stalker

No news on the game front, really; I’m still playing Stalker (pure nukular goodness!), Neverwinter Nights 2 (it’s okay, but I still don’t get the enthusiastic reviews), Anachronox (slowly getting to the end) – and a rallye game called Colin McRae DIRT, best proof that the streets are safer with me off them.

Don’t drink and drive. Or, in my case, don’t drive.

I also haven’t watched any new films (or rewatched old ones), so I’ll take this opportunity to write about films that I expected to like – but didn’t. Usually when that happens, it’s that I like the director’s previous work a lot, but then fail completely to connect with the film. Or it’s that a reviewer I like gives the film a glowing review that I fall for. By the way, I don’t share the dismissive arrogance many people have when it comes to reviewers – good critics don’t necessarily share my opinions 100%, but 1) they have to recognise what a film is trying to do and 2) I have to know where they’re coming from after reading the review. What I do hate is critics who pan a genre film, for instance, because it isn’t Truffaut, critics who mistake their dislike for a certain kind of story or storytelling for its inherent unworthiness. And with a good reviewer, it doesn’t really matter whether they liked a film or not – I will have a good idea from what they write and how they write it whether I’m likely to enjoy the film.

Before I get started on this in earnest, though, I’ll have to come up with a list of films that fit. I’ve got a few ideas: Punch Drunk Love, for one, and my own favourite, Russian Ark. (Okay, technically that latter one is a “Film that this blogger hated with a vengeance”, but more of that later.) So, tune back in very soon!

P.S.: Films that – ironically, predictably – didn’t click for anyone, part 1:

Nope, I haven’t handed in my nerd credentials and stopped playing computer games. As a matter of fact, I recently got a new graphics card, so I’ve been diligently playing those games that didn’t run that smoothly before the upgrade. One of the titles I’d most been looking forward to is Stalker – Shadows of Chernobyl. (Well, technically it’s called S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Something of Doodah, but unless someone can tell me what the abbreviation is supposed to stand for, I refuse to use that wannabe leet name.)

There’s been a discussion about games as art for a while now. If we look at them as narrative art, then I’d agree that there are few games that tell a story that’s better, or even as good, as your average mainstreamy Hollywood genre piece. (There are exceptions, but that’s material for another entry.) What games can excel at, though, is atmosphere – and that’s what Stalker has in spades. It’s based, though loosely, on Andrei Tarkovsky’s enigmatic film of the same name (which I haven’t seen yet – shame on me!).

The game is set in the area around the radioactive wasteland surrounding the defunct nuclear reactor in Chernobyl. Stalker‘s version of the Zone is populated by lone adventurers, bandits, militia and mutated animals. It is dotted with anomalies that tend to mean your death if you wander into any one of them unawares. (There is grim fun to be had of watching packs of mutated dogs happen into an anomaly that pretty much spins them around like the cow in Twister – and then tears them apart.)

Stalker manages to be one of those games that’s greatly enjoyable but not a lot of fun, and that’s mainly down to its atmospheric setting. On my first day in the Zone, I happened across a camp that other Stalkers had made amidst rusty cars and a broken down Hind helicopter. Just as the sun set, a group of bandits attacked, and most of what I could make out were bursts of fire in the darkness and the flashlight’s circle of brightness illuminating burnt out Ladas and the occasional bandit aiming his semi-automatic at me.

In general, the nights in the Zone are tense and scary – mostly because they are actually dark. Walking towards distant lights, your flashlight barely illuminating the bushes in front of you, while you hear strange animal sounds, and suddenly a pack of dogs attacks, their eyes glinting in the dark… Definitely beats the hell (pun only semi-intended) out of Doom 3‘s predictable haunted house ride and its rubber zombies.

I’m not very far yet, but I’m looking forward to getting closer to the shut-down reactor and entering the parts of the Zone that used to be residential areas. Until then, I will continue being the bane of mutated dogs and hogs everywhere… until I run out of ammo. I run pretty fast (’till I stumble into one of those amusing anomalies and it proceeds to turn me inside out).