How Come You Don't Post? (Stalker)

Since I got back from vacation, I haven't been playing much. The promise of Oscuro's Oblivion mod wasn't being fulfilled and leveling the skills was boring. The same for AoE3: Asian Dynasties. The same for Rise of Legends.

I'm currently playing Stalker. But it's not really exciting either. It's actually surprisingly similar to Oblivion in the sense that it's a fairly large area to explore. But there are no skills or attributes to level. There's just better equipment.

It's better than Oblivion in that I can go back to the newbie areas and clean house. But that's a complete waste of time, as they don't drop good loot. They don't even drop ammo I can use. My guns are too awesome for their wussy bullets. Plus my guns degrade every time I fire them. The newbie enemies are literally not worth the bullets it takes to kill them. Maybe it's not that much better than Oblivion, come to think of it.

But that's kind of the point. Stalker is supposed to reflect a very harsh environment. You actually have to eat fairly often to keep your strength up. You have a fairly small amount of equipment you can carry at one time. I only have one main gun (which is wearing out, but I'm having a hard time finding a good replacement) and one backup (which is in desperate need of an upgrade). I finally use a scope, so I can actually fight at a decent range. It does a good job of making me feel that I'm always behind the eight ball, trying to keep it together in a place that wants me extra dead. There is much saving.

To balance it out, the AI is completely incapable of dealing with green foliage. Brown foliage they can see right through. #%& brown foliage. But the green stuff. That stuff is magic. My favorite is the dead guy Xmas tree. At one of the checkpoints I had to pass in the game, there was a fir tree nearby. I was seen by the guards and hid under it. They walked to where they had last seen me. I shot them. I had to go by that point many times.



When I'm in a bush, with a dozen guys circling like sharks, I'm very aware of how ridiculous the scenario is, but fighting a dozen guys straight up is suicide, so I hide in a bush.



I feel like I should love that. It sounds like my kind of crazy. If there was a game about taking out dozens of guys while hiding in bushes, I would put down my money in a heartbeat. But it undercuts the grittiness of the rest of the game, so it annoys me instead. Maybe when the bad guys get grenades (or finally think to use the ones I keep looting off of their corpses), it will stop being a viable strategy. I'm not looking forward to that. But we'll see.