Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

Think of this as a first of many articles in which I, the person who tends to miss more titles than he actually plays, go back and find games I’ve been curious about for years and actually play them. I was a Nintendo-only person for the whole of the last console generation, and never really much of a PC gamer outside Grim Fandango and anything developed by Valve.

This instalment, it’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, a game that I feel I should have tried to appreciate prior to playing seven hells out of Fallout 3. But nonetheless, it’s my first step (excluding Valve) into PC-FPS territory, so I’ll give you a stream-of-consciousness breakdown of what happens when I’m playing.

It’s a Monday night, and I’m trawling through my RSS feeds, absorbing a lot of games news whilst tracking Kevin Smith on his endless Twitter announcements, a pastime I enjoy as it allows me to Twitterise my little world without actually having one of the diabolical pieces of social-network-cancer myself. I notice the fine fellows over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have drawn attention to an FPS of a few years back that almost slipped past me, if it weren’t for a scathing review in a magazine I don’t remember the name of, any more.

I log onto Steam and see that yes, the price has indeed been dropped to a nice, unemployed-friendly price of three and a half of Her Majesty’s pounds sterling. I drop the cash, and get the download, letting it sink onto my hard-drive in bits over the next 48 hours.

These 48 hours pass, and I’m now loading it up, tweaking a few graphics settings and revelling in a fairly recent FPS my laptop can actually handle. I look over at Lex, watching her work her way through yet another academic paper on 19th-century literature, the odd forlorn glance at my screen betraying the struggle between the FPS-nut and the literary scholar taking place in her subconscious. I watch the opening video, wincing slightly at every bit of dialogue as the sound goes half a second out of sync, ruining any chance I have at reading the quality of facial animation. It’s brilliant regardless.

That being said, I do a double take when the truck in the FMV crashes because it was hit by lightning. I shit you not, this actually occurs in the opening sequence. A truck explodes, from the back, with nothing in the back bar ten corpses, because it got hit by fucking lightning. I remind myself I’m engaging in a medium where marsupials run around collecting crystals for a living, and bite back the instant urge to criticise the absence of realism present.

“Okay,” I mutter to myself. Here we go. I find myself talking to a fat Ukrainian gentleman, who teaches me how to use my PDA, containing the functions of mission-keeping, map-reading, and even ranking Stalkers all in one handy package. Odd, I muse to myself. Food is scarce, and yet everyone’s got some kind of iPhone. He sends me off on my first mission, and I charge across the nearby field to assault a set of buildings, with little regard for tactics. I die fairly rapidly, and decide to change difficulty – I had a “badass motherfucker” moment when setting it – and try a slightly more intelligent approach.

I am rewarded with not only the most brutal shotgun I’ve ever seen, but a gleeful Fallout-esque bout of looting corpses and deciding what I’d like to leave on the soon-to-decay cadaver, and what of its meagre possessions interest me most. I’ve still not worked out the map yet.

*

Fast forward around two hours, and I’ve changed level twice. This process baffles me. The first time, I shot a man in the chest, and it asked me if I would like to change level. I was a little thrown at first, truth be told. Yes or no? I choose “yes,” even though I’ve got side missions left to do, which all get deleted as I move on. The second change came shortly after a firefight against ridiculous odds which began to give me an idea of why some men want nothing more than for someone to compare them to Steven Segal.

Currently, I’m helping a bunch of Stalkers fight off a group of army troops. Why they’re attacking isn’t clear, but at this point my moral compass is rapidly devolving into whether the person is a red or a green crosshair. With that strategy firmly in mind, I begin to lay waste to the troops with a machine gun, before looting a couple of them to fill my ammo back up. But of course, their ammo and weaponry is of a completely different scale to my peasant-style aggro-garb. I decide to step it up a notch, and take his gun.

At this point, I feel conflicted. I own a pistol, two machine guns, and a sawn-off shotgun. While in Fallout 3 this wouldn’t be a problem, as I was a stamina-heavy player capable of hauling a couple hundred pounds of gear at any one time, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. won’t let me play the same tune. My weight limit is fifty kilos, but I’m sitting a couple kilos over. What could it hurt, I wonder?

The answer came as me and my new-found friends sprinted for cover out of the army’s reach. My sprint faltered, and my field of vision was now mainly comprised of the floor as I staggered forwards, gasping for breath. They wasted no time, however, in sending me down into a pitch-black tunnel network to kill some bandits, seemingly completely unrelated to the army attack, which was never explained. I take out the bandits, deciding against using my flashlight as theirs is a dead giveaway (tip: when in a firefight in the dark, attach lamps to poles on the ground, not to your skull). I climb back up the ladder, and bam. Level change.

After realising, finally, that “level change” is sometimes the equivalent to Half-Life’s infuriating loading bar that activates geographically, I head back down into the dark, worming my way through passages filled with odd warped-air effects representing Anomalies (physics anomalies… *sigh*). I kill a crazy Licker-like creature that has the ability to cloak (seemingly so it can stand facing a pillar), and die to a horde of bandits who are seemingly impervious to acid, bullets and/or gravity. I quit for the night.

*

And I never actually went back to it.

Most would assume this is me simply copping out, not wanting to make the effort and play the entire title start to finish. Perhaps you’re right if you’re making the rather arrogant decision to force your own mentality on my own and apply them to decisions I myself make. However, the real reason was much more simple; I didn’t enjoy it enough for it to drag me back in.

At first, I wondered about the lack of gamerscore and whether that added to my unwillingness to play the game after being thoroughly sucked into the Xbox point-score fanaticism. But that being said, I play DS games and TF2 regularly enough, and I recieve no points for these, surely? I adore the Medic class and have exhausted most achievements for the gentleman in gloves and a lab coat, but I still play the game because it engages with me on a fundamental level.

With S.T.A.L.K.E.R. it was a different experience. The shooting mechanics are great, the movement fluid, and the inventory system all very neat and Diablo-esque in its own little way. But where was the fundamental background? Telling a long, flowing story is all very well, but imagine The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe starting in Narnia, with no explanation of how they got there, only their dialogue indicating they’d been anywhere at all? Ridiculous, no?

The missions were well-scripted, as was the character animation, but it was the anomalies that finally sent me packing. The concept is beyond inspired; warped clouds of altered physics that will damage anything coming near or into direct contact with them, pacified by a small grenade-type piece of equipment. But ultimately, they were physical obstacles. Characters were concerned with getting their coats and killing other Ukranian thugs in the locality. Yet, were they concerned that the fabric of space-time itself was wandering around, semi-sentient, hell-bent on throwing them in the air and collapsing their skeletal structure from ten yards away? Where were the science-soldiers, the ones tasked with restoring the balance?

I sigh at this point simply because it defies belief that you wouldn’t expand on the anomalies from the beginning. Look at Half-Life, and imagine if there had never been any explanation to events whatsoever. You can’t introduce science fiction into an average, post-nuclear military narrative, and then have it not become the focus of what draws the player in. As I write I wonder what engaged others so much; those brave souls at RPS proclaimed this to be one of the best PC games of the last decade, and in the age of titles that redefined videogaming, titles such as World of Warcraft, Left4Dead and Wii Fit, are we really bestowing this accolade on a title that merely flirts with science fiction and inspired design?

What’s more, where was the emphasis on the post-nuclear setting? Chernobyl is a real place, and I’m confident a title set in the unbelievably bleak wasteland that is the real, contemporary Chernobyl. The second fictitious explosion is logical enough, with that alternate reality being an actual possible reality in today’s Ukrainian society. The playable area you inhabit is based on the real-life Zone of Alienation, an area full of radiation, suffering and poverty brought on by a disaster of unimaginable proportions and a lack of support from those who are fearful of venturing into the cancer-stricken radioactive environment. A moral dilemma exists within the location itself, and in my opinion, the fact this is real, existing place with similar problems (minus the floating lightning balls) is something that needs to have attention called to it. This is no Alternate Washington, this is, minus the excessive gunplay and mutants, something that draws from real life.

I’ll expand on this in a longer article, soon, but for the meantime, look at Fallout 3. Everywhere, the emphasis was strong on what would happen if the rockets that sit under our collective feet were ever launched. Most people found it inspired, found it to be “cool,” as it were. Personally, I found it chilling. I don’t see nuclear war as a bogeyman story for children, I see it as a cultural inevitability. In order to cleanse the human race of the arrogance and violence so inherent in its culture – by this I mean real life, not Call of Duty, a game criticised for its violence when the events it was based on were never criticised by the same demographic in turn - the human race will need to destroy and reinvent itself. No pain, no gain.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a good game. Great, even. But it’s just not to my taste, and in my opinion, the taste of any gamer who values a sturdy background in order to accept such a massive change in pace, scenery and historical events that pre-date the timeline of the playable sections. I never got around to it, and I doubt I’ll get around to finishing it, simply because there are other titles where I can sit behind the eye sockets of a hero in a forlorn wasteland and think about nothing but survival, and I don’t see the thrill of a new version of that idea arriving until Bioshock 2 makes its debut. Think of my tastes what you will, but consider this: when a game claims to instil a raw need for survival in the player, are they not making the fundamental mistake of assuming the player doesn’t want to survive already?