It’s STALKER Week over at GamersGate

I saw this over on GamersGate’s Twitter account.

This week is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. week over at the digital distribution service. You can get S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl for less than $10, saving you 50%; S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky for $3.98, saving you 60%; and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat for $20.96, saving you 50%. The loyalty edition of CoP is $9.97, saving you 30%.

If you haven’t ever played the series, then don’t miss out on this offer. I’ve played each of these titles, and even though the games are flawed and sometimes buggy, the atmosphere experienced in each title makes this series one to play, even if not as commercially successful as other games in its genre.

It’s STALKER Week over at GamersGate

Possible S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Details in Magazine Fan Q&A

Information on this game has been floating around for at least a year or two now, and I’ve done a few posts on it too. Most of the stuff was probably just rumours though. As I recall, at the time these rumours suggested that the game would be called Stalker 3: Apocalyptic. And that info was also in Gameplay, the same as the info released now.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat was released over the past few months in different territories [at different times, from October until February this year]. So where to now?

It seems S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is the answer, which we saw coming anyway. There was recently a fan Q&A with GSC head honcho Sergey Grigorovich, again for a Russian magazine called Gameplay. It’s all in Russian and sifting through Google’s version of English is painstaking to say the least.

It claims that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 will be a trilogy of games, kind of like Shadow of Chernobyl, Clear Sky, and Call of Pripyat were. Or if you want to put them in chronological order: CS, SoC, CoP. There. Happy?

It was once rumoured that GSC was considering switching to the CryEngine [Far Cry, Crysis, etc.] for use in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, but decided to stick with X-Ray – except possibly X-Ray 2.0 [CoP used X-Ray 1.6].

The reason they considered CryEngine was because it was felt it would make it easier to develop for consoles. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 will be multi-platform – not just PC like the existing three games. There was word a while back that an Xbox 360 version was in the cards. People are concerned that this will mean a downward spiral for the series, as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is considered a “PC” title.

And although many other games are all about DLC nowadays, with the Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Package releasing for PC and PS3 this week even, it doesn’t look as though GSC is buying into the whole concept.

It also says that women will feature in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, and not just male stalkers.

I once tried to break the subject of female stalkers in a forum thread, and my idea was shot down – with some claiming that they “wouldn’t survive”. Bunch of sexists.

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Sources: fan Q&A [world-stalker] - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 [TTLG]

Possible S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Details in Magazine Fan Q&A

Stalker Silliness [Screenshots]

Here are some screenshots I took from Clear Sky last year and more recently Call of Pripyat while playing them. The screens are accompanied by captions too. Why did I do this. I don’t know…

“There’s an emission going on outside? Damn right. There’s one going on in here too!”

“Ooh! We’ve never done it by a train station before!”

“Why the hell did you stick the grenades to the bottom of the crate?”

“To stop them rolling about.”

“Teddy?! I sleep with my rifle motherf*cker!”

Stalker Silliness [Screenshots]

Apocalypse Then and Now: Stalker

This past week I was given a few games for my birthday which is coming up soon. Among them, Stalker: Call of Pripyat, as well as Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Aliens vs Predator.

Right now, like I tweeted the other night, I installed Stalker right off the bat and started playing it. The other two I’ll likely save for another day.

I’ll say this: I’m starting to think that Call of Pripyat is the best game in the series – since Shadow of Chernobyl anyway. I good return to form after Clear Sky, not that that game was that bad anyway. But I’m thinking that CoP might actually be better than the first game. I’m thinking of getting a review up and running for the game. It’s been a while since I’ve done one.

Another thing I noticed today is that it’s the third anniversary of the original Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. It was reportedly the 20th of March, 2007, that the game came out.

Apocalypse Then and Now: Stalker

Metro 2033 Doesn’t Use X-ray Engine, Does Support SteamWorks

It was revealed recently in a big announcement that Metro 2033 would support DirectX 11 technology as well as 3D Vision, And several nice screenshots were there to prove it.

If you thought however that the game was too good looking to use the same engine and tech as STALKER… you’d be right. Metro 2033 developers, 4A Games, have put the rumours to rest that they used STALKER’s X-ray engine during the development of the title.

For a while, there have been rumours going around that Metro 2033 indeed used the X-ray engine, and this was even backed up by Sergey Grigorovic or GSC Game World, the STALKER developers. He claims it’s based on an early build of the X-ray engine. But some people who worked at the company and later left to join 4A Games, like Oles Shishkovtsov , say that isn’t the case, as he claims that the X-ray engine couldn’t handle the features in Metro 2033.

"There's no relationship. Back when I was working as lead programmer and technology architect on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. it became clearly apparent that many architectural decisions put into S.T.A.L.K.E.R. engine were great for the time when it was designed, but they just doesn't scale to the present day.

"The major obstacles to the future of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. engine were its inherent inability to be multi-threaded, the weak and error-prone networking model, and simply awful resource and memory management which prohibited any kind of streaming or simply keeping the working set small enough for (back then) 'next-gen' consoles.

When the philosophies of the engines are so radically different it is nearly impossible to share the code, the final answer is ‘no’. We do not have shared code with X-Ray, nor would it be possible to do so.”

Comparing the two titles, Metro 2033 may well look a lot prettier in my opinion. I do sense a bit of professional rivalry there though, to say the least.

The bad news for some people: Metro 2033 is going to support SteamWorks for the PC version of the game, just like Aliens vs. Predator and Modern Warfare 2.

That’ll likely mean that the only place you’ll be able to pick it up online via digital distribution will be Steam, seeing as other companies like D2D boycott SteamWorks titles. They might have to adapt though, seeing as they’ll start losing sales as more and more games start using this feature.

Metro 2033 should be out in the middle of next month for the PC and Xbox 360.

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Sources: Eurogamer - Shacknews

Metro 2033 Doesn’t Use X-ray Engine, Does Support SteamWorks

Metro 2033 Details: Upgrade Weapons, Idle Animations

4A Games has been very talkative on Metro 2033’s twitter account, and instead of just superfluous fluff, a lot of details on the game have been given, and the latest titbit is about the weapons in the game.

Of course the games contemporary, and dare I say it, rival, Stalker, boasts a large selection of different weapons to use, and after Shadow of Chernobyl, even upgrade.

Well, Metro 2033 is going to feature the same sort of thing. According to them, you can upgrade you guns with silencers, scopes, extended barrels and more. Upgrading guns is probably just as fun if not more so than shooting them, and that was one thing I liked about Stalker: Clear Sky, despite its many other problems. You can see on the picture above that it looks as though you can attach bayonets for close quarters combat as well.

Then they go on about something called idle animations. What this means is when you stand still for too long, or the gun stands still (AKA not firing it), then the player character will do some things with it. In some games (Soldier of Fortune comes to mind), the player will start to play with his weapon (stop it, not that weapon), or sway his arm around, point the gun around, etc. So I assume it’s something like that.

Nothing revolutionary, but some games have it and others don’t. Some people I know hate idle weapon animations because they’re distracting.

In other related news, the Metro2033.com site had to be taken down because of a major influx of traffic. So the teaser website is back up again.

And some people still think that this is one game which nobody knows about. I think it’s still garnering enough attention. Proper singleplayer campaign, no multiplayer, and it looks awesome.

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Source: Metro 2033 on Twitter

Metro 2033 Details: Upgrade Weapons, Idle Animations

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky up to 1.5.09 now

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky now has a 1.5.09 patch available for download.

I'm still running 1.5.07 with few problems, so I think I'll likely skip it. 15.08 was mainly for multiplayer, and this one is no different, with just more fixed for multiplayer.

http://stalker.deepsilver.com/index.php?lang=eng

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky up to 1.5.09 now

New RRR Article: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

I've just finished a new RRR article on HubPages.com, and it's called Games of 2008: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky.

"I have played S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky on two different occasions. The first time was when it was still very new and with limited support in the way of patches. I surfed the internet for weeks looking for fixes made by fans of the game. I even outright declared on a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. forum that I hated the game due to its unpolished nature and the many bugs that prevented me from enjoying the game."

New RRR Article: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

Swamps worse than S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s!

If you thought that the swamps from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky were bad, then you haven’t seen this dam. It was shown on Carte Blanche recently, and I was absolutely disgusted when I looked at this mess, which is known as the pea soup pond. Needless to say, you can’t drink it, and what’s more, if you were to fall in this cesspool, you would reportedly get very sick and possibly die. This place has apparently been linked to colon cancer.

All of a sudden, little radiation-filled mud puddles don't seem so bad...

Swamps worse than S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s!