Comments - sutter

I find it so funny how some of the people in here get their panties all bunched up about a mod. In case these same people haven't noticed shooters are about shooting virtual people, why aren´t these same people all nervous and banning all other shooters is beyond me, maybe they missed the part where most world war 2 shooters and call of duty modern warfare are all about shooting people in the face too?

If you start censoring a mod just because it rings closer to home maybe you should stay away from shooter games altogether and play somethhing like duck hunt maybe.

Grow up you nancies, life is cruel too, you should have realized that when you first played a shooter and decided for yourself if maybe you are setting yourself for some fun or getting to be a **** and start whining about stupid whims steaming off your nogging lol, and I thought gamers were somehow smarter...

For some people, gaming, especially pc and video gaming in general is still a childish hobbie, something to keep your toddlers entertained, many times alluding to games such as nintendo's cheerful super mario and company. I personally have nothing against such games, i also played them once or twice ( Super mario was never able to pull my interest long enough to finish all the included towering platform levels) but no, super mario was never really going to be my favorite game and maybe i do understand why so many people, mostly non gamers, still think playing video and pc games is just an affair of fast finger twitching and button mashing. But what's more, many such people have never played any of the latest gaming jewels, most people are not even living in the same age of gamers, they simply don't know what they talk about when they refer to pc gaming, they are clueless. Great times are coming.

We the gamers are witnessing a moment in history akeen to the big bang of gaming history, we have front row seats and are enjoying unique moments all to ourselves, but what is best in all of it, is the portent of things to come. We gamers are just a drop in the seas of people who know nothing of it and have cared little for it, until now.

The future looks bright and phenomenal to pc gaming, for finally tecnhology has come up with the meanings to create games that surpass teh boundaries of what used to be expected from a game, soon pc gaming will become part of our lives and we will live those future games as we nowadays live our well earned vacations abroad to sunny exotic locales, games will become the art form to encompass all art forms, movies will represent no more than little short stories, snippets, mere clips, compared to what will be visually possible in the games of tomorrow.

Stalker shadow of Chernobyl, we 've waited for this game as this game'ss waited for the technology to run it properly, you see, we didn't have mainstream two core processors back in 2003, we have just recently got them and games like this will always need them to run adequately. It's a matter of coding, a matter of design, of game design, this is a shooter, first person shooter but not your average shooter, this is much more and i can only compare it with the shooting that occured in vampire bloodlines where the shooting isn't as streamlined as in for instance half life 2, of which only a matter of collision detection is needed, variables if any or simple and straightforward, no such straightforwardness in vampires bloodlines where tehre was a huge stats number crunching going on behind the scenes, hence the awkward feel in fights, especially when using repetition rapid fire weapons and certainly not in Stalker.

When you fire a weapon in Stalker, teh game has to take many varibles into account, when you move, when you do whatever you do, it's taken into account, that's why you need more than a single core to witness the game becoming an experience you will not forget anytime soon, this is extremely ambitious coding for you, unlike the streamlined code you get on most any game until recently, this is towering, baroque code, this is as close to organic, viceral code as is humanly possible in our time, and most importantly are the possiblities it opens for gaming.

Playing this game put me on a thinking mood i usually only get from listening to great music, a good sign of a good thing and that my time isn't being wasted and while in that mood i had visions of future games wherein each of the multiple characters would be assigned a core from a multi cored processor, in fact where a single character would be assigned as much the whole computing power of our now desktop computers, imagine that power for a single character, just imagine the range of possibilities. when the 20nm barrier is reached we will have perhaps as much as a hundred processors on a single nearly invisible wafer and that will only be the beginning, when such computer power bcomes ubiquitous to the point of even becoming part of thin air, perhaps in no more than 40 years, wow, living and breathing games anywhere anytime in real time, games you will lose yourselves in and perhaps never want to come back from, that's a scary thought, but inevitable for some.

Stalker is not the best game of all time, but it's certainly fresh and innovative to assure it a place in my top 20 games of all time, the sum of it's parts being greater than the end result, it only requires you the gamer to go along with it and sure enough in a few minutes of game time you will be hooked and the addictiion will keep on growing. This is, simply put, a great game, if you want me to draw comparisons, i'd say it's got a huge portion of F.E.A.R for the A.I but much better here, fallout for the choices available and oblivion for the wide 3D areas.

This one is a keeper

Nostalgia galore in this oh so beloved and enjoyed joy of a game to have and own and play and gloat over before playing again and again and then again replaying and still keep replaying the thing for the sake of good and compelling stuff, addictive too, so tread carefuly.

This game should have come with a big sticker on it, perhaps big enough to wrap itself around the whole box it originally came in, a warning, a very huge and necessary warning, because litte did those who bought it the first time, the big monster they were innocently carrying home and more innocently still as they placed the silver disc in their shuddering cd drives ( the prospect of long and large portions of cd spinning while many long hours of play turned to half days and sometimes and for many a player entire days, consumed, devoured into pits of time).

Fallout was and still is one monster of a game, followed by fallout 2 which is a huge monster of a game, both games are incredibly addictive and replayable and there is the trouble with them, one can never have enough of it, for anyone who has never played it and innocently installs it in their machine, their first reaction to it must be like: " Whoa is this what people have been raving about? well the graphics sure suck amd what with the palette used, couldn't the designers have come up with a more colorful choice of colors, something more vivid perhaps, duh ?" and on this new player will venture himself on the character screen, choose this and that for his liking such as strength over stamina or what not and play a little with the choices made and slowly the game begins to settle in and once it does it simply won't let go, that's how dangerous it can be to anyone's social life.

The addictiveness to this game and its themes stems from the depths of our collective conscience regarding it's main theme, war and the dreaded nuclear big one, i know what it was to live under the shadow of an all out on the verge of bursting big WWIII war which would put an end to our ways as taken for granted, i remember for i spent my childhood and most of my youth under that dark cloud, what it did to me and my personal character only God knows, but i remember the terror of my nightmares, it used to be that ghosts and vampires were the subject to my toddler self but it soon was swept under and replaced by a more vile and child opressing fear than that of romantic notions of the gothic, war; war was iminent, at any moment, bombs could be dropping from the skies launched from as far as thousands of miles away or mere hundreds from any submarine surreptitiously hidden near our sea coasts and shores.

The terror, my terror was real and so was that of any child who knew what was going on, we would never admit it before others of course, everyone was tough and buff in the playground but i can imagine even the bullies ******* in their pants if they had enough brains to judge just what a barrel of octillion megaton tnt stick our planet was strapped to.

It could have been just that, the cold war, but not only did we know about teh big nasty bombs, we then also knew the effects, the devastation of nuclear war through documentwaries on the subject and the many films projected in our schools as early as the seventies maybe even sixties, in those films what impressed me and others was the burns a nuclear explosion could cause on anyone near enough to see a blast full on, even the radiation was something we could already grasp the concept of. I never felt that kind of opressing fear anymore, not since then.

(So it makes me laugh outloud when politicians coment about computer and video games being the scourge of our youths, banning many a computer/ video game from the market just because it depicts violence, PEOPLE WAKE UP, THE EVIL IS IN YOUR WAYS OF DOING POLITICS NOT IN THE GAMES PRODUCED OR YOUTHS PLAYING THEM, MAYBE IF YOU CARED LESS FOR POWER AND MORE ABOUT OTHERS AND POVERTY, MAYBE WE WOULDN?T HAVE TO HAVE BOMBS TO BEGIN WITH AND THEN MAYBE OUR CULTURE WOULDN?T BE SO GEARED TOWARDS VIOLENCE, IT?S NOT WHAT THE YOUTH iSE PLAYING YOU POLITICIANS SHOULD BE CONCERNED WITH BUT WHAT YOU ARE DOING TO PREDISPOSE THE YOUTH TO ENJOY IT SO MUCH, PEOPLE OUR CULTURE IS WHAT WE MAKE OF IT AND WHAT WE MAKE OF IT IN TURN CHANGES US TO SERVE IT IN ITS WAYS, THE SAME WE DEALT IT WITH, sO STOP WARS, STOP VIOLENCE AND MAYBE THEN OUR YOUTH WILL STOP PLAYING VIOLENT GAMES, GEAR TEH CULTURE TOWARDS PEACE AND THE REST WILL FOLLOW, IF NOT... WELL, THERE'S ALWAYS FALLOUT

So what am i reminiscing about here and for what purpose?

Well, you see, culture is something we can't escape no matter what we get ourselves through, and this game hooks you so much because it has all to do with humanity and what we've gone through up to now, the theme, the story which is plausible enough and believe me, in such a scenario worse things than deathclaws and mutants could very well be ambushing you in any cross country walk.

Fallout oozes style and culture, more like pop culture actually but in the grand scheme of things and from teh point of view of survivors fromwithing a couple hundred years ionto teh future, believe me either pop or classic culture there wil be no difference to people there so culture i say. From the monopoly style character drawing of perks and abilities which is a main draw to our liking of teh design, because at some point or another almost anyone of us has already played or seen someone playing monopoly, so yes this was very clever as a main draw to the game and i believe it wouldn't have been as successful if it were drawn any other way, so you see, culture, we like things familiar to us and those are easier to get addicted to as well, tp the 50s style signs and billboards adverts and overall lettering style, it all reeks of pulp fiction and old sci fi comics almost anyone surely have known about and seen.

This game is great and i bet it will be replayed again and again well into decades to come and i can tell you graphics and style and gameplay will keep people interested long into the future.

I can also tell you that if bethesda is to change the graphical style into something sleekier or cleaner as to rebuke the grittier look of teh original, i bet that will put fans off for certain, now if they use their 3 D oblivion engine like revamped and adding to that nice and gritty all round textures to bring in the the whole fallout effect in 3 D, all the swearing and dirty slick wordage too and as long as it can be ran fast, count me on as a buyer, if not, well, no matter how good the game otherwise, it still won't be fallout to me.

Many hardcore RPG players got pretty ****** at the all the rave reviews and accolades this game got on it's own merit, Baldur's Gate this and that they went on about was a true rpg this wasn't, well.

To be frank, this actually is an RPG, the thing is it's actually more geared towards character builder than most, maybe forgettting about all else, but... Blizzard ain't dumb, this is a game company which isn't about pampering and massaging hardcore gamers egos and drives, you see Blizzard is a business and a big business and all it's about is ultimately making money by giving you the player something in return for your hard earned money; it so being it means they want to appeal to masses of players more than they care about whether they appeal to the true hardcore player which actually is seeing less and less games geared towards them in the coming years, since a game is taking more man hours and substantially more millions to produce.

So what do we have here? does it mean it sucks just because it isn't hardcore to the sinew and bone?
does anyone who reads Thomas Mann won't ever read Pynchon or God forbid Stephen King ? of course they will, maybe it's not their favorite reading, but when fun comes into the equation the choice widens.

You know your broiled chicken breasts and baked potatoes and rice is much better and healthier than a fat greasy burger, but does that mean you never drooled over a burger? and isn't a burger tasty? sure it is, a burger can be as tasty if not more than the best of the more subtle and refined cuisine.

There's a place for hardcore and there's a place for pure undiluted crazy obsessive fun such as of which this game is made of. Sometimes reading lots of inane absurd and lackluster lines from your average multiple NPC isn't what is should be, story lacking or story absent as is the case with even many trully lauded great RPGs, sometimes all the player wants is action, mindless and intense such as in this game; the huge and greedy choices which appeal to the basest of senses and makes you hooked that can be great, that is also a simple and smart move towards a brilliant idea for a game, couple that with technical competence in design, programing and overall balance and any game done that way will sell like hot cakes.

I wasted months on this years ago and just thinking about it makes me want to revisit the virtual place, feel the obsessiveness, the greediness, the hook it can put on you, the player.

This is a fine, fine game, not something to be played in a million years, for there will surely be chess for that, but still you have a couple more decades untill something has yet to come along and beat this for what it is, a great character builder, and certainly in that sense, it is a true RPG game at heart.

All the bad reviews söldner's got as soon as it launched were well deserved, this game really was subpar when it first came out, my rating when it first cam out would have been a 1 out of a 10, that's how bad i thought it was, but a lot of work has gone into it in the form of patches, and it demands stating once again, a lot of work went into it so that it could become something actually worth of my attention. I am a demanding player, i am not a geek, i have never breezed through a twenty hour game in 20 hours, i always take my time with games, i consider myself an average player, but where quality is to be found i am one to point it out and point it i will.

Graphics: 8 though textures are becoming a bit dated, they still stand good especially for the war theme conveyed.

Sound: 8 good sounds, especially those of explosions and rotor blades, armored vehicles and some fire shots are spot on.

Gameplay: single player 4 forget about it, you may use single player to train your pilot skills though.

Gameplay: online multiplayer 9.8 great.

If you enjoy battles in a grand scale and actually want that little more realism put into it than i guess there's no other game at the moment providing you as much as this one does, perhaps battlefield 2 is hot on this one's heels but still wishing it had söldner's more serious gameplay.

Do you enjoy arcadish mindless fun? tere's room for it in söldner's gameplay, just ignore your comander's orders and go about having your fun (just as long as you don't kill your team players, in which case you may have your butt kicked in less than it takes to say it).

Do you prefer to take your time thinking a more strategic approach? well why don't you become commander of your team and launch a thunderbolt ground suppressing, first air-strike attack, followed by second sweep of attack choppers as your blackhawks disgorge your highly trained snipers and some infantry teams in the background, deploying them right under your oponent's nose. My! you can wreak havok with that sort of combination, helicopters hovering around, bombing the enemy base to rubble and over 700 round per second mini gun, shooting any still standing opposiiion while your carefully placed and constantly changing spot after each kill skilled snipers take care of any daring dodger especially the ones clutching a stinger launcher (which may be fatal to your chopper pilots and their rides) in their sweaty grimy fingers, or just taking care of any still remnant armored vehicle in the perimeter, ( always, always cary a launcher, depending on your environment arena, either anti tank of which only one is really nearly 100% effective on a single shot, anti personnel, anti bunker, or anti anircraft of which there's only one, the stinger launcher).

Did i wet your gaming taste buds already? well no matter what i write here can actaully prepare you for this monster of a game, if you really are into war tactics and if you are the sort of person who has an interest in weapons, from side arms to B2 bombers and whatever's involved in the making of a battlefield, this game is spot on.

This still isn't a real war,real wars are no fun i'll tell you ( some weapons should be more effective than they are in the game) there's still some room for nit picking but what game doesn't. but you can ask yourself the question, "... but is it any realistic, doe it feel like real war on my computer screen ? "
my answer to you is, closer than any other game to date.