Sov's Crazy Ramblings

As I previously promised here is my personal opinions on the recently released S.T.A…. What the hell, stalker.

Stalker Clear sky is a prequel to the first title, STALKER: Shadows of Chernobyl. Both games take place in a strange future ukraine where instead of killing everything, the destroyed reactor at chernobyl instead spews out strange waves that change the fabric of time and space and twist it everywhichway. This makes for some interesting gameplay, with the player constantly having to dodge dangerous anomalies and work out how to use the zone to his or her advantage.

You can’t actually change the sex of your character as that is an integral part of the story, another strange thing that perhaps should be noted is that not once does there appear a female character in the game. I seriously hope in this post apocalyptic world there are indeed females, otherwise I would like to reconsider walking through that odd looking white marsh a few miles back. o.O

STALKER Clear Sky, however, has some rather sad features that its predeccessor did not. Yes it has some beautiful graphics and I was in fact so amazed by the graphics that I took a good five minutes upon starting up the game to look at some of its beauty. It features some of the best HDR, lighting, shadows, mapping etc.. that I have ever seen in a game. Okay its not perfect but very little is. Added to that the performance level of it was good even at highest settings, so they got my hardware actually working.

More »

About 14 hours ago now 7-8 coordinated attacks took place in Mumbai, one of India’s major cities. So far the death toll is around 100 but that is expected to rise. The attacks involved armed gunmen to assault 2, 5-star hotels, a train station, a hospital and a restaurant near the Taj Hotel (one of the targets). Hostages were taken and have recently been extracted from the Taj hotel but as yet there is no information on the other locations.

As you can probably see it has been quite a dramatic night with a lot of repeated blatherings of the same information and repeated 5 seconds of footage. Something that made me laugh however was the indian television coverage of the event which I was watching live via CNN. There were about 12 tv crews there flailing around and pushing eachother over, wrestling with massively oversized and out-of-date TV cameras all crowding around the survivors, draining the last bit of life out of them with repeated and outrageously stupid questions.

Your thoughts and comments on my dislike of the reporting methods and also on the situation in India are greatly appreciated.

As I am british I guess I should mention a senior british official was there and he reported that there were 7 british hostages taken who have been recovered and are recieving treatment for their injuries in hospital. He refused to comment on the gravity of their injuries.

The overall death toll is expected to rise and I personally guess it will be around 120-150. That is as long as there are no further attacks. Which hopefully there won’t be.

Anyway thank you for reading, if you want more information check out yahoo.com or cnn.com!