This is the first Stalker game I played. I knew it was the prologue so I played it before Shadow of Chernobyl (SOC). Hopefully that won’t mess up the story for SOC for me. Stalker: Clear Sky (CS) starts out as a tough open-ended game. In the swamp area you get your feet wet with fighting enemies, finding artifacts, and avoiding emissions (or getting close enough to get artifacts). The swamp also sets up the main story and your character’s role in it.

In the first half of the game you move from area to area following the main story, but each area also has plenty of side missions and items to find. In this part of the game you are trying to earn as much money as possible to purchase upgrades for your weapons and armor (you don’t need to buy weapons and armor because you will find plenty on enemies and in stashes, but their are other items like ammo and add-ons you may want to purchase). During this part of the game I felt I could do missions as I wanted and it was fun and challenging.

The second half of the game turns into a regular FPS with linear missions all related to the main story. You pretty much go from battle to battle and area to area doing what you are told until the end of the game. You also find some of the best weapons during this part of the game. Unfortunately, their are very few traders and no mechanics to upgrade your weapons. You also have very little time to enjoy these new weapons.

The interface of the game works well and is an improvement over SOC (which I started playing). However, I think there is so much potential this game squandered. Working to upgrade weapons and armor was fun so I don’t know why they gave up on this later in the game.  Also the side missions could be a nice break from fighting enemies on your way to the end of the game. Furthermore, the game seems to make a big deal out of the factions in the beginning of the game. You can join the different factions such as Stalkers, Freedom, Duty, etc. and they give you some nice items for joining. But the only thing joining seems to do is give you an enemy to fight (each faction has an enemy faction it is fighting). You can still do many missions without joining the factions so joining seems rather pointless except for the stuff you receive.

There are other frustrating parts to this game. When you enter the Cordon (the second area of the game) you walk through an area in which you immediately come under fire from a machine gun from the Military faction. You cannot go around this and it is very difficult to get through. I thought this rather pointless as well (although I felt good about killing all the Military idiots later and taking their stuff). Carry weight is another problem in the game. In the beginning you need lots of money. There is plenty of equipment from enemies to sell, but you are limited to 50kg. I did finally use a mod to change this to 500kg which made things easier because I could sell more things for money without having to backtrack and I could select take all from people without having to cherry pick items. Speaking of backtracking, two more problems are moving around the zone and having to go back for reward money. Each area of the zone is big and moving back by foot takes time. There are guides but you have to pay them to go faster. It seems like if I can walk somewhere I have been by foot, I should be able to fast travel there on my own. Further, since I joined the Stalkers I would sometimes do side missions which required me to travel back to their base in the Cordon for the reward. Why the Stalkers who gave the missions couldn’t reward me I don’t know. And toward the end when you take the bridge to Limansk, Clear Sky gives you 50,000 RU reward plus a cool rifle, but you have to go all the way back to the swamp to get it (it is worth it, but the game doesn’t make it clear that is where the reward is).

Also, many side missions are broken and cannot be completed because you miss something or other. In one mission I was supposed to help a rookie Stalker kill some dogs, but I couldn’t find the dogs. Later I found the dogs nearby but it was too late to finish the mission. This becomes a real problem when the mission is part of the main story. In the swamp area when you are cleaning the renegades out of certain areas, one area didn’t complete because the game said reinforcements had to come. Well the reinforcements wouldn’t come until I killed some other renegades nearby. Also later in the Red Forest the game screwed up in one part where I was supposed to meet a mercenary and go find a transmitter at a base. I never received this conversation choice so I had to reload a previous game and do some parts over. Make sure you do hard saves often not just quick saves.

On the bright side, CS does give you the option of regular saves, quick saves, and even auto saves the game for you. There are no stupid check point saves here. The weapons are cool and fighting is tough, even on Novice. I liked the AK-74 the best. After fully upgrading it and using AP bullets I kicked butt with it until the end of the game. NATO weapons stink because they jam up a lot. Forget grenades, but grenade launchers on your rifles work good. As far as artifacts go, I ended up with 2 that gave me -4 and -6 radiation respectively, a +4 health artifact which speeds your auto healing, and a bleeding artifact that saved me from having to use any more bandages.

I will see how CS compares to SOC and Call of Pripyat (I think CS is supposed to be the weakest of the three).  I did have fun with CS, I just wish the second half of the game was more open and less linear. But I do recommend it for FPS fans.

Jedi Knight 2 (JK2) is the third in a series of LucasArts games about Kyle Katarn. The first, Dark Forces, was a straight-up shooter. The second, Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight, gave Kyle his first taste of Jedi powers. At the end of the second game, however, Kyle gave up his powers. So you start the third game, JK2, as Kyle with no force powers. Thus, the first few levels are just like any other shooter game with a variety of weapons for Kyle to use against Imperial thugs.

Next, after Kyle meets up with a Sith and gets his butt kicked, he goes to Luke Skywalker to become a Jedi again. Unfortunately he has to start at level 1, so his force powers aren’t very good yet. Plus you get to spend a level learning how to use each one in different puzzles. The puzzles in general are the only thing I truly detest about this game. Whether it’s force puzzles or jumping puzzles, you feel like you are playing a console game and the developers are just making the level more of a challenge without adding much to the story.

In this game, your force powers increase as you progress; you have no control when you get upgraded powers, but you get them at the start of new levels. The force powers really get fun toward the end of the game when they are maxed out and you are throwing, pushing, and manipulating stormtroopers left and right. The boss battles are pretty tough in this game, especially the final battle.

The only other complaint I had was that some levels are very non-intuitive about where you need to go. One that comes to mind is in a garbage disposal plant. You have to go to one side of the plant and end up pushing some crate just to come back and go through a now open tunnel. But you would not know necessarily to go to the different areas of the level or what to do. Fortunately there are good hint files available to help you in your journey.

JK2 is a fun game even today. The graphics might not be state of the art, but they do well enough. But the fun of wielding a light saber and force powers never wears off. Jedi Academy, the last game of the series, is even better. I will review that game shortly.

I recently read PC Gamer’s February issue and was intrigued by Andy Mahood’s article in the In Simulation section titled “People Published.” In it he talks about UK developer Slightly Mad Studios development decision to solicit regular people to raise money for a game project. This isn’t just a plea for money; depending on your level of contribution you can play monthly builds of a game up to attending developer meetings and being in charge of a sub-forum (if you have $33,000 laying around). The point is, though, this could be a great way for Indie developers to make the games gamers want to play (you know, like EA before they went all corporate and answered to stock holders).

This article also made me think about two projects I had looked at before (even purchasing two licenses from one of them). Cortex Command is a popularly modded game being developed by Data Realms. It is a side-scrolling shooter with tons of weapons and enemies and environments to play with. It is currently in beta and available for the PC and the Mac. Another game under development by Goldhawk Interactive is Xenonauts, a remake of the classic strategy game X-Com.  It is in Alpha right now and only available for the PC, but the company is implementing many user requests into the final game.

Both of these companies allow you to purchase access to their games right now for around $20, which is probably cheaper than the final products will sell for. You can also spend a little more to help the developers with their projects. These games are the labor of developers who care about their fans and supporters so check out these upcoming games.

I installed Stalker:Clear Sky yesterday because I wanted to make sure Stalker: Call of Pripyat (Loyalty Edition) that I purchased from Impulse would work with any version of Stalker of Stalker:Clear Sky. I installed Stalker:Clear Sky without issue, but when I tried to load the game, AVG kept popping up warning of a Trojan in some temp folder. So I kept removing the Trojan. Also Stalker:Clear Sky kept demanding admin privileges (I guess to install its Trojan, oh I mean DRM) and wouldn’t load.

Solution – I went to megagames.com and downloaded the fix for Stalker:Clear Sky. After patching the game and replacing the appropriate files the game loaded without incident. This is why I have always been opposed to most DRM. These companies only penalize people who actually buy the game  since there is a crack typically available before the game even ships. I am okay with Steam because so far I haven’t had any problems with it, but requiring a CD or DVD in the drive (they can be scratched, just ask my kids) or loading some crap rootkit or Starforce driver or requiring a constant connection to the Internet for an offline game is ludicrous. These big game companies need to wake up like the music industry and realize people don’t want crappy DRM screwing up their experience. Gamers also want to be able to play a game 5, 10, or more years from without a problem. Help by supporting sites like GOG.com that sell DRM-free games.

Oh and Stalker: Call of Pripyat required Stalker to install (which I also had). After installing Stalker I tried to install Stalker:CoP. When prompted I pointed it to the Stalker install location and it downloaded and installed itself. I also noticed Stalker was added to my game library on Impulse.

I have never been happy with the decline of PC games at retail stores. 10 years ago I can remember going to EB Games and Babbages where there were rows and rows of PC games, new and old for the purchasing. Today you would be lucky to find any PC games at a Gamestop store; Best Buy and CompUSA have cut there stock as well. In this age of digital downloads this is no big worry. I love going to Steam, GOG.com and GamersGate to buy my games. I am wary of Impulse since Gamestop bought it, but they haven’t managed to screw it up yet. If they could just add support for Gamestop gift cards I would be happier.

Unfortunately Gamestop doesn’t support purchasing games on Impulse with Gamestop gift cards yet (they promise support in the future though). So with some gift cards in hand I had to go to a local store because my youngest son was excited about The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim arriving on 11/11/11. On 11/12 we stopped at one Gamestop which had no copies of the game, but the saleslady was nice enough to call another store which still had one copy left. The store held the copy for us so we proceeded straight to the store to purchase the game. When we arrived at the new store, they had the copy ready for us. However, I immediately became wary because the copy had already been opened. For some reason Gamestop likes to open their copies of PC games, which causes controversies from time to time (such as with Deus Ex: Human Revolution).

When we arrived at home and my son tried to install the game, my cautiousness bore fruit: we received an error that the Steam code on a sticker on the box had already been used. Needless to say, I was pretty pissed, not the least of which because I would have to return to the store which probably had no more copies. I waited until Monday afternoon following the purchase in case the store happened to receive more copies. They had not. Then as I explained to the salesman my problem, he told me Steam had been hacked that week and that’s why the code didn’t work. He even admitted that another customer had reported the same problem. At first he wouldn’t even take the game back because “Gamestop doesn’t take PC games back because of problems with them being open and the code could have been used already.” I said you people are the ones who opened it; since the box was already open when I bought the game how do I know an employee didn’t steal the code. Finally he spoke to the manager and gave me store credit.

My son and I went immediately to Target and purchased two copies of Skyrim (and received a $20 gift card to boot). Lo and behold, there were no problems installing either of these versions when we went home (of course they were in a sealed box when we bought them).

So be very careful buying PC games from Gamestop. As more and more games register with services like Steam for copy protection, there will be a risk of the games not working. I admit, I have no proof of an employee taking codes, but I also have no other explanations either. But if we consider the simplest explanation to be the right one, popular new game + open box + opportunity = theft seems possible to me.

Sacred is a nice Diablo-like action RPG from Ascaron that came out several years ago. You can choose from several different character classes and explore the huge world of Ancaria. The main storyline is pretty basic and can be ignored for a while if you just want to explore the world, fight different creatures, and gain cool items. There are over 200 side quests in dozens of different regions of the world. There are some annoying fed ex quests where you go to point a and get something and bring it back; sometimes these are items, but sometimes you have to find or free people. There are some cool quests where you can choose between following the original quest mission to kill or capture someone, or turn on the quest giver usually because they are actually evil.

Occasionally you get a companion to fight with you. A couple of these cannot be killed; when they run out of hit points they fall unconscious for a while and then get up again. There are many monsters and people to fight in the game from goblins and orcs to undead to huge dragons. The enemies also scale to your level so they are not always easy to kill when you get higher level; however at some point in the game you become quite powerful and although there are tough enemies to fight like dragons, other enemies will try to overwhelm you with numbers to wear you down. One cool feature for characters is creating combo special moves which a combo master NPC in the game can create for you and you can assign to a hotkey. A smith can improve armor and weapons if they have 1 – 3 open expansion areas; you can also find weapon and armor collections to use together for extra bonuses. Your character earns levels throughout the game and earns skills points and an attributes point at each level. Items can also give bonuses.

I had a lot of fun with the original game, but the expansion can be skipped. I was happy I had the expansion only because it added two extra classes, one of which is the dwarf. I played the dwarf character through the game and loved that he had guns and explosives to use on enemies. Later in the game the flamethrower was useful in eliminating large groups of enemies. However, the expansion play was a complete waste. There are very few side quests in the expansion (side quests were part of what made the original game fun), and the game play is very linear. Unlike the original game, exploring is pretty much unavailable. I tried exploring a few times only to have to go through the same areas again because of the main storyline. Also, portals, which were good ways to travel quickly around the world in Sacred, are useless in the expansion except in one case where I used one to go to the next area in the story. Thus, I was not surprised after playing the expansion why I couldn’t find any hint files; you simply don’t need hints in the expansion because it is completely linear. And if you thought Sacred’s story was bad, try the expansion’s.

Since Sacred Gold is available now on GOG for $9.99 you will end up with the main game and the expansion for a good price. I think Sacred was a fun game and is worth playing if you like action RPGs like Diablo.

One quick piece of trivia on Sacred: the European version contains blood, but the blood was removed in the U.S. version to get a T rating. I played through the International English version so I saw the blood; it could be amusing and cool when enemy limbs were removed, but you probably won’t have a worse experience without the blood.

This is an old late 1990’s Warhammer 40,000 universe game from SSI. Very good soundtrack and tough tactical combat. The game has a narrated story between missions with in game graphics for the video and audio. You get to equip one or more squads for each mission with different weapons and other items. There is no fog of war over the map (you also get a minimap on screen if you desire), but enemies only appear if a soldier can see them. Each soldier has a certain amount of action points per turn to move, fire, use equipment, etc. There are some decent sound effects and voice overs during combat.

I played the first couple of levels of this game on Windows 98, then I decided to retire that machine when it didn’t want to boot for me. I was able to get my old games off, including Chaos Gate, so I wouldn’t lose my progress. Chaos Gate looked like it would work on XP, but I found out it has some troubles there and is very buggy in general.

I was able to play the game somewhat and solve one annoying bug involving enemy fire by following the advice on a Warhammer 40K forum site. One problem I tried to overcome was patching the game to version 1.2. I didn’t even know the game had a patch, and it is very difficult to find after all these years. I did find it, but it wouldn’t work on my game (my version may have already included the patch as it was part of a 4 game set of Warhammer games, not a standalone version). However, on the fourth level of the game, after battling long and hard, I killed the last enemy on the level only to have the game crash. I tried again several times with the same result.

Unfortunately for now I will give up on this game. This would be a good one for GOG.com to pick up though.

This is the fourth (and final) game in the X-Wing space simulator series created by Larry Holland and LucasArts. Like the two other games in the series that I played (X-Wing and Tie Fighter) X-Wing Alliance (XWA) can be a lot of fun but very frustrating as well. This game consists of 53 missions divided among 7 parts of a single player campaign. One of the interesting changes in this game is that you are from a merchant family that becomes involved with the Rebellion and the Empire. As such, there are several “family” missions, some of which are related to the main story, that have a story all their own.

Like the previous games you fly a variety of ships, but you don’t work your way up to better ships as you progress. You are provided with a ship appropriate to the mission, but sometimes you can choose a different ship to fly. The ships you fly include the Z95, X-Wing, Y-Wing, A-Wing, B-Wing, and a few Corellian transports, including the Millenium Falcon.The best ships are the X-Wing, B-Wing, and Correllian transports (because they have a sweet auto-fire cannon in addition to your regular weapons). One thing that is difficult is having enough speed, ammo, and shields. I ended up turning on Unlimited Ammo from the options which helped a little. At least that let me leave my weapon recharge at maintenance level (even with unlimited ammo you can’t fire if your weapon energy goes to 0). On some of the harder missions I even turned on Invulnerability which allowed me to move all shield power to engines.

Some of the things about the games that could annoy you start with no in-mission saves. You either win a mission or you lose and play again. Some of the missions are very difficult and losing becomes very frustrating. The game does let you skip up to 3 non-family missions if you lose; it would have been nice if they would have let you use that option for any number of missions or at least after you failed 3 times. On some of the later missions I couldn’t beat I tried to use cheat codes but couldn’t get them to work. I don’t know if it was the version I was playing (2.02) or what. I finally found a trick  to skip missions by editing the mission.lst file in the mission folder. After making a copy of the file erase the 3 lines of the mission you are on that you want to skip starting with the mission number. When you re-enter the game you will be moved to the next mission automatically.

Another annoyance was not knowing how to finish certain missions. Sometimes you have to pick up an object and it’s not obvious how to do it. In another missions I had to dock with a station. Well some places tractor beam you in (you press space bar when the message pops up like returning to the Liberty) and others require you to dock (SHIFT-D). One mission I could not figure out what to do; I finally docked and waited about 30 seconds for someone to get off or board my ship. This is another case where having an in-mission save would help a person experiment a little more without having to play the whole mission again.

All in all XWA is a good game, probably the best in the series. If you can live through the difficult missions, you’ll have a lot of fun with this game.

I noticed this recently when I looked at the Impulse client after an update and saw the GameStop logo. I looked up some information on it and Stardock sold Impulse back in March 2011. You can read more on the story at PCWorld.

Many people were upset since GameStop does not appear to care about PC gamers in its retail stores; it either carries no PC games or very few in the back of the store on a single rack. I have not noticed any changes yet in the service since GameStop purchased it. I know GameStop was selling digital versions of PC games through its online store so maybe it wanted a better outlet to compete with larger PC game sellers such as Steam. Hopefully GameStop won’t screw up Impulse by making it some kind of hybrid PC / console game seller.