Earth 2160 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
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More and more games have been moving to Steam, Valve’s content distribution service. When Steam first came out, it just angered me because I had to go through it for HL2 and other Valve games, and all my games weren’t in one place. Since the new content has been pouring in, this is quickly reversing, and I now try to buy everything through Steam to try to consolidate to a diskless game platform.
Two games, however, are worth noting on Steam specifically. We’ll begin with Earth 2160.
Earth 2160 is an RTS game that received almost no publicity. I found it purely by chance, but was immediately impressed by graphics that were roughly two gens ahead of it’s time, with half the hardware requirements. This game has shaders and effects like a DX10 game, and this was before Geforce 8 cards even existed.
Aside from it’s pretty exterior, the core of this game is impressive as well. It has unique gameplay styles for each of it’s races, from networks of structures that form a grandiose city, to stacking towers, to a buildingless alien horde. The gameplay is unique no matter what side you choose, and no matter who you are. Each of the three more “linear” (you build buildings) races contains a tech tree that enables various types of units, guns, etc… and you can then design your own units. That’s right, a feature that is both rare and coveted in an RTS, and this game does it right. There’s nothing more fun than engineering a unit, after a long period of running from the enemy, to decimate them in turn.
The game also has a hero system, which is interesting in that the randomly offered heroes appear to all players. You bid on the hero, and the player with the highest bid is given the hero to utilize until the period you’ve hired him for expires. At this point you may renew or let him go. The heroes aren’t just for combat, they impart powerful bonuses to your entire race from hero to hero, such as a truck that adds +20% research speed.
As a bit of a side note, there’s an odd inventory system going on in this game. Every hero seems to have the capacity to equip items, and has it’s own weapon (if it’s armed). However, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get new guns or armor, etc… Perhaps this system was never fully implemented, or else I’m missing something. (Comment if you know..)
As if all of this wasn’t enough to have you considering a purchase, let me give you a few more reasons:
Have weak hardware? I ran this game on medium, high fps with a laptop of the following specifications:
- AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (1.8Ghz)
- 1.25GB PC 2700 RAM
- Radeon 9600 64MB Graphics (Dedicated Memory)
This laptop was powerful perhaps in 2003-2004, and this game came out in 2005. It’s wonderfully optimized, and scaling back doesn’t remove too much of the beautiful shading, etc. It’s a great experience even on the lowest of hardware configurations.
Now for the coup de grace: the game costs less than $5. That’s right. It’s typically $4.95, and for this holiday season (ending today) it’s $4.45 (not much of a sale incentive, lol). That’s gotta be the best bang for your buck, sale or no. Even if you hate RTS games it’s worth checking this out, even if just to see the graphics and story.
Alright, now to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. This game was hyped and brought to E3 several times over the course of a few years. Some may argue that as a result, it’s graphics engine was a bit dated when the game was finally released in 2006. If you like games like Oblivion, Deus Ex, or other open ended RPG/FPS titles (one of my favorite niche genres), you’ll love STALKER. This game takes place in a post-apocalyptic USSR (near Pripyat, Ukraine, to be exact) at the location of the infamous Chernobyl disaster and it’s surrounding areas. Instead of how things occurred in real life, however, the disaster in the game caused mutants and strangely powered “artifacts” to appear. People known as STALKERs search for these artifacts, harnessing their power for their own gain or selling them to become rich. There are several factions fighting, and you’re caught up between it all. While not 100% open-ended, you can free-roam whenever you’d like and completely ignore all story and just do side quests, similarly to Oblivion.
Strangely, this game has multiplayer. However, it’s not like you’d expect, in an MMO multiplayer free-roam style. It’s kinda like Counter-strike, but with artifacts often playing as the objective and far less polish on the buying engine and smoothness of the game systems. It’s worth playing a bit if you’ve got the game, but this isn’t something to buy expecting spectacular multiplayer. However, the entire game engine runs on a server/client system, even the singleplayer, so it may well be possible to hack up a COOP, which would be excellent.
This is an excellent game, but even with years of development time was released in a very buggy state. I, personally, found that no amount of patching made the retail version stop crashing on occasion, or removed all quest bugs. I even used a few mods and unofficial patches to remedy this, but I was never comfortable trusting it without saving every few seconds. In the Steam release, however, things seem solid. I’ve not had a single crash, the FPS has gone up since the retail version, and quests have been fixed. I’m not sure exactly what, if anything, was done to do this, but perhaps simply changing the binaries around to run through Steam helped to fix a plethora of issues. Whatever the case may be, you can now wander around the outskirts of Pripyat, killing zombies, mutants, and STALKERs without fear of error on the game’s part. Truly a great game, and only $22 on Steam at the moment, worth picking up IMO (I did).
Happy new year, by the way, readers.
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