IGN: Fallout 4 To Be Officially Announced and STALKER SoC review

IGN reports that Fallout 4 will be officially announced tomorrow officially on June3rd, 2015 on it's official website.


 My Fallout 4 has been STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl, very similar to Fallout 3, richly detailed and an under appreciated gem with a great soundtrack.


New Vegas is great as well. After I finished that I began playing the PC game Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl. It did not disappoint either.


Great gameplay, graphics, sound, 24 hour day/night cycle, realistic physics, shadows, lighting and weather in real time, realistic physics, one shot kills, intense gameplay combat and CQC combat as well, weapons and armor breakdown after degrading with each use, you must eat food and use medkits, bandage's and anti radiation drugs when needed


16km of the Russian landscape/Chernobyl area have been recreated in great, rich detail. There are various factions competing in the Zone for survival, mutants and various anomalies. You can trade and talk to people and go on dozens of quests to make money.


The game is 1st person view with many Sci fi and paranormal elements in it, a good story and 7 different endings.


It is also similar to Tom Clancey's Rainbow 6 and Ghost Recon game plus Heroes of Stalingrad.


The soundtrack by Firelake (one song is stunning and hauntinglybeautiful, sung by a woman with a voice like Amy Lee of Evanescencefame) and guitar riffs throughout the game are awesome (yes characters play guitars by open bonfires and will have radios as well to listen to).


Enemy AI is very intelligent and will run, walk, duck, take cover and try and outflank you. Same for friendly AI too.


There is splinter damage, bullets will pass through wood. The ambient sounds are excellent and there are many scary moments in abandoned buildings in the game.


Sadly the game has no fast travel options.


I give Stalker 4/5 stars.

Video Game Hall Of Fame Should Include...

Morrowind, Super Mario Bros 3.

The Return of System Shock 2 - IGN

After thirteen years lost in cyberspace, Bioshock's ancestor is back.

By Rick LaneFor the past decade something has been lurking amid the vast electronic tangle of cyberspace: a name whispered with a strange mixture of fondness and fear by those who remember it; a creation that reigned supreme at the tail end of the last Millennium, and then almost completely disappeared. Just a few days ago, however, it suddenly came back, determined to regain its former glory. I’m here to tell you why you should be afraid and delighted in equal measure.


The alluring monster in question is, of course, System Shock 2, often referred to as the spiritual predecessor to Bioshock, the game that earned Ken Levine a place in the virtual hall of fame. For more thirteen years, legal problems have kept it locked in cyberspace, inaccessible to anyone who didn't buy it in 1999. But now, finally, that's all be resolved, and Good Old Games has released a version of it optimised for modern PCs.

Bioshock and System Shock 2 are linked by far more than spirit.

In both form and function, so much was carried over from the harrowing hallways of SS2’s Von Braun to the underwater dystopia of Rapture. The spacecraft is divided into a sequence of open environments, each with its own particular flavour. The story is largely told through recordings made by the ship’s inhabitants. Most of the crew have been infected by a hive-minded alien organism known as the Many, and are less extroverted, more unsettling versions of Bioshock’s Splicers. The tools at your disposal range from conventional weapons to hacking abilities to psionic powers analogous to Bioshock’s plasmids. It even has creepy vending machines.

Bioshock is a cataclysm within a circus, all action and spectacle, whereas System Shock 2 is about survival.

Yet whilst they are structurally similar, the two games play in strikingly different ways. The Bioshock games are a cataclysm within a circus, all action and spectacle, whereas System Shock 2 is about scavenging and survival. The former explores grand political and philosophical ideas, the latter simply presents to us a struggle for existence, as the squishy, organic Many clash with synthetic AI, with you trapped in the middle of this inedible sandwich.

Artificial Intelligence is a massive component of System Shock 2 on both narrative and mechanical levels. Built with Looking Glass’ famous Dark engine, it utilised the same tech that powered Thief, and the standout feature of the Dark Engine was how its sound system was interwoven with its AI system. Consequently, AI could locate and respond to sounds made by the player, and even sounds made by other AI. This in turn influenced another major theme of the game: horror.

System Shock 2 is frequently cited as one of the scariest games ever made. Despite the suggestive title, however, it never really tries to shock you. Enemies patrol freely through the Von Braun’s metal halls, and you frequently hear them before you see them. Nothing leaps out of vents making weird gargling noises a-la Dead Space. Instead of cheap thrills there is a constant sensation of dread, upheld by the knowledge that you are being perpetually hunted, that something might attack at any moment. Worse, the longer you hang around, the more desperate the own situation becomes as ammo, health and psionic energy are expended with each encounter.

Pervading this oppressive atmosphere throughout is a deep underlying sense of wrongness. The ship’s infected crewmembers apologise to you as they try to kill you. Escaped lab monkeys, their brains exposed through scientific experimentation, chatter pleasantly when unaware of your presence, but shriek with rage the moment they spot you. The Cyborg Midwives are the antithesis of birth and life, their womanhood replaced with cold, bloody steel. And the game is obsessed with worms, hiding them under every shelf and table, sometimes in huge writhing piles. Unlike most survival horror games, where you gradually numb to the unpleasant surroundings, the Von Braun becomes more unnerving the longer you spend trapped beneath its metal hull.

It’s a challenge intended specifically to provoke defiance, for the player to demonstrate their freedom.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, there is also the small matter of dealing with one of gaming’s most infamous antagonists. Right at the outset, SHODAN challenges the player directly, and in a few brief sentences demonstrates everything which makes her so abhorrent and compelling, her vanity, her god-complex and her and contempt for any being seemingly less intelligent than herself. It’s a challenge intended specifically to provoke defiance, for the player to demonstrate their freedom to act against her.

Only when SHODAN finally reveals herself does the significance of this become apparent. From that moment, the player is subject to her every whim, and knowingly so. She proposes an alliance to defeat the Many (and of course to regain the powers she lost in the first game). It’s an alliance in which you have no choice, and so you follow her orders and complete her objectives while she taunts and belittles you. It’s this complete control SHODAN appears to have over you, contradicting the game’s own apparent freedom, that makes her such a memorable adversary.

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Fourteen years on, System Shock 2 feels remarkably fresh. The Dark Engine holds up far better here than it does in the original Thief. The clean lines, angles and surfaces of the Von Braun are well matched with late nineties 3D rendering, although character models look rather like the developers beat the polygons into shape with a tenderising mallet. The eerie, pulsating musical score from Eric Brosius also helps to keep things lively. The skills system shows its age in places – distinguishing between repairing weapons and maintaining them seems completely arbitrary, and the ending is weaker than a McDonald’s coffee. The game is so strong otherwise though, that these issues can be easily forgiven.

System Shock 2 was probably the last great game of the twentieth century.

System Shock 2 was probably the last great game of the twentieth century, and it’s desperately sad that a generation of gamers have missed out on it. I can’t help but wonder how the development landscape might have been different had more gamers experienced it between Looking Glass’ demise and the arrival of Bioshock. Its understanding of level design, storytelling and choice in play style is visible in so many fantastic games from Deus Ex to Dishonored, and wouldn’t we all like a few more like those? 
 
Nevertheless, it’s wonderful to be able to play it again; and more importantly for newcomers to access it for the first time. Night Dive deserve a lot of respect for sifting through the rights wrangle between EA and Meadowbrook insurance group and rescuing it from legal limbo. System Shock 2 has been lost in the wild for too long, we should all be glad to see it finally shepherded from the darkness.-Rick Lane via IGN

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/15/the-return-of-system-shock-2

Alone in the Dark Retrospective, the godfather of survival horror games

Alone in the Dark Retrospective

The Godfather of Survival-Horror

As the '80s gave way to a new decade, a young amateur game designer named Cristophe de Dinechin entered the Infogrames office in Villeurbanne, France with the hopes of landing an internship. To make his case, he had with him a small demo designed to show off a fast 3D engine. As the interview progressed, he realized that he had set his sights too low. He didn't land an internship, but instead secured the most generous development deal the company had ever given a freelancer. His assignment was to turn that demo into a game.

Alpha Waves, as the finished game was called, would turn a few heads. It is regarded by game historians as the first true 3D platform game, and while it didn't inspire waves of imitators, it caught the eye of one of Infogrames' programmers, Frédérick Raynal. He persuaded his superiors to let him take on the time-consuming task of porting the Atari ST version of Alpha Waves to MS-DOS PCs. After the experience, Raynal was convinced of the power of polygons, and he knew what his next move would be: a 3D game with animated human characters.


With that idea, the rest of the vision came together: a haunted house, walking dead, and a desperate plight to stay alive -- just like the zombie movies Frederick grew up watching. Infogrames brass wasn't convinced, so Raynal took the initiative and started working on a demo.

Carnby steps into the first Alone in the Dark

 He developed a character engine that set new precedent. It interpolated the movement of points on a 3D model to create characters that not only animated smoothly, but could bend and flex instead of being cobbled together from solid blocks. Raynal knew that the primitive 3D graphics of the day weren't enough to lend his haunted manor the needed atmosphere, so he created a system that used bitmapped backgrounds to illustrate his 3D space with dramatic (but static) camera angles. At first he thought digitized photos would be the way to go, but before long he settled on hand-drawn art by Yaél Barroz and Jean-Marc Torroella.

His bosses were duly impressed, and placed Raynal in charge of the project. He would direct, design, and program the game. To establish the eerie mood he wanted, Raynal turned to H. P. Lovecraft for inspiration, borrowing mythology and monsters from the Cthulu stories. It was a different sort of storytelling, perhaps ahead of its time. Rather than imitating other media and explicitly telling a story using movie-like devices such as dialog, cut-scenes, and narration, Alone in the Dark would allow players to discover the story as investigators, piecing it together from books, journals, and environmental clues.
The atmosphere was thick. In 1920, an old plantation house in Louisiana called Derceto becomes the site of the unexpected and inexplicable suicide of Jeremy Hartwood, a man who had become fixated on learning about the occult during his final years in the house. Players could choose to play as either Emily Hartwood, Jeremy's niece, or Edward Carnby, a private investigator called to investigate what really happened. Interestingly, since the story is discovered through investigation, the player choice doesn't really affect the actual story. The player's imagination is left to piece together the unholy events that have transpired, not unlike more recent games like Bioshock and Half-Life 2..."