So, I started up a new game of STALKER (I'll be damned if I'm going to type all those periods every time). I got about halfway through the game originally, I think, but that was on a different machine and it was long enough ago that I don't really remember any of it. I'm enjoying it. Two minor issues: there's no real feedback for when you're getting shot other than your health bar shrinking, and since the health bar sits unobtrusively in the lower right corner, it's really easy to suddenly die and be like "WTF?"; and also the game desperately needs a fast-travel option.

Check out this list perhaps? A few list fixing the HUD (which I assume may indicate you being shot at) as well as other neato things as their features. Makes me tempted to get it back off of Steam myself...

edit: The actual list http://www.alteredgamer.com/stalker/99603-...a-l-k-e-r-mods/

I liked these games but never finished either one (have Pripy-yap or whatever and the SoC one).

Just don't have the time those games really require to get involved

Pripyat, and "Shadows of Chernobyl".

IIRC there are actually THREE of them, not two.

STALKER is just another Soviet piece of shit. Seriously, instead of focusing on making one decent game, they half-ass EVERYTHING. And Soviets being illiterate, they don't even bother writing a manual or some guide/tutorial system.
It's artificially ramping up difficulty by retarded decisions on the part of the authors themselves. Usually, the computer is a cheating bastard with unlimited ammo and the ability to put sixty bullets in a mosquito's ass from a mile away while all YOU can have is a broken AK47 that can't hit shit farther than two feet away, two magazines (one of them empty), a shovel that serves as a pathetic melee weapon (you need to hit a dog twenty times to kill it, to say nothing of angry Russians and whatever else lurks in the game) and a bottle of vodka. You have to slog for half an hour through drab landscape consisting of mud, trees, mud, occasional wreck of a military truck, mud, two road signs for the whole game, mud and mud. Sometimes after you pass a tree, four dogs spawn from outtafuckingnowhere and maul you to death because you turned around too slow to kill them. You can only heal using vodka that screws with your POV, and you get only three bottles for a whole game: one after having to slog for two hours through mud, cellars, mud, angry dogs, mud, ruined buildings, mud, angry Russians, mud, scrapyard, mud, angry post-nuclear mutants (resembling a cross between a hairless chihuahua, a sewer albino alligator, an aborted fetus with hydrocephaly, and a turnip) and mud to bring a sprocket (what the hell is a sprocket anyway?! I guarantee you the authors don't know that themselves) to the shopkeeper who will then sell you a bottle of vodka for 500 rubles (there are 480 rubles you can gather throughout the entire game, and forget about selling anything), one after somehow defeating ten snipers scattered throughout a town (the rules are simple: if the sniper sees you, you're dead. He can see you on the street. He can see you through a window. Fuck you, he can see you THROUGH A WALL. And to kill him, you need to spend three magazines worth of ammo. I remind you again, you can get only two throughout the entire game. If you hit him with your shovel, you are dead. If two snipers at once see you, you're dead. Three snipers are positioned in such a way to see you in the spot where the game automatically saves your progress), and the third one is on the roof of the Chernobyl power plant where the radiation will kill you in three seconds (you need five seconds to reach the bottle and another five to get back). Their EVERY game is like that.
Silent Storm? Okay, the first one wasn't that retarded, but the stand-alone add-on was even worse. For example: a timed mission you can't beat, because the scripted event happens before the mission even loads. Enemies that can only be killed using a crate of heavy grenades (when you're allowed to carry only one light grenade for the whole team, AND you have to return it after the mission!). Obvious mines on ledges (which can't be disarmed because of that) that block your every path, and you can't even pretend not to see them with your dumbest machinegunner, because even he spots them before he gets close. Enemies with one-hit-kill weapons you can't use. Retarded-ass bullshit.

Except invisible dogs, sounds like accurate representation of Soviet life.

Perhaps American player Mikhael is upset because he not have enough quality russian vodka.

First, I'm not American, second, Russian vodka is good only for cleaning battery contacts (well, what did you expect from something that is brewed from old socks, motor oil and battery acid?!), third, bears make half-decent ammo carriers, but shitty programmers. Fourth, we make better games over here: Witcher, Painkiller, Bulletstorm and an occasional Call of Juarez.

Heh, Hey Mike, don't sugar coat it... Tell us how you really feel.

-D

I'd blow my fuse if I actually paid for that game. But since they added it for free to one of the game mags over here (yes, we also have great video game mags), I'm just AVGNing all over it.

Clear Sky, which I haven't played, nor own, so I didn't include it in the list of the ones I'd played.

I suggest people check out the MISERY mod for Call of Pripyat.

Its a high concept mod made by professional people to increase the game realism and survival factor, besides updating the graphics for last gen (its simply beautiful). The mod implements high scacity, realistic damage, reworked economy, better AI, russian speech for immersion, etc. Its the ultimate Stalker experience, one of the most memorable ones I had with a videogame, reminding me of the days of System Shocks.

Feel the atmosphere: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TewyHbAicWk


Download from here.

I don't think I could have a more polar opposite experience to the STALKER series than Mike,

Not saying he is wrong, it is his opinion of course and you know what they say about opinions

But all of the things he stated disdain for, I LOVED !

the lack of fast travel (respawning mobs means nowhere is always safe)
Angry russians, Angry mutants
the sparsity of ammo ( I didn't have any issues though)
lack of cash means it's hard work to get the best gear,
the stealth system is fairly well done and not INVISIBILITY MODE ON !
you need to use speakers or headphones to Hear enemies or being shot if the Hud is not enough.

I'm not saying there aren't issues ... trying to climb trees to get artifacts is impossible
physics meant items fell through the world
and a few other bugs in scripting and stuff

but all in all a great series of games ! .. played them all many times.

the Misery mod is good, the COMPLETE mods are awesome too, they fix many minor things and introduce a "Teleport" for those that want to fast travel.

in fact I think I'll download it and play again soon

Funny, I thought that "misery" was the unofficial title of the unmodded game... Because it describes it THAT well.

Oh well, I gotta free up some space on my HDD, dig up my copy (added to a magazine years ago, which is a testament to the quality of the game) and do a Let's Play.
It was more of a presentation of facts on Russian game design, which, as you can probably guess, is piss-poor. First, difficulty level in their games is usually absurd and involves illogical solutions (to even less logical problems, no less). Second, things like beta-testing and QA don't exist. Russian (and Ukrainian, for that matter) games contain insane amount of obvious bugs, glitches and design oversights. My earlier posts refer to it all in a slightly exaggerated manner. For example, the "it costs 500 rubles and throughout the game you can get only 480 rubles" is a common problem: in normal gameplay, you can hardly get the amount of money necessary to buy most things, forcing you to waste time grinding (if that's even a possibility). Same goes for useless basic weapons: yes, I managed to land a perfect headshot with the Makarov from 15 meters. But that was one in a million shot - normally, you're not supposed to deal enough damage to an opponent who is outgunning you. And that one about the last bottle of vodka, radiation killing you in three seconds and getting to the bottle in at least five seconds? Usual design of environmental hazards in those games. And the designers' response can be best given in the words of Igor Pochmelnik Zakuskov, engineer: "Just like I give a shit!" They apparently thought that in a game about their neighborhood everything in it should be obvious. Like "never leave house without a sawed-off shotgun", "vodka is the best remedy. FOR EVERYTHING." and "if you're hurt while stumbling drunkenly through mud, blame radiation-caused black holes in the road".

Also, trying to follow the pants-on-head retarded storyline requiring me to hunt myself down, I was told to go to a something-something prom.
It wasn't a prom. Actually, the one thing common between a prom and that something-something prom (which looked a bit like my high school, just that aggressive ugly bitches in my high school weren't running around with noodles sticking out of their mouths and turning invisible) was the unbelievable amount of booze stashed in corners, trashcans, drawers and otherwise. I also managed to find the finest example of Soviet agricultural technology, the AK-47, of course after braving a pipe-hopping obstacle course that would leave even the Mario brothers perplexed.
And a bit of trivia, I live some 400 miles from Chernobyl. As you can most probably guess, the usual STALKER gameplay, that is: slogging for two hours through mud, rusted car wrecks, mud, bushes, mud, abandoned Soviet buildings, mud, the serious shit and mud, all of that in shitty Middle-Eastern European weather (where more than two sunny days in a year is a rarely-encountered anomaly) is pretty much what I did as a kid. I'm bored of it. Somehow I enjoyed FNV's Mojave better.

aaaah I see, I presume you haven't been on a STALKER LARP event then ?

STALKER LARP DAY

I'll not direct you to the book that is part inspiration for the games "Roadside Picnic"

the vein in your forehead may spectactularly explode

No, but I'm an airsofter, so running around abandoned buildings that might as well have been in Pripyat or Chernobyl is not out of the question these days (actually, I called one of the buildings we used to skirmish in "Agroprom"). And my main gripe with the game is that it's tedious and boring. Two hours through mud, a small shootout with three annoying jackasses camping in a train yard, two hours through mud, down the ladder into sewers, whack a mutant with a shovel since I couldn't find any fucking ammo for the last two hours, up the ladder to a walled-off building, half an hour of ransacking trashcans for booze and half a box of ammo, suddenly HELICOPTER INSERTION, shootout, and again two hours through mud... Why oh why couldn't it have been a half-minute loading screen instead of two hours of slogging through the same goddamn pisshole of a place consisting of bare hills, puddles and sparse trees?!

I kinda liked getting lost in the long grass and the different areas, looking around for secret stashes of .. no wait ... it's more bandages and vodka that I won't use

okay yeah there are some annoying anomalies, and the code / scripting isn't always up to snuff.

but it just felt atmospheric, it's the first game where I actually used cover and stealth and if something got the drop on me .. I knew I was dead .. and oh crap I haven't saved and oh crap I'm dead ... crap !

yeah, trying to platform like Mario wasn't enjoyable .. but it was no where near as bad as tryign to get holocrons in SWTOR ... I damn near threw my PC out the window after that !

anyways I only have one parting comment

"Get out of here, Stalker!"

I think you would have a big surprise with MISERY. Nothing of what you complain is present in the game.

And it has just being elected 1st place mod of the year by ModDB, getting ahead of big names like DayZ and Half-Life: Source.

Anyone curious to see what a real Survival-Sim is should take a look at it. Its the experience STALKER should have been from the beginning.

•Minimap removed and you must now navigate with the use of terrain and your PDA map. But a damage indicator has been re-added to let you know where shots are coming from. This is done to replicate that you would have a clue in real life for such circumstances.

•NPC's no longer have infinite ammunition for their primary weapons like rifles, shotguns, etc. So you will see them switch to backup weapons (if they have any).

But on the downside for Mike

New redesigned structure material textures for a more gritty and less colourful environment

Can't win them all

While I don't harbor quite the hatred toward it as Mike does, I will admit that STALKER is one of the few games I got tired of playing really fast. Not because it was gritty or hard, but rather, because it was unreasonably so. Yeah, I know an AK is woefully inaccurate on auto fire, but taking a semi auto shot I should be a hell of a lot more accurate as some sort of self proclaimed mercenary than is represented in game.