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[Let's Play] S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl
Stolls
Brave Corporate LogoChicago, ILRegistered User regular
Brave Corporate LogoChicago, ILRegistered User regular
SPOILERS AHOY!
Inspired by other Let's Play threads, and the thread for this very game, I have decided to put the two together for a playthrough of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., a game which can charitably be described as buggy and unfinished, and uncharitably be described as "seriously, these people had five years and this is the best they could do?" Nevermind that that phrase isn't actually a descriptor, that's not the point.
The point is, for all its flaws and obvious problems, I am deeply infatuated with this game, and it's kind of tricky to explain why. The gunplay is clunky and unforgiving, the AI is inconsistent, the graphics show their age (though, as with most shooters, they look far better in motion), and the game has the audacity to demand you kill eight mooks with a shitty starter pistol five minutes into the game.
All this is true, and yet from this mess it manages to extract a truly memorable adventure.
There's the word for you. Adventure. Set in the blighted near-future of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. gives the already eerie and foreboding real world locales a sci-fi facelift, borrowing elements from both the Andrei Tarkovsky film of the same name and the book Roadside Picnic. There is a mystery to be solved, a story to be told: the 'why' behind the mysterious spatial anomlies and vortexes that dot the Zone, and who it is that left you a PDA instructing you to "kill the Strelok". But all that is a side point to the real draw of the game, which is the promise of pure, unfettered adventure.
It's not big enough to be Oblivion With Guns, it's not complex enough to be the next Deus Ex. Still, it has an appeal all its own, even when all it's asking you to do is survive. I can only hope that screenshots and text summaries, maybe two or three of which might be amusing for a second or two, are enough to convey this.
(Technical notes: As was mentioned in the other Stalker thread, mods smooth out a lot of misunderstandings and "add" neat things that should've stayed in. And sometimes they go a little further and just make the whole shebang that much better. Many of them, however, are broken, unbalanced, or prone to causing crashes. I'll be playing with the following, most of which are strictly cosmetic, but all of which have never caused me any problems in any combination:
- Real gun names
- Annoying Audio Fix 1.3
- Armor non-degradation
- Float32 shaders
- Flashlight range mod
- Improved Sound Effects
- Sleep/Dream mod
- No headbobbing
- No quest time limits
- Prefetch tweak
- Raw's revamp
- Silent silencers
- Russian names
- Show quest rewards
- Weather overhaul
I'm also throwing in the latest version of Axe's Mod Compilation, which adds, among other things, a stable repair mod and expanded trading system; stalkers can be sold weapons, and traders have larger inventories. Playing on the default difficulty, just because on higher the crazy AI glitches tend to be more problematic. You'll probably see what I mean as we go.)
With all that said, let us begin!
Updates
Rescuing Nimble
Through North Cordon
Garbage - Arrival
Heading to Agroprom
Agroprom - Saving Mole
Agroprom Underground/Strelok's Stash
Infiltration
Exfiltration
Arrival at the Bar
Wild Territory Ambush
Saving Kruglov
Looting/To Dark Valley
Dark Valley - Rescuing Dutyers
Borov and the Vault
X18 - Unwelcome Visitor
Memories?
Escape from Dark Valley
Cordon Revisited
Back to the Bar
Heading to Yantar
Yantar - Brains versus braaaaaains...
Breaching X16
X16 - Power Down
Finding Strelok's Partner
Leaving Yantar
Our Next Target
Army Warehouses - Housekeeping
Loose Ends
Guided Along Strelok's Footsteps
Doctor and the Truth
Red Forest - Surface Tension
To the Brain Scorcher
Brain Scorcher - What Goes Down...
...Must Come Up
Onward to Pripyat
Pripyat - The Gauntlet
The Hotel and the Stash
Pripyat North - Glitches and Secrets
Urban Exploration
Chernobyl Exterior
Alternate Routes
Chernobyl Interior
What You Wish For
Further Inside Chernobyl
Nothing But the Truth
Finale, Part 1
Finale, Part 2
Final Thoughts
(Posts hidden behind spoilers upon request, and to minimize scroll length)
Inspired by other Let's Play threads, and the thread for this very game, I have decided to put the two together for a playthrough of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., a game which can charitably be described as buggy and unfinished, and uncharitably be described as "seriously, these people had five years and this is the best they could do?" Nevermind that that phrase isn't actually a descriptor, that's not the point.
The point is, for all its flaws and obvious problems, I am deeply infatuated with this game, and it's kind of tricky to explain why. The gunplay is clunky and unforgiving, the AI is inconsistent, the graphics show their age (though, as with most shooters, they look far better in motion), and the game has the audacity to demand you kill eight mooks with a shitty starter pistol five minutes into the game.
All this is true, and yet from this mess it manages to extract a truly memorable adventure.
There's the word for you. Adventure. Set in the blighted near-future of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. gives the already eerie and foreboding real world locales a sci-fi facelift, borrowing elements from both the Andrei Tarkovsky film of the same name and the book Roadside Picnic. There is a mystery to be solved, a story to be told: the 'why' behind the mysterious spatial anomlies and vortexes that dot the Zone, and who it is that left you a PDA instructing you to "kill the Strelok". But all that is a side point to the real draw of the game, which is the promise of pure, unfettered adventure.
It's not big enough to be Oblivion With Guns, it's not complex enough to be the next Deus Ex. Still, it has an appeal all its own, even when all it's asking you to do is survive. I can only hope that screenshots and text summaries, maybe two or three of which might be amusing for a second or two, are enough to convey this.
(Technical notes: As was mentioned in the other Stalker thread, mods smooth out a lot of misunderstandings and "add" neat things that should've stayed in. And sometimes they go a little further and just make the whole shebang that much better. Many of them, however, are broken, unbalanced, or prone to causing crashes. I'll be playing with the following, most of which are strictly cosmetic, but all of which have never caused me any problems in any combination:
- Real gun names
- Annoying Audio Fix 1.3
- Armor non-degradation
- Float32 shaders
- Flashlight range mod
- Improved Sound Effects
- Sleep/Dream mod
- No headbobbing
- No quest time limits
- Prefetch tweak
- Raw's revamp
- Silent silencers
- Russian names
- Show quest rewards
- Weather overhaul
I'm also throwing in the latest version of Axe's Mod Compilation, which adds, among other things, a stable repair mod and expanded trading system; stalkers can be sold weapons, and traders have larger inventories. Playing on the default difficulty, just because on higher the crazy AI glitches tend to be more problematic. You'll probably see what I mean as we go.)
With all that said, let us begin!
Updates
Rescuing Nimble
Through North Cordon
Garbage - Arrival
Heading to Agroprom
Agroprom - Saving Mole
Agroprom Underground/Strelok's Stash
Infiltration
Exfiltration
Arrival at the Bar
Wild Territory Ambush
Saving Kruglov
Looting/To Dark Valley
Dark Valley - Rescuing Dutyers
Borov and the Vault
X18 - Unwelcome Visitor
Memories?
Escape from Dark Valley
Cordon Revisited
Back to the Bar
Heading to Yantar
Yantar - Brains versus braaaaaains...
Breaching X16
X16 - Power Down
Finding Strelok's Partner
Leaving Yantar
Our Next Target
Army Warehouses - Housekeeping
Loose Ends
Guided Along Strelok's Footsteps
Doctor and the Truth
Red Forest - Surface Tension
To the Brain Scorcher
Brain Scorcher - What Goes Down...
...Must Come Up
Onward to Pripyat
Pripyat - The Gauntlet
The Hotel and the Stash
Pripyat North - Glitches and Secrets
Urban Exploration
Chernobyl Exterior
Alternate Routes
Chernobyl Interior
What You Wish For
Further Inside Chernobyl
Nothing But the Truth
Finale, Part 1
Finale, Part 2
Final Thoughts
(Posts hidden behind spoilers upon request, and to minimize scroll length)
"At least death would have saved him from the dreams."
Hell of a way to wake up. No idea who I am, what happened to me, or even what's been going on in the past few years. The Zone, anomalies, artifacts, Stalkers... I know about it, thanks to this guy,
but I don't remember any of it. And my only clue, if you can call it that,
is a few feet shy of helpful. 'Kill Strelok', huh? Yeah, I'll get right on that. Thanks a million, PDA. If I don't starve to death by the time I find him, maybe I can club him to death with you, or something. Big help you've been. Anyway...
Sidorovich, the trader who says he saved my life, wants a few favors done before he considers my debt repaid. Not like I'd make it ten feet if I skipped town, much less have an idea where to go. He's looking for a Stalker called Nimble, and a flash drive he's carrying. Wolf, from the local camp, supposedly knows something. What the hell, right?
Huh. Guy's not bad. Probably needs a proper tuning, but what can you do?
Wolf seems to be running the show here, says his men found Nimble. Problem is, Nimble's being held by some bandits and Wolf isn't confident his boys alone can get him out alive. Guess where I come in. In a weird way, I respect a guy whose instructions don't get more complicated than "just wing it."
Well, if all he's giving me is a shitty pistol and a knife, I'm helping myself to what I can find around here.
This is what it's all about for Stalkers: artifacts. Special stones that, if worn (usually clipped to a belt), grant a host of supernatural abilities - regeneration, boosted endurance, resistance to injury and all sorts of environmental hazards. This one's a lesser regeneration artifact, stone blood. Almost all artifacts have some kind of trade-off, and while this heals people, it also makes them more susceptible to injury. Still, I'm short on medical supplies, so don't mind if I help myself to it.
The Zone, I can kind of understand. Just kind of. But why nobody down there is wearing this is way beyond me. How the hell did it even get in here?
Back to business.
Okay, Wolf's boys are holed up on a hillside not far from the camp. So let's just... wait, what's this?
*sigh* Wonderful. One down, one's badly hurt. Dead guy has a medkit on him, which is very convenient. It's almost like someone's trying to tell me something. Fine, we'll do that. Sit tight, buddy, I gotcha.
Tolik's short on traditional means of expressing gratitude, but a kind word around the camp couldn't hurt. Poor guy got mixed up in this Nimble nonsense, still looking a little pale - though not as much his pal on the ground there. All right, g'won, get outta here.
Also, wonder what's up with that chopper? I think one of the Stalkers at the camp mentioned the army's holed up nearby.
Box of 9x18mm ammo in an underpass. Odd place for it, but I did just fish a kevlar vest out of a nearly sealed attic. Plus I could use more of it, so thank you unseen benefactor.
Finally caught up with Wolf's men. Petruha looks ready to go, but I got a hunch his friends would rather be anywhere else. Oh well, us four versus seven or eight bandits. No time like the present.
Let's go!
Look alive guys, we got company!
Hell of a way to wake up. No idea who I am, what happened to me, or even what's been going on in the past few years. The Zone, anomalies, artifacts, Stalkers... I know about it, thanks to this guy,
but I don't remember any of it. And my only clue, if you can call it that,
is a few feet shy of helpful. 'Kill Strelok', huh? Yeah, I'll get right on that. Thanks a million, PDA. If I don't starve to death by the time I find him, maybe I can club him to death with you, or something. Big help you've been. Anyway...
Sidorovich, the trader who says he saved my life, wants a few favors done before he considers my debt repaid. Not like I'd make it ten feet if I skipped town, much less have an idea where to go. He's looking for a Stalker called Nimble, and a flash drive he's carrying. Wolf, from the local camp, supposedly knows something. What the hell, right?
Huh. Guy's not bad. Probably needs a proper tuning, but what can you do?
Wolf seems to be running the show here, says his men found Nimble. Problem is, Nimble's being held by some bandits and Wolf isn't confident his boys alone can get him out alive. Guess where I come in. In a weird way, I respect a guy whose instructions don't get more complicated than "just wing it."
Well, if all he's giving me is a shitty pistol and a knife, I'm helping myself to what I can find around here.
This is what it's all about for Stalkers: artifacts. Special stones that, if worn (usually clipped to a belt), grant a host of supernatural abilities - regeneration, boosted endurance, resistance to injury and all sorts of environmental hazards. This one's a lesser regeneration artifact, stone blood. Almost all artifacts have some kind of trade-off, and while this heals people, it also makes them more susceptible to injury. Still, I'm short on medical supplies, so don't mind if I help myself to it.
The Zone, I can kind of understand. Just kind of. But why nobody down there is wearing this is way beyond me. How the hell did it even get in here?
Back to business.
Okay, Wolf's boys are holed up on a hillside not far from the camp. So let's just... wait, what's this?
*sigh* Wonderful. One down, one's badly hurt. Dead guy has a medkit on him, which is very convenient. It's almost like someone's trying to tell me something. Fine, we'll do that. Sit tight, buddy, I gotcha.
Tolik's short on traditional means of expressing gratitude, but a kind word around the camp couldn't hurt. Poor guy got mixed up in this Nimble nonsense, still looking a little pale - though not as much his pal on the ground there. All right, g'won, get outta here.
Also, wonder what's up with that chopper? I think one of the Stalkers at the camp mentioned the army's holed up nearby.
Box of 9x18mm ammo in an underpass. Odd place for it, but I did just fish a kevlar vest out of a nearly sealed attic. Plus I could use more of it, so thank you unseen benefactor.
Finally caught up with Wolf's men. Petruha looks ready to go, but I got a hunch his friends would rather be anywhere else. Oh well, us four versus seven or eight bandits. No time like the present.
Let's go!
Look alive guys, we got company!
kstolls on Twitch, streaming weekends at 9pm CST!
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
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I love this game, but around 20-30 mins in it freezes. Damn ATi incompatibility issues.
A computer that runs HL2 on max settings will be murdered by this game on medium. Thats from my personal experience.
Fun game, though, once you get into it.
I'm not entirely sure, but don't go under the impression that it'll run just swell becuase your rig is capable of handling Half Life 2. It might look worse than HL2, but it's a hell of a lot more demanding.
Hmmm... Guess I'll have to track down a demo. My PC kicks HL2's ass, but what PC doesn't
Its playable for me on medium/high mixed settings, the main problem is that the firefights are so hard that you can't afford the lag.
3 ghz processor, 1 gig ram, 6800 GT video card.
I haven't played it recently, though, so I don't know if recent patches have fixed this. NWN 2 was virtually unplayable at parts in 1.0, and thats been fixed.
Put simply, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has looks and speed, but not at the same time unless your machine is top-of-the-line. Even then it's hard to say, because the game's just so poorly optimized.
Edit: This Eurogamer review echoes my feelings on the game almost to a tee.
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
Did you not experience problems with your graphics card? IE, freezing, exiting out to desktop or refreshing the game? I'm using an X1300 Pro with the same Ghz dual core and it won't stay on for longer than 30 mins tops. I want top the GC for a better one but I have no knowledge on this matter..... plus I have a Dell :!!:
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
YMMV, I guess.
EDIT: God and those pictures in the OP need to be replaced. If I ever fire up STALKER again, I'll retake those screenshots with better graphics. Other than that, though, great OP (I don't mean to bash on it).
Yes, I'm quite the idiot.
Sorry for the fancy wording, I'm writing (procrastinating?) college app essays.
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Granted, though, that Stalker is damn hard to capture in stills; you can't even tell most anomalies are there. Half the time I tried to grab something it either ran off, ducked out of sight or took a huge chunk out of me.
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
Then again, YMMV -- a lot of people complain that performance in Vista is noticeably worse than in XP. In my experience, every game I've played in XP performs equally well in Vista. I do have a powerful machine, though, that Vista takes advantage of.
Q6600
8800 GTX
4 Gigs of High end Corsair.
I'm hoping that is more than enough. I was told Vista eats up alot of RAM on any game, and RAM is needed for STALKER.
Also In the News - STALKER 64 Bit Edition will be coming soon for those with Multiple CPUS. Good times.
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I run it at medium-high (simply because I'm too lazy to perfectly tweak the settings--at medium-high, 1280x1024, I always have a solid framerate) with an x2 4200+, 7800gt, and 2 gigs of ram. You're machine slaughters mine, so you should have no trouble.
I guess my computer can't be considered powerful anymore. Not in gaming terms, anyway.
AMD Athlon 2800+, 1 GB of PC2700 RAM, Radeon X850 Pro... I'm screwed.
Don't fret too much, DX8 still looks great, it just lacks the high end shaders and such as well as bump mapping.
My old computer was a Peice of crap Athlon 2000, 1.25 gigs of RAM and a 256mb 9700 and it ran nice and looked good.
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Damn it, they heard us! Two on the right, take cover!
So far so good. Let's move in!
Gunfire, left and right! I got this guy!
He's history.
Petruha's guys got two more of them. Five down, at least two to go. Let's move!
Shotgun, round the corner! Flank him!
He's down, we got him! Sweep the main building, Nimble's somewhere inside!
Didn't even have to load it, the previous owner was kind enough to do that shit for me. Also, Petruha scores the final kill.
"We went hunting, and hunt we did. I bet Wolf will be pleased."
Nimble's a little shaken up, but he's grateful enough to fork over the flash drive Sidorovich wants, and point out the location of a nearby stash. He's also on the lookout for a mail jacket he lost somewhere up the path, near where he was captured.
Might as well check it out, it's not far away. He's offering a stone flower artifact for it; it's radioactive while worn, so I can't safely use it until I find something to offset it. Still, it's worth a good amount of cash, and it's as good a time as any to test out my new toy.
Blind dogs, sideways evolution if ever it existed. Several generations of dog have grown up in the Zone, and somehow they seem to fare better when relying on their other senses. In any case, they're dangerous in packs but easy enough to scare off with a good old-fashioned noisemaker.
Nimble marked this area on my PDA as near where he lost his jacket. Now, I'm no expert, but I'm of the opinion that bad things tend to lurk in the dark inside and outside the Zone. I see no reason to doubt this now.
And I am not surprised. Also, I could hear the thing growling from back there. Mean-lookin' sonovabitch, ain't he?
Not every dog went blind. Some just got bigger, faster and more tenacious, though a face full of shotgun turns it around in a hurry. This pseudodog got ahold of my leg, but that stone blood artifact and some bandages should clear that right up.
One slightly bullet-resistant jacket, coming right up. Like I haven't done enough for Nimble.
All right, we're done out here. Back to the camp I go.
Drop the jacket off with Nimble, let Wolf know his guys and I made it through okay... done and done. Wolf is kind enough to fork over a jellyfish for my trouble (another radioactive artifact). I find it a bit odd that his reward for killing seven guys and saving one of his men is worth less than what I got for fetching a jacket. And not even a particularly nice jacket.
While I'm pondering these apparent contradictions in reward economics, the camp gets a bit of a stir from some nearby boars.
Unlike most of the Zone's critters, boars here aren't that different from boars anywhere else, just slightly larger and more aggressive. As with the pseudodog, it's nothing that liberal application of buckshot can't handle.
With the local wildlife under control, I head back to give Sidorovich the flash drive. He's impressed that I pulled it off, so he levels with me about what he's up to. His trading network is trying to open a path to the center of the Zone, supposedly a gold mine of artifacts and such. Normally, nobody can get there; he half-mentions some place where your "brain starts boiling". The short of it is, something or someone is blocking their efforts, and he-slash-they want my help.
As an incentive, Sidorovich mentions that this Strelok guy that I'm after is rumored to have been to the center. The traders will dig up what they can if I help them out. Our goals, it would seem, are at least tenuously linked, so I might as well see what I can do. My next stop is some abandoned research complex to the west, the Agroprom facility; the military has set up shop there, and one of Sidorovich's partners seems to think they've dug up something important about the Zone.
So, to summarize, I have to sneak into a heavily-guarded military compound and steal top-secret research documents. Clearly, the traders don't feel up to spending any of their time or resources acquiring the papers. But it's not like I have a lot of options here, so off I go.
Anyway, slightly north of town I come across this poor fellow, who has run afoul of a springboard anomaly - basically a reverse gravity well. They're fairly common and not that hard to spot, but they are rather easy to stumble into when you have other things on your mind, like a pack of dogs nipping at your heels.
Tiptoeing around the springboard, I find a dropped backpack with a silenced pistol and some ammo in it. Considering I have to sneak into Agroprom eventually, this might actually be useful.
And off to my left there's this ugly thing being pulled into the air by a whirligig, which is basically a normal gravity well - as normal as a spontaneous, self-sustaining violation of the laws of physics can be considered, of course. The critter's called a flesh. I'm told they used to be wild pigs, but they could've been just about anything for all I know. Nevertheless, they usually stay far away from stalkers and are mostly harmless.
This one sure as hell isn't going to be bothering anything anytime soon.
To the task at hand. I need to pass through the garbage dumps to the north to reach Agroprom, and to get there I have to get through the northern part of the cordon. Unfortunately...
...the military have set up a checkpoint by the collapsed bridge and aren't too keen on letting just anybody by. The Major, Kuznetsov, is willing to look the other way to the tune of five hundred rubles (as of 10/09/2007, roughly $20 US). Now, I've scrounged up around ten grand, so the cost isn't the problem here. It's really the principle of the thing.
Besides, Sidorivich left some info on my PDA about a cost-free alternative. We've already established that the traders are doing this on the cheap by sending a single amnesiac stalker to break into a fortified compound while relying on cheap goods and whatever he can scavenge along the way. If we can't be smart, we might as well be consistent, so I'll go see what he has in mind.
---
Asides: For some reason, Wolf's guys were a bit more useful than usual this time around, and actually managed to score a few kills unassisted. I credit this to one of them (besides Petruha) bringing along a shotgun. Buckshot is ridiculously powerful compared to slug and dart rounds, and two shots can drop just about anybody, and most things at midrange or closer.
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
I love the randomness of it all. Seeing an AI character/animal in the distance suddenly get electrocuted/exploded by an anomily they did not see.
Or a little later on with the mine fields, just doing your own thing when suddenly in the distance ***Boom***. Good times.
God there are so many times where I forgot to check my suit. I'd be off on a mission and wonder why I'm going down so fast and I see that sexy new Armor plated military attire is suddenly threads and scraps with most stats in single digits.
So many times...
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I was supposed to meet one of the trader's journeymen here, but his body is currently lying at my feet. Go figure. But he did make some obversations on his PDA regarding this tunnel. He claims the electrical anomaly in this tunnel moves in a pattern, which is very unusual. Lemme just grab a bolt here...
It looks uglier than it is. The anomaly is indeed moving, and in such a manner as to channel someone through it one way, unless you had equipment to disperse the electric charge. In any case, it's easy enough to bypass.
Just as I get through, something else pops up on my to-do list. Sidorovich contacts me and says a stalker named Fox has some info on Strelok. He's nearby, but he's hurt and needs help. Yeah, yeah, I'm goin'.
Hey, Fox! You up here? It's all right, Sidorovich sent me!
Oooh, shit. All right, I got a medkit right here, just hold still. You're lucky these things come with instructions...
Aaaaand... good as new! Fox is grateful enough to share the info without question, but unfortunately there isn't much to say. Looks like Fox's group and Strelok's group traded shots and insults a while back; nobody was hurt, and it looked like Strelok's group was waiting for somebody. However, Fox's brother, Seriy, knows more about Strelok, and Fox can put me in touch with him. Seriy is camped north, near a train station in the garbage dumps. I'm passing through there anyway, so I might as well see what he has to say.
Fox and I aren't out of the woods yet, though. I can hear dogs, and he says there was a pack of them chasing him.
A couple of them come charging in and get little too close for comfort, making Fox and I nearly blow each other's heads off. Still, between the two of us they don't last long. Fox throws me some extra change for the back-up.
Looks like we're not the only stalkers in the area that got their attention. This guy manages to dust the dog and scare off another one.
Sidorovich mentioned that some stalker was selling bad equipment and using his name to do it. He gave me a rough idea of where to look for him and suggested, using a variety of polite euphemisms, that I kill him. However, before I can get too far into the northern half of the cordon, I can hear gunshots. Lots of them, and not too far away.
Shit! Major shoot-out, looks like a pack of stalkers got ambushed by bandits. Still, they look like they have it under control.
I run as quickly as I can, but it's all over but the shouting when I get there. I stop to check the bodies, and I can't say as I'm too surprised to find that the phony trader is among them.
That's how it goes, I guess.
I stop to check out this crashed truck. I don't recognize the uniforms, and I don't really have time to, as the second I get close enough to look my geiger counter starts going off the scale. It hits me all at once; nausea, migraines, dizziness, a painful buzzing in my ears... it's all I can do to stagger away before I start glowing like a lamp.
I did find a medkit near the truck and got a hand on it before I had to bolt. Most of the supplies were contaminated, but it did have a small dose of some anti-radiation drug, carefully sealed. It doesn't quite do the trick, so I chase it down with a couple shots of vodka. Once again, I can get the Zone, in a manner of speaking, but why they manufacture alcohol to tread radiation poisoning is beyond my understanding.
Nevertheless, the symptoms finally subside, save for the nausea and dizziness. Just in time for it to start raining, too. Might as well trudge back to safety and pawn off some of this junk I've been picking up, as well as to let Sidorovich know that his problem has been "taken care of".
Oh, right. These guys again. Well, I can't use the tunnel. This can't possibly be the only way in and out of the southern cordon, right?
In hindsight, I should've seen this coming. Y'know what? I'm not even gonna tell anybody about this. No. Nobody told me about it, so let them find out after dancing through electricity and taking a radiation bath. Jerks.
Okay, dumped my excess gear off with Sidorovich in exchange for our precious currency, got my reward for somebody else's work... let's head to the garbage. Fighting off a bit of a cold thanks to the rain, but I'll deal.
This old checkpoint blocks access to the dumps. A couple of guys back at the camp mentioned that bandits had been lurking around it, and judging by the stalker and bandit bodies all over the place it looks like I'm a bit late to the party. Place is empty, so I guess whoever was left just moved on.
Gate's locked, so let's check the guardhouse.
I stop to get out of the rain for a bit. I'm drenched at this point, and the chill bites deep, but it looks like it's going to let up soon. All right, Seriy, let's hope you're a little better off than your brother.
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
Interestingly enough, in my playthrough, I had a bajillion bandits in that checkpoint. Cool how things change from one game to the next.
Got to to garbage for the first time and Bes was calling for help, ran to him. Realised this'll be a fairly big fight, 7 maybe 8 guys. Turns out there were atleast double that amount. Still, crouching behind a bus and leaning out to shotgun a guy in the gonads seemed to do the trick. And lord! the stash's I found through that battle.
Note to self: you do not need to use a medkit all the time. Bandages do the trick too.
I played stalker with Vista/E6600/8800GTS/2gb and it ran flawlessly (except the areas with memory leaks) at 1920x1200 50-60fps and that was before any patching so I assume it's only gotten better.
Stalker actually scales really damn well to different machines, it's just that there's a noticable difference between all the graphics settings (which, you know... might be the point of having scalable graphics settings) so it's a bit annoying to see people trying to bitch about it.
Fantastic.
Yeah I just picked my new PC up last night, I'm yet to find my god damn modem drivers though. Have to get my copy of STALKER back from my friend and post some screens.
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Of course, this bug can have awesome side effects, such as in Dark Valley
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
The rain finally stopped, so I took it as a good time to continue north. Soon enough I reached what I can only assume is the garbage region; a rather desolate strip of road surrounded by scrapyards, collapsed buildings, and massive piles of radioactive junk.
I hear shouts down the road, and see four people on the radar. I'll check it out.
Trouble. These tough guys want the poor kid to drop all his gear, and will probably just shoot him once he does. He looks over at me, calls out for help. Perhaps not coincidentally, the rain starts up again, albeit briefly.
What else is a guy to do? Two rounds drops the guy with the SMG and pepper his pal behind him. One of the thugs gets a shot off and wings the kid before I can reload, but he's toast as soon as I do. For his part, the kid does all right. He immediately gets out of the line of fire and trades shots with silencer there on the left, taking him down quickly.
Yurik's your everyday rookie from the look of him, but before we can swap stories I get a message over my PDA. A group of loners have gathered in a nearby junkyard and managed to fend off a bandit raid, but they took losses and are expecting a counterattack. It sounds like the stalkers in this region are getting hit hard by bandits, and the commander asks for anybody nearby to give them a hand.
Even though it's not my problem now, if I have to come back through here it probably will be. Yurik pipes up and mentions he's headed there himself. Kid's got guts, I'll give him that. What the hell, let's go.
Junkyard's just up the road. Before we get too far, I pass him an SMG and some ammo from one of the bandits that held him up. Only fitting, and green or no Yurik seems to know his way around a gun.
Here we are. I can see why they'd want help, I can only see three other stalkers and there's lots of room for cover. If we had time to set up a proper ambush, maybe this wouldn't worry me so much.
Bes, the commander, is more of a de facto leader than anything out here. I suspect nobody else really wanted the job. He and his boys are ready for trouble, so Yurik and I agree to help. Seconds later, their lookout, Nik, comes running. "They're coming!" he shouts, breathless.
"Good job guys, take your positions. Let's open a can of whupass on these bastards."
I didn't know people still said 'can of whupass'. Eh, whatever, it's his junkyard.
Nik and I take cover behind a truck. Yurik's off to my right, and Bes and the other guy, Gena, sweep left.
I can see a few of them coming up on the right, looks like they're fanning out. If they surround us, we're fucked.
I probably should shout 'grenade out!' when I do this, but that'd ruin the surprise of it.
Stalls them right in their tracks. All right guys, it's on! Open up!
Right flank is down! Yurik, cover Nik, I'm going over to help Bes!
A half-inch lower and that would've taken a good chunk of my head off. Right back at you, bitch!
Bes dropped two guys I didn't even know were there, and I can hear Gena mopping up on the other side of the truck.
Left flank is clear. I get back in time to watch Yurik catch this poor bastard at point-blank range.
Fight ain't over yet, but we've pushed 'em out of the junkyard. These guys weren't exactly caught napping, but they didn't have time to get to cover.
Barely worth describing. Couple items of interest on the bodies, and by their makeshift camp, but the real attention-grabber lies...
...over here.
This rainbow-looking spot is the point where a bolt bumped into the edge of a whirligig anomaly, I mentioned them earlier. Basically they suck things into the sky and spin them around until they vaporize. Normally, I wouldn't even bother going further, but there are health regeneration artifacts scattered throughout the area, with anomalies acting as a minefield of sorts. The artifacts are on the more expensive end, specifically meat chunks and souls.
What is a diligent stalker to do?
Use the tons of ammo lying around after that last shoot-out to knock one out from under an anomaly...
...and circle around through radiation, which, while hazardous, is not fatal with the appropriate medicine...
...and bingo! One meat chunk and one soul, and my medical supply needs have essentially been halved.
And would you look at that, the sky even cleared up a bit. Not a bad couple of hours, all things considered. Cheers, guys!
*knocks back a bottle of vodka alongside some rations*
Bes and I trade words. He throws down some cash for the help and tells a bit about how he got here: double murder and assault, took revenge on two unsavory-types who put his friend in the hospital and shot a cop while trying to escape. He's a little wary of working directly for Duty, and they don't patrol much out here, making most stalkers easy prey for bandits. Figured he'd hole up here and see what he could do.
He might be just bullshitting me, but god knows the Zone holds far worse. I've certainly met less decent people in the last ten hours or so.
And wouldn't you know it, it starts raining again. Oh well. Take it easy, guys.
I gotta get back to finding Seriy. Train station's further up the road. I have the strangest feeling the weather's trying to tell me something.
Asides: It took many, many deaths to get around those vortexes, since it's not always clear where their range is. It's possible, although extremely unlikely, to wriggle out of one once it grabs you. There is a window of opportunity to skirt by one if you edge forward until it triggers, then back away until it bursts. Also, while Axe's mod allows you to sell weapons and ammo to other stalkers, they still have preset amounts of cash and won't buy what they can't afford. With Yurik I had to grab the dropped SMG and put it in his path for him to pick it up, and then sold him some ammo. In hindsight I probably could've just sold medkits or something and then bought them back, but that'd be a waste of perfectly good rubles.
Which I'm now swimming in, of course, and I'd get it all back anyway, but again it's the principle of it.
Lastly, Bes has a silenced assault rifle, so failing the junkyard objective isn't a total loss. He'll also drop it if he gets critically injured; amusingly, he'll go through his preset dialogs before asking for a medkit (at least, he did as of 1.003).
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
Once I'd hit the otherside of the bridge, I spotted another 4 bandits. No way was I gonna let them scatter and take cover this time. Pulled out the Viper and gave them whatfor. Take that you pansies! Dead. 'Cept one guy who was screaming on the ground. I let a dog finish him.
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And the game for some weird reason ran on high perfectly fine. I just loaded it up, noticed a nice sheen to things, went in the options and was shocked. I swear it's messing with my head. Only an hour ago it wouldn't run on medium.
People complain about the beggining and how unfair it is and the only accurate gun is the sniper rifle but personally that just added to the whole atmosphere for me. I'm a stalker I'm not a marksman who has spent years learning to shoot and oh yeah I found this gun on a dead guy who appears to have lived outside even before he was dead. Im no expert on gun maintenance but thats probably not a good thing - so to sum up cry less, aim more. and for the love of god use cover, even a bush can help.
My only regret is that I didnt buy the CE because I wasnt sure of my purchase at the time but it turned out to be an immense game for about £25 new. Cant wait for the expansion
Just remembered the best moment I had, basically I had wondered too far forward into the Zone and found myself fighting guys well above my "level" as they had body armour and so could take rounds to the chest so I had to fight a running gun battle back out of the zone - at which point I realised I was carrying too much and so could only sprint for limited time before resting and damn it I did it the mans way I didnt drop anything and just used a bus for cover, thank you bus buddy you served me well and the fight at the start in the vehicle graveyard also awesome.
Pro Tip
Cover is so important I cant stress it enough and of course once I jumped into a bus in the vehicle graveyard fight and found a pack to loot. Also makes the fire fights dramatic with hearing the bullets hitting the metal.
Im so going to install this again :P