Post-apocalyptic videogames, the ultimate escape. How wonderful to venture to a strange land, so different from our own, and see what the world may look like an entire week from now. Well, today the PlayStation clan secluded themselves behind their barricades with The Last Of Us Part 2, leaving the PC tribe to suffer in the harsh elements of reality alone. But never fear, wanderer. Here are some similar games to play if you want to leave your austere existence behind, and indulge in a grim struggle instead. Pull up a plastic bucket, break open a tin of Pedigree Chum, here are the 8 bleakest post-apocalypses in PC gaming. A post-apocalyst.
]]>On every PC gaming forum, there’s a question that pops up without fail: “Now that I’ve completed Stalker, how should I replay it?”
There’s clearly more than one answer to that. I’ve never known a game to be quite as autopsied by its own fans as the Stalker series (or, technically S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but who has the time). The three games - Shadow Of Chernobyl, Clear Sky and Call Of Pripyat - have all kinds of mods, and those mods have their own mods. On and on it goes. Every release has its own style, aided by the developer’s willingness to let modders use their assets and engine to a remarkable degree.
]]>The past few years have been amazing for fans of the gritty survival shooter sandbox series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Between a vague but permissive modding agreement and an engine-code leak, fans had all the tools they needed to make their own successor. The likes of Lost Alpha, Dead Air and the upcoming multiplayer Ray Of Hope are all impressive, but the recently re-released Anomaly is the closest we've seen to an unofficial sequel. Free, standalone, polished and stuffed with irradiated promise, here's why Anomaly is a must-play whether you're new to Pripyat or know it like the back of your hand.
]]>Despite mods, abortive sequels, and spiritual spin offs, the promise of "like Stalker, but x" never quite comes true. I've just now realised this is why Ray Of Hope is so named.
"Multiplayer Stalker" is such a pipe dream that it took ten minutes of uninterrupted footage to convince me there was more than a slim chance this will deliver. What I've seen of this standalone mod is enough to turn my head. You too can injure your neck below.
]]>I had a fine time with Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden's post-apocalyptic, ducking good blend of real-time stealth and turn-based combat, but one concern dogged me throughout. Used repeatedly throughout the game are two beyond-familiar terms: 'zone' and 'Stalker.' Names scorched into the very soul of anyone who's played the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games/seen Tarkovsky's Stalker/read Roadside Picnic.
How what why? I asked Mutant Year Zero's developers to explain this anomaly. (And then I spent far too long researching the Swedish release dates of cult 1970s sci-fi).
]]>S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is still years away so here's a banquet of irradiated exploration and scavenging to tide you over. Dead Air is a standalone mega-mod (no purchase necessary) for bleak FPS sandbox series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Built on top of the fan-upgraded OpenXRay engine and using Call of Chernobyl's massive world map, it offers an uncompromising but accessible survival sandbox that looks good and runs better than any similarly huge S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mod out there.
]]>Good news for fans of uncompromisingly bleak and incomparably atmospheric Eastern European sandbox shooters: an official S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel is on the way, original devs GSC Game World have confirmed.
The less-good news is that we’re all going to have to continue playing mods for the original games for a while yet. According to the announcement, the game isn’t due until 2021. And for those itching to pass the time with the similarly-themed Metro Exodus, that's slipped to next year.
]]>Take one hundred players fighting to the death in that Playerunknown's Battlegrounds way, throw them into the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-esque irradiated and anomaly-ridden ruins of Chernobyl, and you might have a game like the newly-announced Fear The Wolves. This latest game to hop on the hot Battle Royale trend is coming from Vostok Games, the studio founded by some former members of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. developers GSC Game World. Fear The Wolves is separate to Vostok's not-very-good S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-inspired multiplayer shooter Survarium, mind, which is still in early access.
]]>We've previously covered Lost Alpha, a massive labor-of-love project to rebuild the original Shadow of Chernobyl from the ground up, reinstating concepts and content that never quite made the final cut. While the first release of Lost Alpha suffered nearly as badly from a messy development cycle as the original game, the updates have continued, and the massive patch released this week makes it a far more tempting prospect, whether or not you've played a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game before.
]]>Cowardice is a virtue. So says the team on this week's RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. That's because our theme is "running away" - games that encourage you to flee from danger, or that give you a choice between fight and flight. Adam will run from the soldiers of Arma or the post-apocalyptic antagonists of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Brendan will scarper from poor odds in For Honor or Overwatch, while Alice only pretends to run away in Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, tricking her foes into giving chase before ambushing them like some kind of velociraptor.
]]>The most exciting part of Survarium [official site] has always been the dream that it might one day become essentially an unofficial S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel. Survarium studio Vostok Games was founded by folks who formerly worked on the celebrated open-world FPS-RPG series, Survarium is set in a very similar irradiated world of artifact hunters, and Vostok have gabbed about wanting a peristent world to stalk. Survarium is still primarily a small-scale competitive PvP multiplayer shooter but it has recently taken its first teensy tiny step into PvE with the addition of a tutorial story mission.
]]>S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Lost Alpha [ModDB page], the fantastic free standalone mod inspired by bits of Shadow of Chernobyl that appeared in alpha versions but were cut for the final release, is now properly out. Craig adored the version released in 2014, so a big update is fantastic news. You might remember Dezowave reluctantly released 2014's unfinished (but still great) version after scamps leaked a rough development build. Now they've launched what they're calling the Developer's Cut of Lost Alpha, fixing bugs and making it even bigger. Have a look:
]]>Alice is away moonlighting as a chiptune DJ this week, as well as nobly helping to fill her local public swimming pond with cement in order that it might become a skate park. Hence, it falls to me to pose the question eternal. What the dickens are you going to play this weekend? Pretty sure I can take a good guess, if I'm honest. Here's what Team RPS is up to. Pretty sure you can take a good guess, if I'm honest.
]]>Back in the days of STALKER and its two sequels, I felt like I was the only games hack who didn't get sent on a tour of Chernobyl and Pripyat. Those who did visit came back with reports of rain and health worries and mystery meats, then shared photographs of them smiling in front of a decaying Ferris wheel or looking sombre in a Marie Celeste classroom. Perhaps it is best that I never went myself. What a strange thing to be a tourist to. Is any possible response appropriate?
The Chernobyl VR Project, essentially finished but for the time being only available for Oculus Rift, with a more refined version due for both that and Vive a little later, gives me my chance to be a tourist, without the background anxiety about background radiation.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Don't stand there, I said come in.
]]>35MM is a less fantastical, more sedate STALKER. It is tempting to call it Everybody's Gone To The Rapture meets Russian post-apocalyptic fiction, but it is not a walking simulator: it has action and horror and much more besides. I beseech you to play it.
]]>1) Passivity makes me fidgety. Even in a film, TV show, gig or novel I'm hugely enjoying, my mind will at some point drift to the clock, wondering how soon until it ends, how soon until I can stand up or talk or check something or eat something or go somewhere. Awful, I know. Games, broadly, need me to be doing something most of the time, and that is the greatest weapon I have against a propensity to boredom that I am not at all proud of. This is also why I start to go spare in something like StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void, as it spends so much of its duration pummelling me with particularly low-grade passive storytelling, and my frustration that I have to watch this nonsense instead of do things for myself goes through the roof.
]]>“Hunting for distribution rights is essentially detective work,” says Marcin Paczyński, Head of Product at GOG. “Rights can repeatedly change hands or be split up between different parties, and it’s our job to get to the bottom of what happened.”
Preservation of old games involves more than just an extra patch. The journey from dusty unplayable relic to polished, cross-platform installer is a minefield of technical and legal obstacles. The team at Good Old Games remain the industry leaders in the restoration of classic PC games, tasked with reverse engineering code written more than 20 years ago, unraveling knotty licensing issues left behind by defunct development studios, and battling lethargy on the part of skeptical publishers. It’s a thrilling and, at times, gruelling process, but - as the GOG team will testify - it never fails to surprise.
]]>Warning: in this piece I'm primarily talking about Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, which isn't out on PC as yet, though I'll willingly devour at least one item of clothing if it doesn't walk this way eventually. Anyway, I talk about STALKER and Dear Esther too, so everything's OK.
Playing The Chinese Room's new game, Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, what strikes me almost immediately is not the mystery, the science fiction trappings or even the extreme prettiness. It's that I'm in England. A very particular England.
]]>The one certainty with news items about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. [official site] is there's at least a 70 percent chance they've been planted by Jim. Thanks Jim!
GOG.com continues to blow the horn in support of DRM-free everything with a new game reclaiming service, which you can check it out for yourself in this generously placed link. The idea is that if you bought a game legitimately but the game no longer works because of unsupported DRM or other causes, then you can enter your original game key in order to get a free copy of the game through GOG's DRM-free online store.
]]>Discounts on the STALKER trilogy (which seems like the wrong way to categorise the series somehow, but never mind) tend to wheel around pretty often, but this is particularly good deal for the whole set. There a certain games which are buried deep in RPS' DNA, and the semi-open world, post apocalyptic survival/horror/action STALKER is one of them. If you haven't played them, you are everything that's wrong with humanity missing out some of the most ambitious and atmospheric shooters of all time.
Y'know GSC Game World? Oh, you do! The Ukrainian studio behind spookyhard FPS series S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? Oh, you must! You remember - they seemed to close in 2011 but held on a bit longer, still working on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 for a few months then cancelling it, and since only resurfaced to weigh in on confusing brand rights issues. See, I knew you knew them. Well, they're back, baby! Boom! And other exciting onomatopoeia. They've announced a return to active game-making, and chatted a little about what went down, including about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2's fate.
]]>See this here? This is a bargepole. It is, I would say, approximately ten feet long. What I'm doing with this bargepole is very deliberately not touching something with it. Even if said bargepole were a hundred feet long, I would still be very deliberately not touching something with it. That something is a crowdfunding attempt for a game called 'STALKER Apocalypse.' The people making it previously tried to make a game called Areal.
Yeah, the Areal that got abruptly pulled down from Kickstarter because it made all kinds of dodgy promises about being a spiritual S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel. "Stalker is just a word", apparently. Uh.
]]>I don't want to get into any speculation of my own about what's genuine and who has the right to do what in terms of STALKER's heritage right now. Let's just look at the brief in-game footage devs West-Games have finally pumped out to support their slow-moving Kickstarter, and see how we feel then.
]]>If you took a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. design document and replaced the words "Chernobyl disaster" with "weird meteorite," you wouldn't be far off from Areal. Think post-apocalyptic open world survival FPS with non-linear missions, populated by simulated life and mutants, and fizzing with dangerous anomalies. That sounds pretty enticing in itself, but developers West Games also have a few former S.T.A.L.K.E.R. folks working on the game, including the series' lead designer.
As you might guess, it's on Kickstarter. However, West Games don't have much to show of Areal at this point. Their pitch relies heavily upon S.T.A.L.K.E.R. footage and pre-existing artwork not made for the game (some even made for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.). Given that they're only looking for $50,000 (£30,000)--nowhere near enough to realise such ambitious ideas--it's a mite concerning.
]]>GameSpy has officially exploded, and games are still fleeing from ground zero while green smoke and shrapnel billows every which way. It's been a messy process, to say the least, with some games finding happy new homes while others collapsed on the street side, never to rise again. STALKER, thankfully, has made it out at the last second, with whatever remains of GSC releasing a patch for STALKER, STALKER: Clear Sky, and STALKER: Call of Pripyat to migrate online functionality onto their own servers.
]]>I am standing in the middle of Pripyat in what was intended to be the site of the 1986 May Day festivities. Now an expanse of cracked concrete, the iconic rusting ferris wheel stands behind me. No one else is in sight, as I've been left here alone to get on with some measurements. Looking down at the Geiger counter in my hand I slowly make my way back and forth across the area, taking readings at regular intervals. This is my last research trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the end of six months spent tagging along with tour groups and later helping as a tour guide.
I should be used to this space now, but I feel uneasy. Occasionally I anxiously look up and scan the thick line of trees and shrubs that border this area and break line of sight with the nearby ruined buildings. I try to rationalise my way out of this fear – I tell myself the worst thing that's likely to happen is the embarrassment of trying to cobble together an explanation in Russian for what I'm doing if Pripyat's police guard wanders by.
But there's more to my unease than this. It's not that I'm alone, it's that I've been alone here before. Only the last time was whilst playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl.
]]>Stalker: Lost Alpha is out, but it's not finished. Typical Stalker, really. The game, a fan-fronted effort to reconnect all the elements that were cut from Shadow of Chernobyl, was leaked during development. The developers have chosen to release it earlier than planned, and I decided to try it out. It's still Stalker, still based on the first game, but at the same time it's not. It's as close to a remix as I've ever come across in gaming, bringing in new elements, but still reminding me of the original. It's all different, but if you loved the first Stalker, instead of reinstalling the original and modding it, when this is fixed it'll be your next install. I guarantee it.
]]>Although Survarium shares some DNA with the magnificent, terrifying ecosystem of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the Lost Alpha standalone mod is the closest thing to a new game in the series we're probably going to see for a good while. What began as an attempt to restore content cut from the original release of Shadow of Chernobyl has become a total overhaul of the game, with sections redesigned and reintegrated, and changes to elements other than maps. It's been in development for five years and is now available, slightly earlier than originally planned. There are download links (including an official torrent) over at Moddb and you won't need to have the original game installed to play. I want to spend my day in the Zone.
]]>Like old Stalker tales told around the campfire, a lot of strange and wonderful things were once said to be in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, from naked green dwarves to driveable vehicles and a whole extra city. Several mods have restored various bits of cut content, based on leftover files and leaked dev builds, but Lost Alpha is one of the more ambitious. What began as a project to remake and reintegrate these leftovers has blown up into a new parallel story which includes (new) old content and a bits of the creators' own design too.
In response to some ruffian leaking a scrappy old build from November, developers Dezowave Group have decided to release Lost Alpha earlier than planned then keep working on it. It'll arrive on April 26, the 28th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster which started all this.
]]>Rob Sherman, author of interactive fiction project Black Crown, asked if he could write about videogame inventories. We were powerless against the result, which pairs a personal journey through the English countryside with a treatise on the power of possessions and the reasons videogames must do better in representing them.
There was once, and still is, a boy and a man called me, and one summer, two summers ago, I could be found tiptoeing along a main road in southern England, my boots full of dusty blood.
I had only taken them off once in the last day, and at that point I had nearly wilted from the sight and smell. I took my diagnosis on top of a chalk escarpment, a widow’s peak, a combover of woodland. The couple on the bench next to me were after-work drinking from cans, and looking at the wealds rolling away from them. They must have thought that some medieval leper had staggered out of the local hospitalers, holidaying on his stumps.
]]>My conflict-o-tron is clicking like that time I discovered a 'free kitten, smoosh child' lever. I could have had a free kitten, but then there's that child. Not even imagining the cutest kittens and the worst children could get me to pull it. Believe me, I tried. Survarium has me in that same sort of headspace: a game from a lot of the Stalker devs set in a zone of alienation! Hooray! But it'll start out as a free-to-play shooter. There is some footage of a match below, and it looks lovely and lush, but doesn't play anything like Stalker.
]]>If various apocalyptic games, books, and movies have taught me anything, it's that you always side with the trees. Humans? Nah, they're old hat. On the way out. This is largely evidenced by the fact that they always find some way to bomb, globally warm, or pandemic themselves to the brink of extinction. That's not exactly the stuff of a winning team. Trees, though, they wither but never waver. Just a few stray seeds and they're back in the game. So naturally, Survarium's Fringe faction worships them, because what else do you do with an unfeeling entity that doesn't care if you live or die? See them in action - along with a new, impressively colossal map called Chemical Plant - below.
]]>This career affords me the option to write about space chickens more often than you'd think, but still not as much as I'd like. It's a real shame, but this - this right now - is a most eggcellent moment. And getting to namedrop STALKER in the same article? Well that's just the finger lickin' chicken's most prized pickins' (I'm from Texas, so I'm allowed to talk like that). But yes: Humans Must Answer, a shmup by former STALKER devs where you play as genocidal intergalactic avians, is now officially out. There's a celebratory trailer that tastes remarkably like chicken right after the break.
]]>To this very day, I continue to be followed around by a gray little rain cloud that weeps heaving droplets over STALKER 2's demise. I have named it Probably Clinical Depression - after my great grandfather, of course. But one can only linger on the past for so long. I know this. I am a mature adult with grownup feelings, coping mechanisms, and tastes in colorful breakfast cereals. So naturally, I've decided to pile all my hopes and desires on a thing that only vaguely resembles my loss, like any well-adjusted person would. Survarium's been unabashedly multiplayer since day one, and now it's officially entered invite-only alpha. Does it at least capture STALKER's spirit? I can only hope.
]]>Update: GSC responded to our queries, pointing out two rather major items: 1) "BitComposer doesn't have any rights as to S.T.A.L.K.E.R., except for distributing our game Call of Pripyat on some territories," a rep clarified. "They may have purchased the rights for the game based on Roadside Picnic, but it has nothing to do with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or its universe." 2) "GSC is seeking ways to continue the series, and we're also considering selling out the brand to a decent developer or publisher." Hear that? Somebody amazing, BUY STALKER.
Original: I always wanted to be able to tell people STALKER will never die, but I'm not sure I wanted it to be like this. First, German publisher bitComposer claimed to have obtained the rights to develop games about Chernobyl's implausibly bad luck with nuclear power via a book-series-shaped backdoor. When doubt was cast upon the validity of their claim, they confirmed to Jim that the rights are theirs, but hesitated to comment any further as to what that could mean for the series or the sadly defunct STALKER 2. Now, though, the thought-to-be-corpsified remains of original STALKER dev GSC Game World have caught wind of the controversy, and they're returning fire with fighting words.
]]>Was my decision to write this story influenced strongly by the fact that I'd get to include the phrase "space chickens" in a headline? Future scholars will argue over the answer to that very question for generations, and they'll be wasting their time because duh. But eggstraterrestrials galaxy-faring coop-flyers are - believe it or not - only part of what makes Humans Must Answer intriguing. The other half of that equation, then, is the oh-so-silly shmup's pedigree. Developer Sumom Games, you see, rose from STALKER 2's irradiated ashes when GSC Game World ceased to be. So now the team's making shmups starring “intelligent and dangerous chickens," naturally. Apparently, though, the storyline - which sees said chickens encounter hostile humans - is "subtle and surprising." I honestly can't tell if they're joking.
RussianUkrainian blogger and marketing man Sergey Galyonkin - who tipped off the closure of the STALKER 2 project earlier this year - has claimed that Bethesda now have the rights to make a publish a STALKER game. They apparently do not have rights to the extended universe. GSC owner Sergei Grigorovich has not sold the brand, but apparently Bethesda could now make a game based on the property with their own technology. We'll report more on this as we get it.
'Cinematic' should rightfully be a dirty word when discussing games and yet Max Payne 3's marketing wears it proudly, like a sweat-stained vest or an inappropriately jaunty tie. A cutscene is cinematic, every detail and angle just so, no room for accident or deviation, but to aspire to a ‘cinematic’ experience during play is to ignore so much of what makes experiences within a game unique to the form. We run, gun and react in worlds that rely, for the enjoyment they bring, on the accidental and the curious as much as they require adherence to a plan. Here’s to the unexpected, the unplanned and the unforgettable.
]]>I had a jolly good time with Crysis, mostly just watching things fall over and cooing with delight, but if I could have changed one thing about it I would have made it less about wearing a nanosuit and punching people through buildings and more about being STALKER. Nothing against Crysis, it's just my way of looking at things. In my least impressive moments I'll rabidly argue that Peggle should be more like STALKER. Turns out I'm not alone, on the Crysis front at least, as a group of Russian modders by the name OWL Game Studio have been working on a Zone-based anomaly-ridden bleakness of an experience called CryZone: Sector 23. The stabilisers are coming off and it's going to be a standalone game.
]]>Over Christmas I drew up a list of little things about games that have always intrigued, interested, or appealed to me. I've been adding to it over the past couple of weeks, and I'll be writing about these little nuances of gaming in the coming months. These are just idle musings, but I hope you'll find them to be food for thought. Today's is about the odd joy in seeing AI entities getting into a fight.
]]>GSC have announced their arrival at Good Old Games with a bundled package of some of their most fondly remembered titles. Yes, it's the Cossacks Anthology, containing Cossacks: European Wars and its two expansion packs. Now, I do have very fond memories of Cossacks' take on the historical RTS, throwing around thousands of units at once, but of course it's the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games that most people know GSC for. Further titles will be appearing but I'm not even sure S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is old enough to be considered anything other than a GG. The Cossacks Anthology is available here, priced at $5.99. Maybe if everyone in the world buys it twice, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 appears immediately?
]]>Lost Alpha is an ambitious mod for Shadow of Chernobyl that aims to recreate all the content that was cut from the game between alpha and release. New (old) areas and new (old) mutants are the main additions, with the bulk of the mod being recreations of the cut locations. The team are aiming to stick as close to the original versions of the cut content as they can based on known info and it's all looking mighty impressive. After a long time in development, release is closer than ever, which has of course been true every minute since it was first announced. We should have a date in February. In the meantime, here's a trailer and a FAQ.
]]>"The Stalker team is extremely happy! Why? Because we are continuing work on Stalker 2 after the holidays." That makes me extremely happy too. That's the official line from GSC, although it's not quite as simple as that. Speaking to Edge, the studio's Oleg Yavorsky reveals that “We are still in the process of seeking funding to back up the project. We are hopeful things turn out well eventually." Which still sounds pretty precarious, but given the situation last month was that the studio and the game were flat-out closing down, it's still a good day for Stalker fans.
]]>A surprise Christmas present from GSC, at which there appears to remain some life despite the awful news that they (and with them Stalker 2) had apparently been shut down earlier this month:
]]>The sudden apparent closure of GSC GameWorld and death of Stalker 2 is, for me, the saddest gaming news of this year, and a whole lot of other years to boot. Jim eloquently summed up why over the weekend. The waters of explanation remain deeply muddied however, so all we can do is hope that some glimmer of life emerges from the ruins. We got a small hint of that earlier, with the GSC Twitter account suddenly offering "We will do our best to continue. However, at this moment, nothing is certain."
]]>With the news that iconoclastic Ukrainian developer GSC Gameworld has closed its doors, putting the future of the Stalker series in jeopardy, thoughts turned to the games they had made, and the hopes we'd held for a sequel. There are a few reasons why the Stalker series is so important in the greater scheme of gaming, and as of 2011 those reasons seem more pressing than ever.
]]>So I've finally got around to installing the Shadow Of Chernobyl "mega-mod", Narodnaya Solyanka. It's a tangled compilation of Russian-language add-ons, put together by a Russian team, which has been roughly translated into English by enthusiastic bi-lingual Stalker-fans. The translation is interesting. Overall, though, Narodnaya Solyanka provides us with a vast amount additional content, including new maps, maps pulled in from the other games, and a daunting radioactive salad of minor Stalker mods. It hugely expands the size of the zone, and reportedly adds another several hundred hours of missing-driven content. It is also a bizarre and off-putting experience, as my initial dabblings have discovered. "It all gets better after the cave," is the mantra that appears across various Stalker forums. And they're right. Because the cave is a horrible mess. What lies beyond, however, is intriguing...
]]>The jury is, as far as I can tell, still somewhat out on the Games For Windows do-ever, but Microsoft's Steam rival has certainly been offering a few tempting mega-discounts lately. This time (as LewieP tips us off to) it's the original STALKER (Shadow of Chernobyl) for less than a pound/dollar. Only lasts for today, so get a wriggle on if you want it and aren't one of those chaps claiming a moral objection to GFW.
]]>The Stalker TV show was pretty much the most unexpected news item of the week, and I just had to drop a line to GSC to find out more. Below you can read my quick chat with GSC's Oleg Yavorsky, in which he stresses that the TV show's production is intended to be as faithful as possible the source game, and reveals that it will be timed to air on the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2.
]]>That's what GSC are suggesting with their Quest Contest. There are bunch of rules and stuff over on the competition page, but what it comes down to is this: "The best ideas from the contest may be implemented in the new S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game. This said, the developers retain the right to change the quest looks or implementation, while preserving the key author's idea." Quest authors will also get the name in the credits. They're looking for less than a side of A4, so it's not exactly an insurmountable challenge. Might as well have go, eh? It can't look bad on your CV, either.
]]>The next GSC S.T.A.L.K.E.R. project will be... a TV show? Yes, it seems to be real. You can check out the trailer below, and the teaser site here. I've contacted GSC for comment. I wish I had something profound to add, but really I am just pleased that it looks like it's trying to be faithful to the game. Weird. Possibly awesome.
]]>GSC have been vaguely rumbling about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 for a while now, but it seems that they've decided to officially announce its development and arrival in 2012. A news article over on the company's main site makes the matter known, saying that it the technology will be "completely new" - a statement which could be aimed at rumours GSC were going to use the Crysis engine. ""After the official sales of the series exceeded 4 million copies worldwide, we had no doubts left to start creating a new big game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. universe," says GSC's Sergiy Grygorovych. "This will be the next chapter of the mega-popular game players expect from us."
]]>I've been doing some guest blogging for splendid architecture site BLDGBLOG. You can see my previous offerings here and here, as well as an interview here. The latest piece - here! - delves deeper into my obsession with GSC Gameworld's Stalker games, and the wider fiction - and reality - surrounding them. Go have a read of the rest of BLDGBLOG, too. It will surprise you.
]]>We normally reserve talk of discounted games for Saturday's Bargain Bucket post, but this one's too good to leave for then. STALKER: Shadow Of Chernobyl is a title that instantly flickers into the forebrain of both myself and Jim whenever the question of the last few years' best/most important PC games is raised. It is not a perfect game, but it realises a world, a place, an atmosphere, a dream of what games can and should be that pretty much nothing else even tries to come close to. And it's £3.50 on Steam (not sure of US price - presumably around $5?) until Monday. I find that almost insulting. On the other hand, it means there's essentially no excuse to not buy the thing if you haven't already. What else could you spend that £3.50 on? If you do invest in it, I strongly advise you apply the STALKER Complete 2009 mod compilation for maximum post-apocalyptic prettiness.
]]>The original, ever-seminal STALKER's longevity is impressive - the fan/mod community just keep on jiggery-pokering it to astonishing effect. Perhaps it's a result of the game's singular gestation - so much content and concepts from its long development jettisoned for the final release, and a superficially wobbly engine positively bubbling with power and potential once the surface muck was wiped away. It is and always will be an important moment in PC gaming, and I'm starting to wonder if it might be becoming almost a weird sci-fi cousin to the original Operation Flashpoint: a game that's, over time, redesigned so thoroughly by its community that the original form is almost forgotten.
First STALKER's community needs to join hands and sing It's A Small World, though - for instance, there are two competing projects for the status of ULTIMATE STALKER MOD...
]]>The notion of open game worlds has always appealed to me, ever since Elite. When there's even the faintest whiff on a free roaming environment, or virtuality that I can go off an explore, I'm interested. It's an impulse that leads me to spend endless hours in Stalker, or to expend an entire day driving around Fuel. But whatever game I play, I end up feeling somewhat dissatisfied. It's kind of dissatisfaction that does not seem to be so common with linear or arena games. I think it's to do with a specific tension that open world games create: between what the game is about, and what the environment - and its openness - implies.
]]>Jim's already done an extensive round-up of the more interesting mods for Stalker: Clear Sky, but me, I'm happy sticking to the original Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. While the Oblivion Lost mod and its million features is the most renowned fan-tweak, there's much to be said for retaining the game's original structure rather than necessarily embracing such sweeping changes. With that in mind, I'm very much enjoying replaying SHOC with the Stalker Complete 2009 modpack. Primarily, it simply makes the game much, much prettier. How pretty? This pretty:
More shots below.
]]>Via the strange magics of download service Gametap, the original STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl (not its deflating sequel Clear Sky) can now be played for precisely zero pennies. No region restriction (apparently), and it joins a freebie roster that also contains the stalwart likes of Deus Ex, Hitman: Blood Money, Psychonauts and - yes! - Hotdog King.
]]>The past week of my gaming time has been dominated by Stalker mods: downloading, testing, crashing, deleting, reinstalling, and even a few hours of playing. For Shadow Of Chernobyl there's pretty much a one-stop shop for changes, which is the extraordinary Oblivion Lost mod. It's a comprehensive, colossal piece of compilation modding, much of it done by the author, and the rest factored in from across the community. It isn't to everyone's taste, especially since the list of changes is immense, but it includes drivable vehicles, sleep, alcoholism, and reworked NPC behaviour. (And that means grenades, annoyingly.) Oblivion Lost is, given the difficulty of combining and over-writing various Stalker mods, a worthwhile download - but it also completes Shadow Of Chernobyl on a profound level. This is modding at its finest. The problem for me, however, was that the Stalker I wanted to return to wasn't an augmented Shadow of Chernobyl, but a fixed Clear Sky, which I hadn't played since the pre-release review version. Could it be time to go back?
]]>Via VG247: a GSC fansite is reporting that there's a "new" expansion (the first presumably being standalone Clear Sky) as well as a full new game from the company in the works.
]]>Whatever will be will be. Whatever might have been can also be, it seems. Any glimpse into the creative process behind a game, especially one of some legend, is fascinating – for instance the design documents for Planescape Torment and Grim Fandango. This, however, is some kind of alterna-history motherlode.
GSC Gameworld have released an early build (from 2004, to be precise) of their acclaimed STALKER – from back before too long struggling through development limbo saw the game enjoy a major rethink and some not insubstantial tinkering from publisher THQ. With GSC’s blessing, we now to get to find out whether this kick up the bum was entirely necessary.
]]>You know what I hate? Accidentally hitting quicksave when you meant to hit quickload, leaving yourself trapped in some ostensibly unwinnable situation and sobbing like a child about a terrible turn of events that you can blame no-one but yourself for.
You know what I love? Managing to win that unwinnable situation anyway: ultimate triumph in the face of self-made adversity.
]]>Well, we've had more than a week of E3 coverage, and I'm sure you're sick of it by now. So I'm finishing up! I checked my huge pile of notes, recordings and press materials and found I have only one thing left to write about – Stalker: Clear Sky.
This sequel/prequel/remake of the acclaimed, if divisive, FPS is an interesting one because it's the only game anyone at RPS specifically asked me to check out at E3. Jim Rossignol all but demanded I find out if there was going to be "terrible new English voice acting and music" in the upcoming title, and so I obliged by chatting with GSC Game World's Valentine Yeltyshev.
]]>Certain game experiences seem to suggest other, older games, and leave me longing for them. Age Of Conan, which I've been playing a great deal for the PC Gamer review, somehow left me longing for Oblivion. There was something about the way that Age Of Conan tantalises you with elements of single player gaming that left me quite hungry for a proper RPG romp, and so I reinstalled the last Elder Scrolls game and plunged in.
To tell the truth, I'd been meaning to go back and play Oblivion a some point this year after being reminded of it in PC Gamer UK's Top 100 meeting. Tom Francis had talked about the moment he'd be most fond of in replaying the game: coming out of the underground tutorial into the bright, beautiful gameworld. “You get this incredible feeling of freedom,” he said. “It's wide open and it feels like anything is possible.” It's a feeling that, in some ways, is only possible in a game of Oblivion's calibre. That kind of feeling could be an antidote to the pressures of real life, and definitely an antidote to too many hours in a traditional MMO. I wanted to recapture that, although I had wondered whether Francis' was simply being hyperbolic. Was Oblivion better than I remembered?
]]>If you're going to do cosplay, don't dress up as some manga character with a purple sash - it's too easy. If you're going to do it, do it with S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
]]>A couple of months back I went to a dinner party. It was a modest, grown up affair, albeit it with a bout of arm-flailing Wii play dominating the evening. I didn't know the host all that well and, as we found common ground, we got to discussing his game collection. We sat and picked out titles, as I imagine menfolk might have discussed a shelf full of books or vinyl records in previous decades. One of the games he had on there was Stalker, which he had played through once and not bothered with again. Too gloomy, he said. And there really wasn't much to it.
Needless to say, my feelings were quite the opposite.
]]>This interview with Anton Bolshakov of GSC Gameworld looks at this history of the company, the inspirations for S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the nature and mythology of Chernobyl, and the development of the “A-Life” living world system found in the game.
I originally conducted this interview earlier this year as research for a feature on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. commissioned by PC Gamer UK (click through to read it in full). Although I was pleased with the final, published draft, little of the material from the interview was used, and so I'm republishing it in full here.
]]>My continuing unhealthy interest in GSC Gameworld's apocalyptic FPS from earlier this year reaches a climax over at PC Gamer UK's website, with a three part feature originally published in the magazine. Read the three parts here, here, and here. Or, conveniently, read the first part and then follow the links built into those very pages. Clever, eh?
]]>S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is now available on Steam. It was one of the most interesting and atmospheric PC games of this year, and you really should play it - if just to have an opinion on it. It's up there for just $30, so give it up to the Ukrainians. Needless to say, I'll be talking more about Stalker later in the year.
]]>A quick anecdote from Stalker, which I've been replaying on and off, just to see what I can change/break.
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