Late last night (or early this morning), I finished the single-player campaign of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow Of Chernobyl. Immediately after the credits rolled, I started playing it again. Yeah, it's good :) Most of the reviews of it that I've read are pretty spot-on with their assessments; that the graphics are about on-par with Half-Life 2, the gameplay is most similar to Oblivion, and it's full of bugs. The graphics are indeed a little dated, but still look quite nice (especially with dynamic lighting enabled); the gameplay is more of an action-oriented FPS-with-RPG-elements than Oblivion's RPG-with-FPS-elements, but the similarities (mission structure, resource management, exploration) are undeniable; the bugs though... Oh man. While I didn't run-into any real show-stoppers, the ones I did see were glaringly bad. Everything from bodies disappearing before they hit the ground to infinite armour, the glitches were ever-present. They didn't, however, detract too much from the overall experience. The other common thread throughout the major reviews is their praise of the game's atmosphere; this game is immersive like few others, and so the bugs are ultimately excusable. Vast (though not as open as Oblivion's) landscapes and buildings to explore, plenty of side-missions to complete (or ignore), in-game politics to consider, a good variety of weapons and enemies, and an interesting (albeit somewhat perplexing) story with (I've heard) seven potential endings make for a particuarly good game.
I have only a few real gripes about the game, and they won't even affect most players anyway. First, as pretty as the dynamic lighting is, it kills my GPU (over-clocked AGP GeForce 6800). I can run the game with all settings at maximum using static lighting and it's very nice, but dynamic lighting brings it to its knees at anything over 1024x768 and "medium" detail settings. Second, a patch was released shortly after the game's release, and while it's nice to see so many issues addressed (and sad to see a broken game shipped), it was painful to learn that it breaks your saved games! Gah! Finally, there's the script. While the voice acting is superb, some of the bits of text are a little off... Like when the middle-aged Ukrainian guy refers to his "homies", and when the military commander calls an opposing force "the shit", and when your new armour is called "inefficient" when it's pretty safe to assume that they meant to write "efficient". Still, it's a rock-solid game that will draw you into its world, plus it's only $40.
Oh, and while I was out this afternoon, I noticed that Best Buy has Viva Pinata marked-down to $20! The two locations I checked were out of stock though :\ They did, however, have the Guitar Hero II XBOX 360 demo unit running. The graphics weren't a huge improvement over the PS2 version and the controller felt small and cheap; I was not impressed. Then I tripped (but didn't fall) over the cord connecting the controller to the demo unit, taking the 360 to the floor. The noises coming out of that thing didn't sound very healthy at all, but the salesperson was cool about it :)
