I’ve honestly mostly been vibe coding my changes to STALKER Anomaly mod TALKER and writing more backstories and personalities for it. It’s been fun, although frustrating at times.

I have played some Chaos Zero Nightmare on my phone. The game is fun, I just kind of wish it wasn’t a gacha mobile game. Also wish the character designs were a little less ridiculous, most are acceptable but some are playing to sexuality way too much making me just roll my eyes. All the usual trappings of daily energy and menial tasks to grind out to progress and level up your characters also feel extra annoying and needlessly time-wasting when the main gameplay is so good.

The actual roguelike deckbuilder gameplay is surprisingly good, though, and so far has kept me interested. The variety and versatility of builds is a lot of fun, with lots of specific or extra-rare upgraded versions of cards unlocking niche strategies and combos and stuff like that. Balance seems surprisingly good despite being a gacha and with the right builds you can make pretty much any character you like shine.

Also the story has a fast forward button that is almost like a skip, which is great because the writing is terrible and the translation is awful. But I’m not really here for that, so I don’t really care as long as I’m not forced to engage with it.

If that’s the case I can’t really fault Valve here.

Does the story actually get good? I tried it out around launch but when they introduced a knockoff Paimon I noped out. I was there for a dark post-apocalypse story, not Sunday morning cartoon. Not that there is anything wrong with it but just not for me. I felt a little mislead.

Recently it’s been Chaos Zero Nightmare on my phone. Yeah, it’s a gacha. Yeah it has some absolutely ridiculous gooneriffic character designs that makes me roll my eyes. Yeah it’s poorly translated and the story is garbage.

But you know what? The actual roguelike deckbuilder game mode is actually a ton of fun. The characters are well balanced enough that I’ve never felt like I was behind on power even with comparably “bad” pulls from the gacha. The game has been generous enough anyway that I have a lot of pulls saved up too. And the mutability and variety in the roguelike mode is just amazing. Tons of combos, tons of variations of every card and tons of opportunities to make niche builds work just because you happened to get one specific rare upgrade variation on one specific card while also stumbling upon one specific neutral card to add to your deck and stuff like that.

And all for the price of free? I can’t complain.

Wouldn’t surprise that much, as far as I’ve heard from as far as I remember Valve is a great place to work and by all accounts treat their employees well.

It is… kind of. Hence the half-cheat. First off it’s 3D, but the game is completely centered around the Oldest House, which is the headquarters of the fictional FBC. Like a Metroidvania you explore and backtrack back and forth through it and unlock new areas opening up from previous places. There is also one (although only one) proper ability gate that lets you explore previously unreachable parts of earlier areas once unlocked.

Even if you don’t classify it as a true Metroidvania it’s definitely Metroidvania-inspired.

I don’t know, I played Blasphemous this summer and had a very mixed time with it. I really wanted to love it but it mostly pissed me off. Too much gameplay design specifically intended to waste your time and make you miserable. Which - I guess - is the point because the game is all about the virtue of suffering. I just didn’t find it particularly fun to play.

Great world building, music and art though.

Can I half-cheat and say Control?

Love seeing Blue Prince win awards. Such an inventive, creative and amazing game.

It was a special event route for the Pokewalker, but you can unlock it via connecting your 3DS to a pirate network. The myth of Surfing Pikachu was a whole thing back around Gen 1&2 proper so I think they did this one-time event around the time of HGSS release as a nod to that.

I was just warning them to set their expectations. It’s a sad state of affairs.

Just went and read your other post. Great read. I love HGSS, I know people sometimes complain about the level curve but to me those games were always the peak of the series. So much content, so much charm, just an absolute love letter to Gen 1 and 2, the dual region is still the coolest thing ever and the Pokewalker was a great little gadget. Though I still haven’t gotten my flying or surfing Pikachu from it as those fuckers have like a 2% spawn rate and no pity system.

Even 12GB honestly feels low these days. I have a 4070ti that I regret buying because I still run into VRAM bottlenecks and I don’t even play in 4k. I guess if you’re content with 1080p you might get away with it but I’d be super weary about buying anything with only 8GB.

I’m back to the modding relapse. My playthrough of STALKER: Anomaly has stalled out again as I’m week-deep into a project of modifying the mod that got me playing again in the first place: TALKER (the AI-powered mod that lets you chat with NPCs in game).

What begun as some tweaks to the prompt and minor edits to faction personalities has turned into both some hacky vibe coding and a ton of prose writing as I’m pushing to see how much character description I can feed the model to improve the output.

Even on Normal you can just build defensively and use Maelle with Egide to tank through like 99% of the game even without nailing a single parry or dodge. It’s only maybe the optional superboss that might give you trouble.

I know it never had a chance to win it. It never had a chance to win the soundtrack award either, but a nomination is still something.

I’m assuming Silksong snags the Indie Award but Best Debut Indie should be possible to win perhaps. It’s such a unique, interesting and inventive game and it deserves recognition.

Blue Prince only being nominated for the two indie awards is an expected travesty. Merited a GOTY nomination imo and also a OST award nomination. Sad times.

Perfect for when I shake my current STALKER addiction and get back to actually playing the AW2 DLCs. Bookmarked, thanks for sharing!

Same story for almost every passion industry. I remember being surprised at first to learn how underpaid Formula 1 engineers are when some of them are literal rocket scientists, for example.

There is an alternate universe out there where the N-gage was a smash hit, Nokia is reigning supreme in the handheld market and we’re all rocking gull-wing phones.

I’m more or less done fiddling with mods at this point, and so the last week I’ve been spending my time actually playing STALKER: Anomaly. It’s been an interesting experience, both familiar and different as I’m using several mods that have released since my last playthrough and that completely change the game. Some for the better, some I’m not sure. STALKER players seem to love three things: misery, immersion and realism and while I am one of those too I also recognise that the pursuit of them can sometimes get in the way of enjoyment.

But even with a heavier-than-I’m-used-to Military presence around the starting areas the early game is playing out much the same as always. Grind some simple missions, take the fights you can win, try to loot NPCs kills if possible, abuse any free temporary companions you can get from quests and gradually scavenge your way towards assembling the kit required to move north. Which involves finding a better armoured suit, finding a better helmet with gas mask, finding a scoped rifle or sniper to repair (I got lucky and found an SVT-40), finding a pump-action or semi-automatic shotgun, crafting your entry level tier night vision goggles, getting enough good healing items and anti-radiation meds…

I’m just about setup now and ready for the trek to Dead City where I’ll make my next base of operations I think, but I decided to finish up some missions in the Great Swamps first while I’m still in the south. Despite my initial misgivings about the idea I managed to clear out the military outpost thanks to being able to sneak my way to a perfect cover and some well timed headshots, so now I should be good to actually do some missions in this area.

Despite the bump in difficulty with the new mods I’m having a great time, Anomaly is just such a unique and special experience - the immersiveness, the desolate loneliness, the horror elements, the atmosphere and world design… It’s hard to explain the beauty of it in text, and it definitely isn’t for everyone. But whenever you get that specific itch, there really isn’t a lot else that can scratch it.

I want to finish it some day but I also kind of get sick of it quickly whenever I try to play it for extended periods and actually do main story missions.

Fucking around in the open world and fishing and hunting and all that is great though.

I think OLR is based around circa build 1935, but it’s using stuff from all the early builds and also incorporating material from the design documents heavily.

Anyway, as long as older versions are available it’s fine. At least they aren’t trying to justify those new changes as “lore accurate” and push them on everyone like a certain Skyrim modder who shall not be named, right? Please say yes.

I’m not sure about this honestly as a lot of the community is in russian, but they have the older version up at least so that’s a good sign.

I heard the A-life implementation in 3.0 is very impressive, so there’s that. But yeah it’s kind of unavoidable with projects like this. Same thing goes for the Unofficial Patch of VtM: Bloodlines. Eventually the fan group dev team starts running low on material to restore but want to keep working and so start extrapolating single lines of unimplemented code references into full fledged quests and taking throwaway sentences from design documents and turning them into wholesale mechanics and stuff like that.

You’re welcome, always happy to talk STALKER! If you want to try OLR, make sure you grab the 2.5 version as they apparently started inserting more liberal/fanfictiony changes in version 3+. You can download it here (don’t worry, the installer lets you chose English as language).

CPU has been a bottleneck for CoC/Anomaly forever since Xray was originally made in that time when people thought super fast single core processing was the future. So GSC optimised it for that idea. Instead it turned out clock speed has pretty much flatlined since then and multithreading was the future. Plus it doesn’t help that all the offline simulation of what the world is doing in the background offsceen is incredibly CPU heavy.

STALKER modding is absolutely crazy, not quite as large as Skyrim but also harder to quantify since in addition to the by-now massive Anomaly scene there is also a massive scene that’s still spread out over other older offshoots, particularly in eastern Europe. They’re very big on modding and remaking the original trilogy there (STALKER is huge there in general). Hell, I actually have Oblivion Lost Remake installed and ready to go, which is a fan-recreation of the original vision of Shadow or Chernobyl, recreated from design documents and early dev builds that have been leaked. GSC famously had to cut down their vision massively to get the game out the door and OLR 2.5 has been described by many as the closest thing we’re ever going to get to what they actually wanted to make (Oblivion Lost was the original title before it became SoC).

Yep, Anomaly is built on the 64-bit Xray-Monolith engine, which is derived from GSC open sourcing the X-ray Engine back in the day. Though a lot of work has been done on it over the years at this point. Hell, there are two recent further engine forks being worked on right now that will hopefully be merged into main one day: one implementing dual-render PiP scopes in a very smart way with negligible performance loss and one implementing rudimentary multithreading that can give particularly weaker systems a huge performance boost.

The engine guys working on Anomaly are wizards. Those and the guys making custom shaders. The game looks absolutely fantastic these days, almost as good as STALKER 2 - and that is UE5.

Best way to think of Anomaly is as the successor to Call of Chernobyl. It’s really an incredibly impressive project. As I’m sure you know from your time modding the landscape used to be a complete clusterfuck with CoC and Misery and hundreds of forks and submods and what have you. Anomaly basically collected and unified everything into a single stable common platform to work from.

At this point the modding scene of STALKER is probably on the level of non-Skyrim Bethesda games and there are not only thousands of mods but dozens of high quality precompiled modpacks that let you plug-and-play modlists with hundreds of mods without issue. Or you can be a deranged nutter like me and setup your own modpack.

If you used to play close to vanilla CoC back in the day you’ll be amazed what the community have been able to wring out of this old ass engine.

This is far from my first time in Anomaly, so I think that’s a reason my posts have been a bit briefer than my usual rambling. But I can try to be a bit more elaborate going forward. What to do in Anomaly is so heavily dependent on what modpack (or custom modlist) you’re running though. They can play out completely differently and sometimes have entirely different approaches. Like, playing GAMMA and playing EFP are entirely different animals.

How much have you played before?

Still dividing my time between trudging through the Chernobyl exclusion zone in STALKER: Anomaly and perusing scripts and configs to resolve conflicts and crashes as I either discover them or provoke them by continuing to either tweak existing mods on my list or add more to the pile.

I get like this frequently with modding, I don’t know if it’s a latent perfectionist streak or just your garden variety hyperfixation but I tend to lose myself in the desire to make everything just right and get stuck on that over actually playing. But I think I’m having fun with it as I’m hacking my way through making compatibility patches so maybe it doesn’t matter?

It would be fun to actually finish the Mercenary storyline though. I haven’t even progress past the starting areas of Cordon/Meadow/Garbage yet…

Remedy made some GTA slop?

Even better, Remedy themselves are! Rockstar are publishing it though as they own the rights to the IP. I’m super curious about how they’ll turn out, especially with James McCaffrey’s passing.

It was literally the only way Alan Wake 2 was getting made, no other publisher would finance the project after Alan Wake 1 sold poorly and Sam Lake/Remedy really wanted to make it.

Unbelievable game for its age, it looks bonkers good for a 2005 release with some really impressive particle effects and particularly distortion effects. Shockwaves from explosions and slow motion bullet traces look phenomenal still and really smooth, clean and sharp.

Gunplay is great and holds its own against most modern releases, with literally every weapon barring the oddly anemic assault rifle feeling amazing to use. The combination of extremely intentional level design and the insane-for-its-time AI makes every fight fun and different.

If you haven’t played it yet it’s regularly sold on GOG for like a dollar and I consider it a must-play. Make sure to grab the Echo Patch and dont forget to play the Extraction Point expansion too, which is included in the GOG edition and is phenomenal - perhaps even better than the base game.

I really loved FFTA. Is it your first time playing it?

STALKER: Anomaly. Finally finished up my modlist, landed on a grand total of about 430, so now it’s time to playtest and see if it actually works without crashing and feels good and balanced to play. Just started a Mercenary playthrough yesterday and so far so good. Managed to clear out the bandits at the vehicle station in Cordon as is custom but the real test will be the first handful of missions over in Meadow. I’ve been wanting to do a Merc playthrough for a while but the start is rough in this modlist setup as you can’t get Fanatic as a free companion and you don’t get to start with a shotgun. At least starting off as neutral with the loners means you can start out in Cordon. It’s going to be rough until I get a working gas mask, dosimeter, detector and repair the first shotgun I find.

All in all though it feels great to be back in the Zone.

Shame it’s just the original Splinter Cell. I’ve been wanting Chaos Theory on GOG for years. Also would love an actual PC port of the OG Xbox version of Double Agent, but I know that’s dreamland copium. It’s an awesome game and easily the better version but trapped in the Xbox ecosystem.

Putting my final touches into my STALKER: Anomaly modlist and creating the last couple of compatibility patches. I think I’ll end up at 400 mods which is a nice round number. Hope I’ll get to start my playthrough this weekend.

Will also try to get through another chapter of Alan Wake 2, I was on a replay of it when I got derailed but I do want to finish it and finally start the DLCs.

Had this on my watch list for a long time and every new video it keeps looking better. I’m still of two minds about the black-and-white - I get the idea and it works for the theme but I can’t decide if it’s worth it or if I miss the detail color would add. But at the same time maybe it would make it too bright and cheerful for the setting and story?

Still looks super cool and I’m looking forward to playing it.

Anytime! One thing I appreciate in Jade Empire is that they attempted to do something different with the good/evil dichotomy. It doesn’t always come off properly and it’s often constrained by the nature of the game (you can’t really opt out of the main quest for example) but I appreciate the attempt. Instead of just good/evil they try to make it a “Good Samaritan versus Hardcore Darwinian” dilemma based on opposing philosophies that aren’t necessarily good or evil.