Rock, Paper, Shotgun

GSC have released another trailer showing off some of the environmental details for Stalker prequel Clear Sky. We’ve seen some of the tech-demo stuff before, but the glimpses of the new regions are rather tantalising.
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The image above is from this gallery over at Strategy Informer, which is packed with similar lavish glimpses of the forthcoming Stalker prequel. It seems to be showing off some of the new areas, as well as suggesting a level of detail that will cause my graphics card to shudder and slowly die. Elsewhere, our Eurogamer chums have had a long chat with Oleg Yavorsky, the GSC team’s primary spokesman. He says a good deal about the new game, and also talks about the failings of the original game. He blames this in part on the reticence of the US audience in taking to the game, which he sees a fundamental cultural divide.

It seems that to appeal to North America you need really flashy, bright games, and you can see that every eastern European game is very dark. In the end, I guess this just comes down to our culture and history – we’re just different people, and that’s that.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is due out on 29th August.

There’s a Clear Sky DX10 tech trailer over on GamersHell. Normally I’d embed it here, but I can’t get it to upload to GameTrailers, and our poor little server might not be happy about much heavier traffic than it’s getting already. Anyway, the video shows off some pretty spectacular DX10 technologies (realistic watery surfaces, realistic gas and smoke, etc) and makes me suspect that I might need to beef up my PC in the next couple of months. Definitely worth a download.

Someone has posted a bit of shakycam footage of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky DX10 tech demo. Not convinced it looks all that much better than the DX9 game cranked up to full blast, but that could simply be the grainy video.

GameTrailers, stalking you makes us happy inside.

News so hot I didn’t even have time to work out a proper headline, news reaches us that STALKER: Clear Sky, GSC’s 1.5-equel to Jim’s favourite game of last year, is going to be digitally distributed exclusively through Valve’s Steam. This is interesting for a couple of reasons. In terms of business analysis, it’s another game that’s gone the Steam route… and it’s one which hasn’t even discussed how it’ll be distributed in the shops yet, since they’ve parted company with THQ. Secondly, there’s five new Clear Sky shots over on their site.

Press release beneath the cut, with Valve’s Gabe Newell calling GSC “Forward-thinking” and GSC’ Sergiy Grygorovych describing Steam as “the leading global digital distribution platform for games”. I like to imagine people quoted in press releases winking chummily to each other when they say things like that. You should try it too.
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