January 15, 2011
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Looking Back At Chernobyl: My Saga With Stalker
I’d heard of Prypiat, the empty city, before the videogames. But I never really experienced it; never fell in love with its ashen apartment buildings and tainted air, until Stalker emerged from the creative labyrinth of modern Russia. And I played them all with a devotion I’d dare to label as cultish.
The beginning with this attachment with the east started in 2001, back when PC gamer ran previews on a game called Stalker: Oblivion Lost. They were describing a post apocalyptic role player that seemed reminiscent of the fallout series, but from the shooter perspective with a darker universe set in eastern europe. In the promoted history, the 1986 Chernobyl explosion had turned out even worse, leaving a zone of inhospitable radiation that gunslingers and monstrous mutants struggled to survive in.
The idea captured my imagination, but it would be years until I held a boxed game in my hands. Being the impatient teenager that I was I did some searching and pirated a pre-alpha version of their X-ray engine. Pre-alpha means the game isn’t even close to ready. Its more of a tad-pole swimming in the creative uterus; barely formed and still easily aborted.
The thing only came with three maps, and you had to load and launch them seperately. It couldn’t go more than fifteen minutes without crashing, and animations were rudimentary at best.
But they had the mood right. Each map felt desolate and abandoned. An open field around a decaying highway, or a military compound with rusting gates, or an underpass filled with torched cars and vicous rats seemed like the perfect playground for a desperate firefight.
The first time I played the released version of Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl was during a residence party with a bunch of potheads. One was decidedly more interesting and fun than the other. When your second weapon in the first half hour of gameplay is a side-by-side sawn-off shotgun . . . well that’s my kind of game. When I was clear in the head and had my settings tweaked, I ran three simulatenous save games in Shadow of Chernobyl simply because there were so many options. I had limited inventory, and there was a lot of equipment to try out. Beating the game meant anything from having your brain dissolved and becoming a zombie, to destroying an monsterous AI construct of former soviet scientists. It was a classic.
So classic that after the final cinematic ended I immediately clicked New Game and started again. Stalker has a very active mod community, so within a week I was downloading mods to make the nights darker, the guns more varied, and the blasted environment even more punishing.
But the hardcore playthrough took some more time. And before I finished it, the expansion Clear Sky was announced. Promising a prequel in a more populated but still deadly Zone, the Clear Sky expansion opened the door to groups of gun wielding opponents who took cover and lobbed grenades.
Clear Sky was a stand-alone expansion pack that changed Stalker into an open-world, team-based shooter. Instead of roaming alone I found myself aligning with factions to seize objectives and control the zone. Its addition of an over-under hunting shotgun brought a special kind of personal delight, but the crowds of mercenaries in the still smoking Ukraine was a departure. Battlegrounds were less appealing than wastelands. The idea of the zone as an enemy was developed too, with blow-outs that forced you to hide from savage winds and deadly radiation.
Call of Prypiat was the crowning achievement. It blended the dynamic world of Clear Sky, with the stark survivalism of Shadow of Chernobyl to produce an intriguing mix that enveloped me entirely. This may sound ridiculous; but one of the biggest changes was the ability to equip two weapons of any type, not just a pistol and rifle. That meant my much loved sawn off shotgun could be kept as a sidearm throughout the entire game. And still be useful if I paid the drunk gunsmith to upgrade it for me.
Stalker is the kind of game where a quest is as likely to lead to an ambush as it is to lead to loot. Where vodka is an effective cure for radiation poisoning. Where ammo is precious and making the choice between slug rounds or buckshot is one of real consequence.
The defining moment of my Stalker experience was during my first play through with Shadow of Chernobyl. It was sunset, and I had just snuck out of a military base after stealing some secret documents. I was about to flee into a tunnel network and make good my escape, when I saw a group of bandits on the crest of a hill. Normally my enemies, the bandits had proven useful by attacking the special forces guards, a distraction I was able to exploit. But now, these guys looked broken. They had retreated from the gates of the military base, but now were firing into the air in a sporadic manner. It seemed I had encountered an AI glitch. So I moved closer, thinking I could make an easy kill and loot their corpses for ammo.
As I crept behind trees for cover, the firing seemed to decrease. Instead of a squad putting out heavy suppression, there now just seemed to be one AK barking away. There was only one guy left, surrounded by corpses, trying to reload with the sun burning a deep red behind him. I thought it was weird, until a cloaked blur raced up and a bloodsucker materialized to grab the poor bastard by the throat and hoist him into the air. I sprinted for the caves and didn’t look back, but the tentacled terror howled the whole way. There was no scripting there. When I played through the same area in another save, the bandits were cut down by a military sniper and the beast was no where to be seen.
That sense of completely random adventure in a hostile wasteland is why all three Stalker games are still occupying their combined 20 gigs of space on my hard drive.
To contact the author of this post: edward.osborne@wildgunmen.com
Those fucking bloodsuckers, man. Easily the most terrifying enemy in any FPS I’ve ever played.
Dam i was scared shitless when I first encountered bloodsuckers underground. Was shooting everywhere. SoC was one of my favorites, Clear sky, not so much, But CoP made me interested into the game even more. The atmosphere always caught me attention and the experience is different every time. Using the Stalker Complete mods made the game even better, and im going to start another play through of CoP with it. It makes everything better.
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