STALKER is one of my favourite modern shooters because it is so unscripted and challenging. It's not your typical COD experience of breaking into a room and painting the walls with the NPC's innards. No, it's more of the NPC's painting the game with your innards and you hotkeying the quicksave and quickload to the Q and E keys. Pleasure is derived from meticulous planning and grand strategies that are unfortunately not as common in games today.

On my most recent attempt I killed the dogs first, took potshots at the soldiers and lured them from their defensive position, then took shelter in the barn while they ran about. The AI could use some work but that doesn't take away from the large amount of planning that went into that strategy.

Oh, boy... Got in another interesting fight in the underground tunnels two hours ago. Some Military soldiers vs. some Bandits. But no party would be so much fun without some unwelcomed guests, like the invisible mutants and the mind controlling mutants.

It is really starting to attack Crysis' spot as the #1 shooter on my list.

Own all of these, never played them... okay, into the queue they go... should be getting to them sometime in 2015.

Bump them up the list. Seriously. These ain't your average backlog entries.

Dunno, my backlog currently contains Planescape, Fallout, and Thief 1+2 among other things. I feel like I should at least make some progress in them because they're awesome.

Yeah it's great but not random enough if you ask me. For example in Garbage the stalker camp is ALWAYS attacked from the back by bandits, every time you pass by. On the way to Bar there are ALWAYS packs of wild dogs. In Rostok there are ALWAYS mercs on the roof of that devastated building on the way to Yantar, etc. I mean after you deal with all of those there should be some more variety and not always the same events. It gets boring after passing by for the n-th time.

However the game is fantastic. Real shame about STALKER 2...

I'm normally not much of a fan of shooters, but I really enjoyed SoC when I played it (and I've got CoP sitting in my backlog, although I should be getting to it soon enough). The AI for the game was really impressively non-retarded, with the AI opponents actually able to behave reasonably intelligently without any kind of heavy scripting- it makes good use of cover, uses grenades to flush you out of cover, and when fighting groups of enemies they actually work fairly well together (in one of my first fights with a group of enemies I pinned one of them down and expected others to just do suicide charges from the same direction, only to end up with a few bullets in the back of my head when several of the other enemies flanked me). The atmosphere was also great, managing to be really creepy at times without relying on typical gimmicks, plus just the random behavior of the world could lead to some great "Oh shit!" moments. I remember one time I was traveling through the Wild Territory and heard a bunch of gunshots- figuring it was just bandits and mercs mixing it up I went to pick up the spoils, only to find a group of bandits getting finished off by a pack of around 20 mutant dogs, who then started charging at me. Oh shit! Only reason I survived was because I was able to get to some high ground where they couldn't get to me, then picked off enough of the pack that the rest ran off and I could get down from my perch and get the hell out of there.

I always loved that bridge.

My favorite part in the entire game, though, is that first quest/mission/whatever. You know, the one where you have only a pistol at the start? Yeah, I love it. There's something just plain awesome about keeping yourself alive until you can fire a round or two into one of the bandits' heads so you can get his shotgun, and then finish off the rest of the bandits. I found the fight especially delightful when I upped the difficulty, because a single, point-blank shot could kill me. I had to be bit more careful, and I had to watch my ammo, because I didn't have much.

The game was still fun after that, of course, but none of the other battles were really the same.

Okay, that thread made me decide that, once I will have finished Serious Sam 3, I will definitely try me some STALKER. I have the three games, with their respective "complete mod" (great job, artistpavel!) and never got to play any of them. It has to change!!

I'm just gonna leave this here. Yeah, the game is kind of awesome.

I've only played the first STALKER (with the graphics mod). Amazing game. I still need to play Call of Pripyat.

Sad to hear about STALKER 2 canceled this week.

I quite agree, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is my favorite FPS series. I love how unforgiving it is, how it allows you wander basically wherever you want, keep stashes and loot (I love loot).

I really hope more get made.

Who's taking bets that EA is going to buy out the IP and bring it back the way they "brought back" Syndicate? :P

Bethesda bought the IP, that's why they are working on something else.

Get out of here stalker!