so blurry you'll think you've been dipped in vaseline. Changes the UI so that it doesn't take up the whole screen, but is more confusing, and has reams of text and stats for every weapon that you have to scroll through manually by clicking on up an ddown arrows to compare them. Improves the sound - guns sound generally punchier. But now you have 450 types of ammo and no clear way to distinguish them without becoming the most useless walking encyclopedia who ever lived. You can now carry about 9 bullets and a piece of string before you fall over and die of heavyitis. The PDA thing no longer beeps constantly nor forgets what you have and haven't read. You can have several types of grenade, but you can only equip them with one button, and there's no way to change which one is equipped but by using the other types up. There's no HUD or health display, but when you're badly injured, a big red CoD blood splat obscures most of the screen, looking crap and annoying. There's no way to tell whether you are 3 points away from injury or 4000, so you'll either spam medkits or be on death's door nonstop.

Oh, and I got to the first scripted mission and they haven't fixed any of the crippling bugs around it. "Hey these bandits are coming from that direction, will you help us stop them?"

"Why yes, I wo-"

MISSION FAILED: Stop the bandits

"uh... but they're not here yet."

People still walk off while you're talking to them, so you lose the whole conversation. Animals will teleport in and attack you while you're in a gunfight or talking to someone. There are guns that, if equipped, do not work, and prevent you from equipping anything else. 1 in 4 times you click to use a grenade, nothing will happen unless you put it away and take it out again.

In conclusion: Some nice ideas, some small improvements... but a total failure to fix some of the most glaring, infuriating, ruining broken things, and even managed to introduce new ones. 2/10.

Next up: "stalker complete". This one seems to focus on graphics, so I'm not getting my hopes up.

First impressions: They've kept closer to the original dark style, but with more detail. I like this. The UI and menus and music are closer, too. Again, a good thing.

First mission: So far exactly the same as vanilla. Except that I found out that if you save the game when you're trying to be stealthy, when you reload that saved game, you'll loudly cock whatever weapon you have out, and everyone nearby will know you're there. Hm.

...Aaaaand after clearing out a building and leaving people behind, I come back an hour later and everyone's respawned again.

Exactly the same, but looks nicer. 1/10.

I'll try one more mod tomorrow, and if it's not vastly better than this shite, I'm writing the whole series off. There is no way the people who've been praising these games know what the fuck they're talking about.

"Oblivion Lost", a much-lauded older mod that apparently makes more than cosmetic changes to the game. ie: IT might make the changes that the game actually bloody needed from the start.

First thoughts: Text is bleeding out of the boxes on the main menu screen. Oh dear.

I start a new game. It asks me to choose a difficulty level, the lowest of which is "noob".

I'm not even as far as the introduction, and already this mod is on -2/10.


... half an hour later... yep, it's exactly the same. Shitty side missions that time out if you so much as look around for five minutes (even when the mission was "hey, find this for me and bring it back? Thanks", and you IMMEDIATELY do so, but are timed out while running back. Um), broken, arbitrary scripted missions, and constant respawning meaning that every single fight will happen again and again and again and again every fucking time you walk past anywhere at all.

1/10 for all of these mods just for the prettiness. Stalker can get to fucking fuck, mods or not.

STALKER Complete is supposedly the only mod you'll ever need, although I did my playthrough on the vanilla game. I keep meaning to do it again with the Complete mod.

It's a shame this game hasn't clicked with you SA, though I personally am in the RuySan camp of thinking the game is utterly fantastic. It's a bit quirky though and definitely not for everyone. Clear Sky is utter, utter wank also. But the original Shadow of Chernobyl is a terrific game and one of the most genuinely scary and unsettling titles I've ever played.

Edit: I've also never experienced this 'teleporting enemies' thing you're getting... that's just bizarre. Obviously the game does spawn enemies, but normally they spawn in miles away from your current location.

This is always something I've been interested by, but no console release has meant I haven't had the chance to give it a go.

I tried it, first of all it bugged and I got to a bit where I a door I had to get through to advance the game got jammed shut so I had to start again. Then I got to a bit where I just kept getting repeatedly killed to fuck and got fed up. Regardless I could see the appeal but got distracted by friendlier titles and never bothered going back to it. I think anyone into self-flagellation would probably love it.

There's no getting around the fact the the game's developers had far more ambition than they did talent, which is why most people seem to consider the 3rd party Complete mod to be essential to the experience. If you can bear with the awkward start though, it starts to get good. By the time you've got to the bar, it should be really sinking it's teeth in.

Clear Sky was appalling though. I gather Call Of Pripyat is much, much better, but despite buying it on Steam ages ago, I still haven't got round to playing it.

The "complete" mod is the second one I tried. It's prettier, but hasn't fixed any of the game's glaring flaws like having missions randomly fail for no reason, and having to constantly fight the same pigging battles every single time you go anywhere.

Every time I've played, I'll be rooting around in a place I've just cleared, and some bandit will magically appear in the next room, though it has no entrances and I just killed everyone five minutes ago. It's tedious as hell. At least in Far Cry 2 you could just plough through in a jeep and be gone before they could do anything.

The reason I'm so hard on it, rather than just chucking it and moving on, is because I can see the potential it has, and I really, really want to like it. The AI is a little inconsistent, but pretty challenging at times (the enemies make great use of cover and flanking and know when to move in and out depending on what weapon they have). The setting is great. The atmosphere is quite dark but in a subtle way. The combat could be really exciting and tense (and to be fair, some of the mods did make it less a case of quicksave suicide charge/flukey pistol potshots until everyone is dead through sheer blind luck). I even like the Ukrainian (?) dialogue the characters use, although I'd appreciate some general subtitles because I'm buggered if I'm going to learn ukrainian if there's not going to be sex at the end. But it's all pissed up a tree by horrible design choices. And even the modders don't fix them, which is the really baffling part.

I'm in agreement with mr agent.

I really want to like iit, but unfortunately its shit

I completely understand the criticism, the whole thing smacks of a developer biting off more than they could chew, but I love it. I know I'm far from the only person out there that bums the game either. It's just a very Marmite title.

I know, for instance, I found it's 'sequel', Clear Sky, to be utterly impenetrable, which really isn't good considering I played right through the main campaign in the original...



It did take me a little while to get into SoC too. It's bastard hard to begin with and it only starts to settle when the bandits start dropping decent weapons and armour.

Okay, I tried AMK, which sounded very promising, changing much about the game and introducing some really fun-sounding features, and offering custom install options like STOP FUCKING RESPAWNING EVERY FIVE MINUTES YOU FUCKS.

Naturally, it crashes immediately upon exiting the first (unavoidable) conversation.

I've uninstalled and am giving Stalker Complete one last chance to convert me. I'll try my damndest to like this game and if it still fails this last attempt, it really is irredeemable.

I'm playing a game!

Firstly, it's maddeningly difficult so far and I've only done the first mission where I raided a bandit camp. The reasons are two-fold: firstly (or secondly depending on whether you think that previously firstly was firstly), I didn't realise that the torch was on button "L". Secondly, I'm still quite shit at mouse and keys and that WASD thang.

Still, it looks quite pretty for a desolate wasteland and it has pangs of DayZ about it but with more activity. The AI seems quite decent at the moment for an aging PC game. I was trekking along to get over an embankment that's fenced off so I need to find a way through. Turns out that there's a gap in the hill a little way yonder where there's a bridge. I need through, but there's a bunch of military shits moping around. I'm packing my trusty glock and they appear to have assault rifles. So, standing at the top of the hill I take a punt at shooting them from a distance with the handgun but it turns out that my character is a terrible shot and all that shooting has made a few military folk quite cross with me. Off I leg it, out of site, and down the hill where I spy the army folks going towards my last position at the top of the hill in that thing army folk do where they space out in a line. They slowly inched up the hill towards where I wasn't before realising and spreading their search wider. Pretty cool it was too. I just legged it under the bridge without any trouble. Turned out to be an excellent diversion.

Ah well, I can't see what the moaning about this was all about. It seems fine.

Told you.

Who was the manic STALKER obsessive? Is it Ruysan?

I wouldn't call myself obssessive, but yes, I really liked the game.

Don't know if it's aged well though.

The case for the prosecution, Sir

viewtopic.php?style=19&f=3&t=428&p=756876&hilit=Stalker#p756876

viewtopic.php?style=19&p=242463#p242463

?

That isn't obsessive! Just likes it a bit.

I played it for a while, but it kept making my PC over heat. Not enough LEDs I assume. I liked what I played though. I think I might by a PC that can play games (which are 10 years old) instead of a console.

I tried to play it many times, unfortunately it was rather irredeemably shit.

Hey. If you liked STALKER, why not have a go of Boiling Point: Road To Hell?

After a break, I've been going back to this. A lot. 26.4 hours says Steam, which makes me think "oh yeah, I left the PC on when I went out yesterday morning."

Is it any good though? Yes, but I can't tell you why.

I'll try and explain but I don't know why some aging PC age has interested me enough to play it so long despite the following factors: 1) My setup in the living room is such that I get wrist pain after playing too long, and 2) Why play this butt ugly game when there's loads of other stuff that could be played. That game about that woman and Her Story. Whatsitcalled? Women Lie, Dealwidit. Or something. Oh, and that game called The Fall, I really like the look of that ... and I could be playing it. But I'm not. I'm playing this pile of poo. And not because I have an overwhelming obsessive desire to finish games once I've started them neither. Yes, I can tolerate some bullshit, but if I really hate a game then I'll quite happily not bother wasting my time when I could be watching more House of Cards. Which I've just discovered. Good init? House of Cards that is. Not STALKER. Although that's pretty good too.

I've got it! It's because it reminds me of my favourite - and some would say the pinnacle - of the horror shooter genre - FEAR. I will make no bones about it: FEAR is fucking excellent. It's creepy, it's scary, it's got some of - no - the best baddies in any game ever. Excellent chattering enemies that will shoot the shit out of your face hole. And just when you think that you've killed the little sods in a shower of exploding bollock juice with a big old Spaz-12 Shotgun who walks around the corner? Fucking ED-209, init. Holy crackers. And once you've finally defeated Ed you'll move onto the next area. Where it is? Down this ladder? Oh, ok, I'll just go down heFUCKING THE RING GIRL IS STARING IN MY FACE.

Yeah, it was good FEAR was.

Oh Stalker? It starts off bad. Very bad. Full Motion Video, bad. And it gets worse: fetch quests dished out by a guy behind a window. Well, it was some time since this was released so I can give it a break here I suppose, but seriously, it fucked me off. Then you talk to some guys, you talk to some guys, blah blah and before you know it you're storming a bandit's hideout at night and you didn't realise that you've got an infinite torch to use (Press 'L' fact fans). Anywhere from there you learn that all your guns are shit and you're shit and radiation is shit and dying over and over is shit. So you finally learn what AE was moaning about in that Bioshock thread since he has probably been used to pressing F6 to quick save all his life every 5 seconds. I now do that with STALKER. Sometimes I don't and then I reply whole sections cursing my idiocy.

Anyway, you play for hours and hours. You struggle with the guns and the quests and soon it leaves you alone. You've been playing for hours. You fail missions almost as soon as they start when bandits wipe out people before you can even get involved because you're so shit. Are you supposed to be able to finish these missions? Not a fucking chance. I failed both bandit raids and some guys died. Did it ruin my enjoyment? Nope. Did I think I was supposed to complete these missions and save the day? At the time I did, and now I think the game doesn't give a shit if you fail. So once you learn to stop caring about winning then you get on with the game.

Once you fail two bandit raid missions almost entirely one after another you get into a major ruck with some army guys. Then it gets serious. Not only do army guys not fuck about but they also have nice weapons. Every guy will have a weapon perfectly capable of shooting a face off. Maybe not on the first go, but by firing spreadshots in the general direction of a head then bodies will fall. You start to realise that, yeah, shooting people in the face probably isn't so easy in real life neither. But that doesn't make it any less fun neither. I mean, in the game, not in real life; shooting people in real life is probably frowned upon. Anyway, you wrap up the army guys, you pick up some weapons and you learn that if you stand in front of someone and they are shooting you in the back 2 feet from you then you'll probably die quite quickly. So you die and then you learn the valuable lesson: enemies are sneaky bastards and they should be engaged at a safe distance. So you do.

Now you're enjoying yourself. You're settling into the atmosphere of the game. You've finally figured out WASD keys and aiming with a mouse. You've figured out what the different items do, how to manage your inventory. You're killing folks. A lot of folks and you're not so fearful that you won't engage but not so brazen that you won't avoid a fight if the odds are against you. You've also figured out what the tilt side to side buttons are actually useful. The only game where they are actually an integral part of the game. All those games you've played and thought, tilting around corners is fucking stupid and you never do it. Well, step out and watch someone put a bullet through you or just make you bleed, since you've figured out what that icon is at the side of the screen (finally). Or don't. Because you can look around corners.

Then it goes all FEAR on your ass: Sewers. Then you get some story in your face. Cut scene. And then you meet zombie army folk. Time to mow to work. Cause you mow them down with bullets as they're actually dead easy to kill (GEDDIT?). Then you get some psychic killer monster men doing strange stuff in your face. Psyk. I mean, sike. I mean, fucking hell, Cras? Psyche?

Anyway, you're fully versed with the tools of death and you've brought the SA-80 lookalike which has a kick ass scope that works. You might have a Spaz shotgun. You might have 4 types of assault rifle. I mean, seriously, you're a kitted out killing machine. And yet the baddies still blow you the fuck up. I reached The Antenna yesterday and met a guy with an RPG. Yes, I died instantly because it's insanely hard but I'd quick saved moments earlier.

The Antenna section is really good actually and leads you to what I imagine will be the start of the end game. The Antenna is causing massive amounts of radiation and needs turning off so you can head north. Typical objective game crap, right? The initial section leading up to it is the hardest part of the game so far. The canyon leading to the Antenna is infested with army folk, and you meet your first ever sniper. And his mate. Good job that you offed the first guy and nicked his sniper rifle for a game of "Who can find whom first and blow out the back of their cranium". Not the catchiest game title in the world but the second sniper is really good at it. It leads a whole new element to the game. Not only that the Antenna is causing the sky to frazzle and snap which means lightning in the sky and everywhere is a bit dark (making visibility poor in an otherwise very sodding dark game). The antenna has also made all of the metal radioactive so if you stand next to anything metal and you're radiation will go through the roof. That sounds shit, but when you've learned to stay out of harms way by standing next to sometime and peeking out, suddenly you're playing the game different. You're standing away from objects and you're trying to engage enemies from distance or draw them out instead. Then they fire an RPG at your grill.

I haven't got much further than the Antenna and, in fact, I still haven't got by this bit yet. Once you head close to the compound where the Antenna is stationed the colour bleeds out of the screen until it is a sepia yellow hue. Ghosts of mutants and stuff appear here and there and disappear. The sky beneath the Antenna looks like an untuned TV. And whilst you stand beneath the crackling sky wondering what happened, some cunt will wander up and put a bullet in your face sending you back to the start of the canyon because you forgot to quicksave. Fuck.

STALKER is, in my opinion, the precursor to Dark Souls. The following apply in some form to both games. The start is difficult and made worse by the near impenetrable wall of conventions that are never explained to the player. The moveset is not explained nor is your mission. You learn by doing and stumbling onto bigger and better weapons as you progress. The starting hours are make or break - the difficulty curve is so high and the weapons so poor that you wonder if it is worth it. Learning the conventions, the moveset and increased weapons evens out the difficultly curve and once you've reached a level of skill and competence then the real challenge begins.

STALKER, I've decided is a good game. It is FEAR but in a fancy new environment. The initial missions and the first few hours are a slog. A tedious, boring slog, but once the game starts to hit its stride and move you along in the campaign suddenly it's a fascinating little game. Old school, sure, but an interesting game even in today's market. I've played Metro 20-something and that had a nice background story but with a boring story and rubbish linear campaign. This isn't Metro, it's something else, some cooler, something more awesome and something I will eventually finish. I haven't seen Chernobyl yet but I've heard so much about it that I can't wait to get there in this virtual game about mutants, PSI powers and stuff and Russians.

I can understand why people would get mardy about playing it to start with but I do doubt whether they played it long enough to advance the story, learn the ropes and get into the nitty gritty of it. I doubt whether many people would take the time these days but I think it has been worth my time. I can finally understand why it has got the praise that it has. About 10 years too late. Tch.

I totally agree...

FEAR is awesome.

Oh STALKER? Pile of wank.

Did the bad guys in FEAR leap through windows in the first one or am I misremembering it?

There was a cheat to increase your accuracy, I tried it once. Sadly it also increases enemy accuracy to the point that the cunts were all crack pot fucking snipers.

Try Call of Pripyat, it's much more polished

I'm playing it with the STALKER Complete 2009 mod.

It's absolutely fine and I don't need any other mods at all. Now I've sunk a load of hours in I'm wondering what the fuss was about.

Hours and hours later and I've done the lot.

Turns out the open world aspect of the game is about 7/10ths of the map and remaining bits are all about the campaign. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY FINE. Once you proceed past the military warehouses you'll be on a collision course with the end game. It all gets a little linear too which, again, is absolutely fine. I was hardly ever bored of trekking back and forth since if you follow the main missions - like I did for the most part - then it will take you to all corners of the map. The remaining sub-quests are "Kill all the dudes" "Kill all the monsters" and "Pick something up. After you've killed all the monsters and dudes though. Natch" variety. Since they were optional I was quite happy to try a few and ignore them at my leisure.

And I was having a leisurely time too. I liked that the open world aspect was wide and long (Fnaar, fnaar) and yet there were open fields and dense outposts to play around with but also that the main campaign areas were set largely in underground spooky bases and shit.

I thought there were going to be more monsters and stuff but the game is surprisingly reserved about leaving the invisible monsters and freaky jumping dead faces to only a handful of places. You won't find them in the open world but you will find them in underground laboratories and stuff. Just as you'd expect.

It's got a whole Dark Souls (or probably more accurately old PC game) vibe to the story telling as you get little in the way of information except a few tidbits on your PDA thing, which, is absolutely fine. It gives it more mystery. I found that as the game progressed I was given very little campaign information from any of the vendors and the like who initially have loads and loads of text for you to read in your interactions with them. Apparently, since I've been reading up on it, things like factions and endings aren't fully explained either EXACTLY LIKE DARK SOULS.

Anyway, I had lots of fun with it. Loads. It was open world FPS shooter on the surface and then FEAR in the underground bits.

Oh, special mention goes to Pryiat (or however you spell it) for being a scary city area before Chernobyl. It had the fairground stuff, the stadium and an entirely random discovery of mine - a group of folks worshipping an indoor bonfire of furniture. It never popped up on the map but storming that particular bit was great. And a bit freaky.

It didn't really put a foot wrong throughout the lengthy time I had with it. Checked all my boxes for moody shooting fun and I haven't played a decent FPS shooter that's held my interest as long as this despite the fact that I was playing it with mouse and keyboard (and not having a jolly keyboard/mouse-time neither).

Oh and then I got to Chernobyl and it went shit.

Really shit. Storming Chernobyl was good until I died and died and died. Fucking attack helicopter with massive splash damage killed me over and over again. It was near impossible to avoid the fucking thing. That was an irritation but nothing prepared me for the difficulty spike that occurred inside.

(after the cool race to the door of Chernobyl and the army of dudes helping me out (albeit briefly cause they all died))

But when you get inside suddenly military folks are murdering you with a single bullet. You can't lean around corners without inst-death. Insta-death is absolutely everywhere. It's torturous. At one choke point I was absolutely convinced that there was something fundamentally wrong with the scenery. I would stand next to an opening and lean around to kill the army folk and they seemed to be hitting me through the wall. I stood on the other side of the hole in the wall and I fared better. Maybe I was right. But then the deaths continued in earnest. Time after time after time I died. 10's, 20's, 30 plus times I was dying just by shoving my head around a corner. A stairwell proved a massive obstacle too as literally every army guy in sight wanted to come through a doorway and have a pop at me. The bodies were stacking and I resorted to saving the game for every successful kill I made. You shouldn't ever have to be that precautious when playing a game.

I had masses of health packs by the time I reached Chernobyl thankfully but they were rapidly drained. As was my will power to continue and yet Chernobyl is by far the longest section of the entire game. It was soul destroying and the paint on my F6 button was being worn ff. I like hard games but this was grossly unfair and broken.

How sad it was then that the ending was so bitter sweet. After the torture of hours of fighting for every inch of space you reach the centre of the reactor and it was kinda fucking cool. You even have a lengthy bit where you climb around the dome of the reactor core to find The Wish Grantor. Or the Monolith, whatever they want to call it. Then came the Dark Souls moment as I hovered over the glowing stone and pressed F to "Make a wish". Oh course, I asked for immorality and was turned into a silver statue on the spot. THE. END.

The fuck. So a trip to the wiki pages reveals a variety of different endings and some more explanation as to what the fuck just happened. There's 7 endings apparently. Thank god that one of the sub-missions I had already done lead to the secret "true" endings.

So a quick wiki here and I was off to finish it again.

Then comes a very, very, very, lengthy section of outdoor shooting across rooftops of Chernobyl and some teleporting from here to there. I'll be honest, the teleporting is shit and wasn't explained. I had never teleported anywhere up until this point and was never told that teleporting was even a thing the folks behind this stuff had even mastered. Teleporting is just a mechanism to shove you into various different arenas to fight through until you reach the last teleporter which leads to ... the ending cut scene. It's a terrible section and the enemies are perfect shots again (still) and it is all artificially difficult. All of my health packs were exhausted from the last terrible section and so this was even worse as not only was I dying frequently (sometimes a matter of seconds, but nowhere near as worse as the preceding corridors of doom), but I was having to restart when I took too much damage (i.e. one shot) as I knew I could not make it through without a perfect run. I could now only identify F6 by the two F keys surrounding it, such was the wear and tear on that single button.

Long story short, I finished it. The endings are all terrible short FMV's just like Dark Souls endings were all shit. They do have an element of creepy spooky to some of them (I watched them all on youtube after I had completed it) (The "I want to be rich" is actually really really good) but I never understood the meaning and it was not really clear that I was heading to Chernobyl just so I could make a wish, but still, at least it has 7 endings. I mean, come on, that's a lot of game.

Turns out that the Zone is all about some weird consciousness experiment and nothing to do with the 1986 disaster but rather the disaster was being used to hide these experiments. It all felt a little silly with Psi powers and stuff. But then again I'm sure FEAR was about some similar bollocks or other but that never stopped it being one of the best FPS shooters despite the miriad of problems it has.

So STALKER - are the naysayers right? No. It's actually pretty bloody good after the first couple of hours (although they are still a few decent hours of enjoyable gaming) and right up until the last couple of hours (which are horrible and broken and shit). Everything else in between was actually really good. I'm happy I stuck around to play it and to experience a classic that I had read and heard so much about for years and years.

8/10