Blogs - PsyWarVeteran

I just created my own Youtube channel, which was something I was meaning to do for a long time. The content will be all about classic games, I will be showcasing unforgettable moments from them. I may tackle mods and their greatest moments too after a while, nothing's certain yet.

If anyone is interested, here's the Youtube channel:

Youtube.com

If you want to support me, I've also set up a Buy Me a Coffee page:

Buymeacoffee.com

Never required, always appreciated.

Thanks and have a nice day :)

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Thoughts About Various STALKER Mods

Someone recently asked me what my thoughts are about Lost Alpha, Radiophobia and Anomaly in my comments section. Instead of writing a wall of text and filling up my comments section, I decided to answer it like this. Here's what I think:

Lost Alpha:

My first disappointment when it comes to STALKER modding. Imagine a group of developers that not only have a treasure trove of development information, playable builds, files etc. available to them and the rest of the world but also given more, never before seen resources by non-other than the STALKER developers themselves, alongside other technical help. You'd think the mod born out of these circumstances would be the most well researched, understood and faithfully realized cut content restoration mod ever, right? Certainly it would, under different management that is.

How the developers of Lost Alpha, team "Dezowave" handled what they so fortunately had is criminal. A project that would shine in hands of another team has turned into a far-cry from what was initially promised. They jumped the shark for whatever reason and created a badly put together fanfiction about nonsense that was never present or planned to be included in STALKER, ever. Instead of creating what was promised: The old, forgotten STALKER given new life, we got a story about Illuminati, made up, unfitting missions and characters that were never there in the pre-release versions, needlessly complicated gameplay elements, great looking but terribly handled maps, awful gameplay loop that's made 90% of back and forth plus fetch quests, and much more.

I remember installing the "Developer's Cut" years later, thinking maybe they learned their lesson and realized that they lost focus. The second I left Sidorovich's bunker a pointless, fanfic character that has the face of Jake Muller from RE6 forcefully spoke to me, talking using proverbs. It was at that moment I realized that they had moved away from the original goal even more. The rest of the experience was the same old boring gameplay loop with a tacked on levelling system, a "haha so funny" slavic Youtuber cameo and other similar nonsense that has nothing to do with pre-release version of STALKER.

The only good things about Lost Alpha is its very well crafted maps, nice graphics and some other minor content. None of which makes it a very enjoyable experience. If you want to experience the real pre-release STALKER and see what could have been, "Oblivion Lost Remake (OLR)" is the mod to try and look forward to.

Radiophobia:

No need to write yet another wall of text for this one, as I'm not nearly as frustrated with it when compared to the rest of the mods I'm talking about here. Instead, I'll talk about my thoughts on "modding the mods". Here's what I think: I'm generally not a fan of the aforementioned "modding the mods", as in, people taking existing modifications, adding features to them and calling it something else. We see this a lot with CoC forks nowadays where people just add a bunch of addons on top of the existing base and call it something like "ProSTALKER's Epic Merge" or to sound more professional "Gloom" or "Scorched Zone". Unless the addition is absolutely incredible (which hasn't happened yet and I doubt it'll happen in the future), I'm not playing the same thing just because you called it something different.

Radiophobia isn't really like those CoC forks but it's still something I played and loved (OGSE) with different features implemented. While I would have preferred a completely original story mod, what this mod does isn't bad at all. It's not a simple "mod of a mod" but has original quests and other things to do added which is good too see. Overall, I enjoyed Radiophobia and have no issues with it. It's far from mods that only add eye-candy, the so-called hardcore features and shiny tacticool weapons with new animations, which are meaningless to me.

Anomaly:

Bow down! Here comes the big cheese! A mod that single-handedly destroyed any hope for western STALKER modding. While our Slavic brothers and sisters enthusiastically work on breaking the mold, aiming to create new adventures filled with interesting new quests, maps, items etc. we, the English speaking community are drowning in CoC forks that pop out weekly, and many seem to enjoy this situation.

Call me crazy, but I don't find roaming the Zone again and again, doing menial tasks such as bringing a medkit to a guy that's six maps away from me, fun. That whole "create your own adventure" thing translates to me as "aimless busywork without an end goal". If you ever visit a foreign forum such as AP-PRO, check out what they think about Anomaly and freeplay mods in general. Nine times out of ten you'll find people talking about how pointless and overhyped it all is, and I fully agree.

Anomaly (or any CoC fork for that matter) is an extremely overhyped, aimless, busywork simulators that mostly made popular by newcomers who watched their favorite Youtuber talk about it being "All three STALKER games combined into one, and it's FREE!!!". The whole freeplay thing was a fun idea that was even planned by the STALKER developers way back when, not the norm or how STALKER should be, nowadays people go as far as saying "this is the real STALKER" when they haven't even touched the original trilogy to begin with.

I played CoC and Anomaly quite a few times and it always ended with me removing it after a day or two. While the main idea and some additions are neat, for me there is no fun in visiting the same maps over and over, increasing some numbers up like faction respect, money or ranking when it all amounts to nothing in the end. There is a barebones story here that's nothing more than "talk to this guy, now this guy, now this guy" in essence, so I can't even base my goal around that.

I wish this series stayed niche and the community tightly knit. Some call this gatekeeping, my answer to them is: "If this'll prevent newcomers who haven't played the actual games and don't have even a smidge of interest in this series to invade every forum, server etc. and talk about how fantastic the mod is, then you can call it whatever shiny word as you like, I will prefer that, everytime. By all means, call me a gatekeeper". Sometimes I see newcomers who are actually interested in what this series is about and looking for guidance or simply popping up to say hello to the community, only to get drown in posts about Anomaly, Misery, Gamma and general freeplay nonsense. It really is a terrible time to become a fan of STALKER. The Reddit page of STALKER is a lost cause, they should just rename it to "r/Anomaly" instead, Youtube videos and streams about the game are the same old "look how great this mod is!" nonsense created by hack Youtubers and streamers, fake fans. Not even Steam forums are safe with hyper popular mod topics popping up every now and again.

To end this rant, Anomaly (or any freeplay mod) is a boring, gimmicky experience that's blown way out of proportion and overhyped to heavens by certain groups of people. I refuse to believe this could ever be the future of STALKER nor do I believe it's a good mod to spend time in.

There you go "Guest", I hope this post has answered your question.

A Zone Memory: Weird Laughter in Agroprom Underground

If you ever played S.T.A.L.K.E.R. you know how different and special the series is. In many years of playing games I have never came across a more atmospheric and immersive game than S.T.A.L.K.E.R. It's my favorite game alongside Half-Life and a game I have been a fan of since 2007 and maybe even before, when I came across some sneak peeks in various gaming magazines . Nowadays I am expecting S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 with great anticipation and always looking out for more great story mods from our fellow stalker friends from all over the globe. In this post I will talk about an event that still baffles me to this day. Before starting I will say this: Nothing I talk about this thread is a lie. You may and should doubt me but know that, even if you don't believe a word of what I say, this is something that really happened to me:

The year was late 2007, I had just bought Shadow of Chernobyl and was having a blast playing it. At the time I knew nothing about the gameplay except the basics. I had seen the trailers online and screenshots in various gaming magazines and fell in love with the idea. Long story short, I was a first time player who had some idea about what the game was like and nothing more. Moving on...

I had it installed from DVD (which I still own and display on my shelf) and started, no patches and naturally, no mods, nothing. I remember everything very clearly:

I started the game on Stalker difficulty, left the Rookie Village, tried half an hour to get past the Electra in the tunnel and barely made it, saved Fox, helped Bes and Hangar stalkers and moved on to Agroprom. As I said, I was having a blast and after the firefight with the military I was very happy to hear about needing to head down to the dark and scary Agroprom Underground, I love locations like that.

I remember smiling when first seeing the place, a long dark tunnel, a dead stalker on the ground with an emergency light constantly spinning on the ceiling. It was a perfect atmosphere and everything I had hoped it would be.

I quickly noticed the bandits and not so quickly dealt with them, you see, at the time, playing SoC with a low end PC without patches was like torture. Everytime I died I waited 30-40 seconds for the game to load my save, only to die seconds later, rinse and repeat. There were no 64bit engines or SSDs used as everyday hardware back then :)

Anyway, I killed the bandits and decided to take the closer path, which was the Electra corridor to the left. Because I spent many minutes struggling with the anomaly in Cordon, I knew what it was and tried to find a way around it.

This is where things get interesting:

I tried moving around the anomaly without throwing a bolt and naturally got zapped. I quickly bolted back, and was about to use a medkit when I heard the laughter. It wasn't a particularly scary or ominous laugh, the best way I can describe it is: Imagine the English voice actor of Bourbon from Metro 2023 video game doing a forced HAHAHAHAHA sound with his forced, gravelly voice. The laugh was over in a second and that is when I noticed the flashing notification of the PDA icon, top left. I loved reading about the game world and especially mutants so I quickly checked to see what information was unlocked and saw it was for the mutant "Poltergeist".

To recap: I got hit by an Electro anomaly in Agroprom Underground, after a couple of seconds heard a laugh and after that the PDA information for the mutant Poltergeist was unlocked.

Because I was a first time player, I didn't think much about it. The one thing puzzling me was the mutant Poltergeist. I wanted to see it, fight it. Was the anomaly holding the mutant or was the mutant the anomaly itself? You must understand, at the time I didn't know the difference between anomalies or artifacts and kept mixing them up, I was that green. So I quickloaded my game, waited another 30 seconds and tried touching the anomaly again, no laugh and no PDA information this time. Tried it again, no laugh, no info. I decided to try one more time because I was kind of fed up having to wait that long on the loading screen and again, no laugh, no info. I decided to move on...

Now, I know what I told here sounds like a nonsensical spooky story but I swear I am not making any of it up. As I am writing this sentence the year is 31-12-2020 and the time is 21:36, only a couple of hours left for the new year, 2021. Throughout the years me and many other people become Stalkers themselves, played every game of the trilogy countless of times, played countless mods, even modded the game a couple of times, talked about it for hours and much more. What I am getting at is that now, I know how the game works, what can or can't happen etc. and if I read my story today, with my current experience, I would simply ignore it and label it as a lie, plain and simple. But, It's not so easy to do so when the story in question is mine. I though about it over the years and come up with a few ideas as to why it happened:

1. Unused Sound / Bug: There are countless unused sounds in the game files, some are quite disturbing, maybe my unpatched game somehow replaced an underground ambience sound with one of them? Far fetched but it's theory nevertheless.
2. PDA Bug / My Late Discovery: Disregarding the laugh, it is too convenient for the Poltergeist info to pop up afterwards. Maybe it was always there but I just then noticed the icon and checked? Thing is after the quickload, there was no Poltergeist in the mutants section. Not too weird considering how the PDA informations work. Sometimes they appear after you loot an enemy, sometimes they do when you are walking from somewhere.
3. My Memory Fails Me: I know for a fact that I heard the laugh, but it wouldn't be right to not assume the possibility of it being my own imagination. Maybe I was tired that evening and imagined it?

One other reason for me to write this here is because I also heard a similar, maybe even the same, laugh in either StalkerSoup or some other Solyanka variant a couple of months ago. I was playing the mod and at one point I heard a laugh that reminded me the event from 2007. I didn't find the sound in the SoC game files when I checked a couple of years ago, but it wasn't exactly a thorough search either.

My personal theory is that the laugh is in the game files of SoC, maybe unused, and got repurposed in the mod. Just like that one, irrelevant laugh you hear in every single S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mod that has horror sections, you know the one, a male voice doing an echoey laugh.

And this is it Stalkers, a memory of mine from Agroprom Underground in 2007. I never forgot about the laugh to this day and decided to write about it as to never do so, and maybe to find an explanation for it someday.

Thank you for reading.