Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This is the kind of thing we’d normally leave for LewieP to herd into his weekly Bargain Bucket post, but if we wait to mention it till Sunday, most of the great offers will be gone. So, call this the RPS Bargain Jar or something. Quite a few of you have griped about digital store GamersGate’s general design over the past few months, and it seems they too were aware of their fugliness. There’s just been a big old redesign to make the site sleeker and noticeably faster – and, if you ask me, just a little bit GoG-esque. Shiny! And, thank Vonnegut, it doesn’t demand to install yet another icon into our heaving system trays. To celebrate, they’ve a week of ultro-discounts – a new price-slashed game each day, plus a particularly splendid one lasting the course of the week. Buy buy buy!
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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?
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We’ll be talking more about Clear Sky soon, once gamers have had a chance to actually play it rather than just shout conspiracy theories about the mixed-bag scores it’s been receiving. On the pre-eve of the game’s European release, however, there’s already a patch out. Notably, it addresses a few of the things Jim’s, Kieron’s and my respective reviews complained about, such as easing the penalties from bandit muggings (note to everyone in the world: the multiple random, avoidable bandit muggings and the single, cutscene-based, unavoidable bandit mugging that happens partway through the main quest are not the same thing), improving performance, increasing the cash won from missions and vague talk of balance improvements. I’ve stuck the complete patch notes beneath the cut, too.

Even if it’s as good as it sounds, I’m really not convinced it can lift the game to the level of its predecessor, but I’ll be glad to be proved wrong. I adore Stalker, and I had dearly hoped Clear Sky would be awesome. I’ll give the patch a spin tomorrow and see whether it takes the game any closer to my obscenely high standards.
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After Jim and Alec’s reviews have found their way into the world, Eurogamer eject my take on Clear Sky onto the Internet. In it I say things like:

“It’s a graphically improved prequel that integrates a mass of things that were promised for Stalker with assorted game tweaks that – on paper – sound as if they’d improve the immersion of the game considerably. In practice, it mainly shows that there are no good or bad ideas: only good and bad executions.”

And other stuff which is a bit more flowery. As per usual, eh? More here.

EDIT: Jim’s review here.

Bad news for Stalker: Clear Sky – it’s been recalled from stores. Well, only briefly – apparently the initial shipments didn’t contain CD keys, cleverly. So it’s been delayed a few days while some poor sod presumably prints out a load of stickers, meaning its September 5th release date in the US ain’t gonna happen.
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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.
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Initially I couldn’t actually bring myself to watch this. Those that had assured me that it was “okay, I suppose”, “looking a bit better the first game,” and – ominously – “Jim, it’s a kill x rats mission.” I hoped that’s wasn’t true. I had to take a look.

Also: it’s almost sarcastically karmic. There was me moaning about trailers that had no game footage, and then along comes twenty-five minutes of a game that I didn’t want to spoil for myself by watching. Sigh.
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What. Okay, I think that this Clear Sky preview (new footage intermixed with the 1UP team waffling about what they’ve seen) shows that the incidental voice acting for Clear Sky is in atmosphere-shattering English, rather than Russian. There’s also some deeply shit music. GSC, noooo!

The new inventory looks good though.

My preview of STALKER: Clear Sky, penned jointly with Tim Edwards of PC Gamer, has been posted on computerandvideogames.com. In it we talk to Anton Bolshakov about how the original game came to be, before moving on to the nature of the new beast:

Central to that is what GSC are doing with the various factions that inhabit the zone. While there were a large number of factions in the original game (Freedom, Duty, the military, the mercenaries, the scientists, the neutral stalkers and the servants of the monolith) you were only really able to follow three paths: Neutrality, Freedom, or Duty. In Clear Sky you’ll be able to join up with seven different factions, work with them, fight them, and ultimately lead your chosen side to victory.

“It’s a global war of factions within the zone,” says Bolshakov. “Now each faction has a fully fledged main camp with a number of key characters in there, like a trader, a mechanic, a leader, a barman, and all of those perform specific roles.”

So here’s my concern. I’ve played Stalker. Twice. I’ve seen the Zone. I know how it works. I’ve killed every mutant, collected many guns, many artifiacts, drunk much vodka, eaten many, many sausages. Do I genuinely want to do it again, but with the linear purpose of its wobbly but oddly affective plot removed?

Damn straight I do. The Zone was my favourite game-place to be last year. Give me more mutants, more guns, more artifacts, and all the digi-sausage I can eat.
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