STALKER Call Of Pripyat

(2016 Note: In February 2010 I wrote this piece about the third Stalker game intending to post it somewhere but never got around to it. Here it is!)

Call of Pripyat shares none of the frustrations of Clear Sky, it brings back the FUN of the original game, and improves upon it in a multitude of ways.  Yes, this is still Stalker, and the game mechanics are similar: open world, shoot blokes, avoid mutants, hunt anomalies etc.  But the faction wars are toned down, and you feel like you actually stand a chance from the off.  At first you are somewhat fragile, but not stupidly vulnerable.  I started venturing out to places and noticed that, like the better-tuned RPGs, there were areas that I could just about tackle, but others for which I'd have to improve myself before I could return to them.  Feels just right.

Call of Pripyat is designed to be "open world" immediately. The main plot arc isn't entirely linear, the first 5 "quests" for it can be tackled in any order. The "world" comprises 3 large, distinct areas that are naturally shaped and do not feel like long corridors.  Keep walking in any direction and you'll see one completely different thing after another, a wrecked ship, swamps (very scaled down compared to Clear Sky), chasms, bridges, burned farms, anomalies, plateaus, and buildings.

Day and night cycles are still there, and you have a permanent clock in the main hud. There are two weapons slots, in which you can put whatever you like.  This was curiously limited in Clear Sky. CS got one thing right with artifacts: they were hard to find.  This is still the case, and detectors are required, making for a tricky but compelling challenge whenever you attempt it.  Earning money is tough, but a little easier than Clear Sky, and feels about right.  Shotguns are no longer nearly-useless, and the new Protecta is a solid, satisfying weapon.  Weapon upgrades are present again, but futher tuned, and even more essential.  Some of the dread and scares of the original game are present, if not to the same extent.  There are a lot of things that, if not frightening, are certainly odd and will put you on edge.  There's more "weird" in this game than "scary", put simply.  How many FPSs engage your imagination as much as your trigger finger?

And I found it absolutely reliable, too.  No crashes here.

Niggles:
Realistic but frustratingly small carry limit early on.
That damned view-bob.
Vanilla game could do with more AI spawns.
Short, some are saying 20 hours.
Could do with more dungeons!
Weapons degradation is a more prominent factor than Clear Sky, and if anything happend a tad too "rapidly" for my liking.
You'll wish they mapped more of Pripyat (but what's there is fantastic).

To conclude:
One of the best first-person-shooters ever but certainly not perfect.  A unique, compelling and satisfying experience, and recommended to absolutely everyone.  Google for the "SMRTER mod" after you have played the full game, to add more goodies and replayability.

Mainstream gaming and Ludonarrative Dissonance

Today I wish to draw attention to a collection of mails between Matthew Milewski and Clint Prentice of the gaming blog Error! Not Found. They discuss the so-called ludonarrative dissonance that occurs during the course of the new Tomb Raider game. Suffice to say, I played two hours of it and then uninstalled it in extreme disgust:

http://errornotfound.org/2013/03/08/tomb-raider-on-ludonarrative-dissonance/

Are the 80s back? Well for gaming they might be.

I'm old enough to remember baggies the first time. 'Avin it. Largin' it, even! Of course back in the late 80s/early 90s, when acid was popular (I mean the music, of course), rave became massive (say it loud!) and many gamers were to be found browsing through the racks of my local newsagent, to find that treasure trove much loved by gamers of the time: computer cassettes. Orange for Amstrad CPC, yellow for Spectrum? I forget which for Commodore 64... but yes, going entirely on some tiny screenshots and provocative (or not) hand-drawn cover art, finding a diamond in the rough happened all too rarely. These were all independently-created games, published by "real publishers" but the people involved could usually be counted on your hands.

After the rise of the PC in the 90s, Amigas and all the 8-bit machines fell into sharp decline. More and larger software teams were putting out games, and big boxes were in (and so was the hand-drawn art, thankfully). This era has a lot of collectables, and sadly to this day I cannot count System Shock in my collection, so collectable it is.

With the advent of the Playstation 2, and the turn of the century, gaming became big business. Small development teams were a rarity, and it was becoming increasingly more common to find AAA games being produced for PS2 or PC by teams comprising hundreds of people. The notion of "indie" gaming was a flicker in Jonathan Blow's eye. It would have seemed likely that the XBOX 360 era, with its stupendously high production values, would be the final nail in the coffin for "indie" or "independent" video and computer game production. Well, thankfully, it wasn't.

All of the three current major consoles have their "online" stores, and - particularly the XBOX Live Arcade - feature many independently-created games, including the mighty time-trickery of Braid. There are others that prompted this movement beforehand, but I mention Jonathan Blow and his game Braid, for a reason: Many will, and do cite it, as probably the most important independently developed game that was released commercially in recent gaming history.

And not even for the rather cool and quirky time-shifting gameplay. No, that wasn't important. What mattered was the notion that, again, an "indie" game could have commercial potential, and could even be distributed and sold on a major game console.

The short of it is, the last few years have seen an explosion in independent game design again. And not only for online game console stores, but for the more recent - and possibly even "bigger" - iTunes / iOS app store. There are now many and regular releases on mobile platforms such as iOS and Android, let alone PC, of independently-developed games. Often by small teams, or even just one or two people. Heck, the last game I purchased was Deadly Dungeons - a first-person action RPG for Android phones and tablets - and it was developed çalmost entirely by one person.

It is a good time to be a game developer.

More discussion and news on independent games can be found at IndieGames.com and TIGSource.

(As for my current progress, I am steadily learning the process of creating colour maps, normal maps, specular maps and alpha maps. Vital stuff, and I'm most of the way there already.)