rorschach’s journal

Early in the morning (read 0900) I wake up to the sound of someone drumming my door. Ah! It’s Gargoyl3 (erstwhile Gargoyle… kids!). “eh, ho gaya re”. Finally, the chap’s been up all night in the lab with both our laptops (while I’ve been pleasantly snoozing), and now we’ve finally got our hands on the much-awaited S.T.A.L.K.E.R – Shadow of Chernobyl.

The ISO (an MDF rather) is a mere 3.x gb betraying the actual disk requirement. The Setup first scans the hardware (and does that very efficiently too) and checks if the system meets the requirement (better than some games which do that AFTER the installation). Gargoyl3’s PC easily meets the requirements… now comes the first glitch… the game’s asking for 9gb (shock and awe revisited) of disk-space, but wait that’s not the reason why I said glitch, while the (full) installation seems to take only 5gb (eh?)… the developer’s seemed to have grossly over-estimated the disk-req!

Anyhow, we proceed to the game and believe me the menu (as well as the loading) screen really help build up the excitement. The starting cut-scene isn’t disappointing either (I actually expected some monsters… but alas!). The real disappointment comes later… the game much touted as a revolutionary fps, turns out to be an quest-based-rpg (yucks!). The same rigmarole of talking to people, maintaining an inventory and using a pda (I’m kinda tired of the pda routine now) gives this game a signature rpg feel. We’ve only played for some 10-15 mins so I can’t really comment on the action but whatever I saw was, quite frankly, blasé. The AI doesn’t seem overtly intelligent and the physics isn’t brilliant either. At one point we were standing in between two NPCs (and shooting at them) while they were merely content at taking pot-shots at our team-mates… mind you, they didn’t take even one shot at us, while we were busy “kicking their arse” (mind the quotes… the action, like I said, is quite tasteless.

The only good I could draw (from my brief look of the game) was the environmental details! It’s quite sad that developers, these days, are concentrating more on improving the aesthetic value of a game (and thus making them unplayable on systems like mine!) rather than on the in-game intelligence and actual playability. Only a few exceptions like Farcry, Half Life2 and FEAR are games which actually combine both intelligent gameplay with stupendous graphics. I don’t know about others but I’d rather play a bad looking Half Life than a good looking Spiderman.

The net result, S.T.A.L.K.E.R’s a good enough game for those who like both traditional fps’s and rpg’s, but don’t expect it to behave like another Half Life or FEAR… lets keep our fingers crossed that CrySis doesn’t disappoint (it’s a Ubisoft game… I don’t think it can).

BTW, we downloaded TMNT as well… kinda fun. It’s basically a Prince of Persia for kids (when I say kids, I do mean kids). Don’t expect it to behave intelligently (either). The graphics are neat and action cool. Play it with least expectations and you might actually like it. Cowabunga!

Arrivederci.