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All Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs reports Mt. Tiburon Testing LabsBy Jon Peddie As usual we had more stuff to test than we could get to, so we picked the things that are most fun for us: games and displays. As so often happens, we discovered unusual and certainly undeclared artifacts, which we hope you’ll find interesting, amusing, and informative. First impressions of “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl”
Created by the Ukrainian developer GSC Game World, and first unveiled back in 2001, “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl” is a first-person shooter (FPS) set in the near-future in the ruined Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine. You, the player, are a “stalker,” which is a cross between a bounty hunter and a poacher. You have to earn money and collect arti-facts, and to do that you have to enter the radiation-riddled zone around Chernobyl to recover valuable artifacts that they then sell to researchers. The Zone is rife with killer mutants and rival stalkers, both of which mean to do players’ stalkers harm. The game is loosely based on the 1979 Russian film Stalker. (See Trivia about the game on page 18 to learn more about The Zone.) We first got exposed to some of the treats in visual quality the game would bring at an Nvidia product introduction where a now-famous scene of a railroad yard was shown with debris lying around and the wind swirling things like leaves and bits of paper. I ordered the game as soon as it was announced as available. It took two weeks to get here, and so this is not a total review but more like my first impressions. It is an amazing virtual world and, as one might imagine, The game is not very compelling in the beginning. There’s a learning curve related to figuring out what the objectives are, where to go, and what to do when you get there. It’s no “Doom3” slash and blast game, a bit more like HL2 (“Half Life 2”), with a touch of trading/reward concept—you collect things from dead people (who you either kill or find dead) and from locker boxes, and you can trade them, which sometimes requires you to go back to the starting point to trade them with The Trader, who you owe for saving your life. The graphics are very good. The game has really great atmos-pherics. The wind blowing through the weeds, and the associated sound effects, are really excellent. There are areas of radiation that have a little translucent, slowly exploding bubble that helps you spot them in a distance so you don’t acci-dentally wander into them. If you do, a Geiger counter starts clicking, and if you linger you can watch your health meter slowly go to zero. You can restore health, even from radio-activity, with health packs, and vodka. StuttersOn our 2-GByte 2.61-GHz 64-FX60 with 8800 SLIs and Dell 30-inch 2560 x 1600 rig, I saw stutters where the scene would freeze for a fraction of a second and then catch up, which I suspect is due to disk paging (the rig has a SATA 250-GByte disk) so that’s little annoying; more investigations is needed. But once you get into it, past what I suppose is the training section, although it is not so declared, it is an amazing virtual world and, as one might imagine, it’s like being at Chernobyl. Where’s the game?Even though I did nothing tricky during the installation and accepted all of its defaults, when in the game and being killed, I could not reload the saved game. When I quit (to Windows) a DOS text screen appeared and had five lines of “can’t find saved game.” Sooo, then I went online to see if there were any patches on this new game. Guess what? There were. The patch fixed the save problem, but it required me to restart the game at the beginning so, WORD OF WARNING: download all the patches first before starting the game (but after installing). Here’s looking at yaThe characters are good-looking but a bit decal-ed, and the movements are a little stiff. 
FIGURE 1. Faces are decals mostly in “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” (Source: JPR) In the course of the game you are to go up to the characters, press F to talk, and then a dialog screen comes giving you one to four things to say or ask. You choose one and the character you an answer, sometimes useful, mostly not. It reminded me of the old text-based “Adventure” game. It’s good for treasure-hunting (think “Myst”) and puzzle-solving, but very distracting if you’re looking for action and nice firefight. No linear game play, almost role-likeThere are firefights in the game, but that’s far from its main theme. The game isn’t linear line HL2, “F.E.A.R.,” or others that take you through a rather restricted path and scripted ride. Like “Deus Ex” and “Ghost Recon,” “S.T.A.L.K.E.R” lets you take an open multi-path through its huge environments. 
FIGURE 2. “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” is a huge world, multi-path, Its open-ended gameplay makes it more like a role-playing game, but you don’t have to deal with role-playing problems like strength or intelligence, or accumulating skills and abilities. You do have to have skill with a rifle and scavenging med kits weapons, and ammunition, and you need to scavenge from dead people, enemies, and comrades. Me and my PDAThe first time a PDA was introduced inside a game was 1984 (I think—anyone who knows, please tell me the first game to use a PDA). Many games after that have been using a PDA as an advanced HUD. Most recently the list includes “Splinter Cell” (Sony Ericsson p900) and “Doom3.” It seems like “Quake4” has one as well, and it’s becoming quite common. Unofficially many scripting gurus have been distributing HUD.utx files to the gaming community for Unreal technology-based games, building PDA interfaces into games that weren’t proposing the possibility at retail. The idea of a PDA is used extensively in “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” The PDA has your maps, your missions, and an encyclopedia—haven’t figured out how to use it yet. 
FIGURE 3. Your PDA is as important as your weapons. BulletproofAn interesting thing in this game is that is the enemies seem to be almost bulletproof—you, of course, are not. It takes several shots, even more than one head shot, to down them. Bad weatherThe game makes great use of particle effects in the atmos-pherics with rain effects and lighting, and when lightning strikes the background lighting from the flash is particularly well done. 
FIGURE 4. Bad weather on top of all the other problems you
have to deal with— As you work your way through the fields and down roads windstorms hit and die away and raging rainstorms break out. Time of dayAs you work your way through the fields, tunnels, and buildings, if you get tied in a big fight, the time of day will change, going from daylight to dark or visa versa. This is a -really nice feature and adds to the realism a lot. Very intelligentThe AI is damn close to what I’ve been whining for, for some time—the characters are really cunning, finding multiple paths to me if I make it too difficult for them one way. And, as mentioned above, they are almost indestructible. There’s one scene in an underground tunnel where four squads of three troopers come after you, while you’re running out of ammunition and life. It’s really hard because, even though the troopers enter at the same point (they have to, it’s a doorway), they take a different route, and it’s different each time. (When you get to this spot you’ll know what I mean; it took me six tries to get through it.) It’s breakableThe physics are goodThings break (boxes, windows, some beams and barriers), fall down and bounce, and stir up dust and debris when they do. Bodies fall, but seem to be rag-dolls (remember when this was started—it’s not going to have the latest of the latest stuff in it). It doesn’t take advantage of the Ageia accelerator and isn’t using PhysX, but it looks to be a good candidate for adding hardware support in the future. As it stands today, though, a PhysX accelerator would not make a difference since it does not use PhysX software. Bleak, but…“S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl” is a bleak game, and it captures the postapocalyptic setting very well. It is supposed to take place in Pripyat, Ukraine, a large, metropolitan city that to this day is in absolute silence. If you go there you can see Communist propaganda posters still on the buildings and on bulletin boards; they were posted on over 20 years ago. Only a handful of people for miles in any direction. Trivia about “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.,” and ChernobylA nuclear accident as mentioned above took place near Chelyabinsk in 1957. Several hundred square kilometers were polluted by fall-out and abandoned; of course, there was no official mention of this forbidden zone at the time.
Radiation will stay in the Chernobyl area for the next 48,000 years, but humans may begin repopulating the area in about 600 years—give or take three centuries. Related “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” titlesElena’s motorcycle ride through ChernobylA story about town where one can ride with no stoplights, no police, no danger to hit some cage or some dog (http://www.kiddofspeed.com/). Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz SmithMartin Cruz Smith (author of Gorky Park) has developed a character named Arkady, a determined and usually undermined Moscow plainclothes man. The prosecutor uses the excuse of a murder to get rid of Arkady by sending him (into exile) at Chernobyl, where life is cheap and the crime is unlikely to be solved. If Arkady found the people in Moscow uncooperative, the people at Chernobyl are unfriendly, fatalistic, and could care less about anything. Supposedly the only people in the Zone of Exclusion are scientists studying the -effects of the radioactivity that have permanently scarred the area, but there are also local poachers, and scavengers stealing what they can salvage from the abandoned buildings (http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/wolves_eat_dogs/review/). Stalker the movieThe game “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” is loosely based on the 1979 Russian film Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky. There are people who absolutely go mad for this movie (“the best movie ever made”), but then there are people who go mad for any film by Tarkovsky (who also made the original Solaris—“the most beautiful movie ever made”). Others go mad watching Tarkovsky movies. In the story, stalkers are people who make illicit trips to The Zone to gather alien artifacts for sale. • The insignia on the police officers’ helmet features two letters: “AT.” Those are the initials of the director, Andrei Tarkovsky. • The original negatives were destroyed by a processing error at the laboratory, and the film had to be shot again from scratch with a new director of photography. • It is said that the rushes of the first version of the film were kept by editor Lyudmilla Feiginova in her home for years. They were destroyed by a fire that also claimed her life. For a brief writeup on the movie go to http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/plotsummary. And for more background on the Stalker story line check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(film). Perspective on ChernobylSome grim photos of buildings and mutilated people (they did become monsters), and historical clarity are at http://todayspictures.slate.com/inmotion/essay_chernobyl/. Also you’ll find some facts and photos at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_alienation. What do we think?The game was definitely worth waiting for, if for nothing else than the environment and associated elements like the atmos-pherics and images. The story line goes limp in a few places with the usually creepy monsters, one of them being transparent except for its eyes, and another that seems to be able to warp time and space, to your peril. The everyone-is-against-you aspect is interesting, but sometimes the soldiers ask for your help, rewarding you with money, and presumably friendship. The game will, if you allow it to, remind you of the tragedy and dangers of mishandling nuclear reactors. But aside from the occasional monsters, it is more of a tourist walk through The Zone. Like many of the new cinematic-quality games, “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” has such rich environments you could just wander around it (which I do, and did, only to be killed too many times). I think modern games should have a non-gun god mode to allow you just wander the models; they’re that well done and interesting. All in all, it’s an excellent blend of exploration of the zone, with lots of action, an acceptable amount of horror, and enough surprises to keep you in the game. There is a good description of the game at http://www.stalker-videogame.com/. More Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs reports |
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The long-awaited game based on the nuclear accident at
Chernobyl in 1986 and the subsequent movie of the same name are finally here.
FIGURE 5. Map of The Zone. 