Coffee 54 wrote:Empire: Total War. It's going to take some getting use to. I'm playing as Prussia and so far, so good. However by invading Polish held West Prussia to establish an overland route to Berlin I have triggered a series of alliances that have left me at war with every nation I share a border with and then some. I think I'd better deploy some peace feelers before I get squished.
I've got it, I'm looking forward to trying it after Clear Sky, or depending on how this goes, very soon.
So instead of writing applications for universities and scholarships I've been finally getting my good computer set up. TO celebrate it working I spent the night playing STALKER: Clear sky, and since I already beat it, admittedly in a pretty shitty environment, I decided to try Redux. Redux for Shadow of Chernobyl was a nice touch that made the game a challenge without a real loss in fun. There was also supposed to be a Redux extreme but as far as I know it was never publicly released. Apparantly the extreme design philosophy carried over into redux for Clear sky. On even the easiest of settings you can still go from skipping through the swamp to pig food in under 30 seconds. Which is why I just quit playing.
One has to wonder whether it's worth playing at all it's so hard, you're counting every bullet, trying to aim every shot in face of the enemy, and you'll never be in good health, just radioactive and limping around. Your guns will kill a human, but the mutated monsters of the Zone will eat any man alive. A single bloodsucker ate 3 entire 5 man teams, most armed with AK-74's and BP rounds. Every rouble spent is sure to be a questionable investment at the best of time, and the game has continued to surprise me with the weapons it's giving so early in the game, rendering previous enormous investments garbage. No, not just something to try to reclaim value for, but outright garbage as the market economy in this game is just as awful as the real one. I don't think I've ever played a game like this where every decision, even just what route to take, was so heavy and potentially life-threatening, as this mod. If the AI, admittedly a pretty good one in comparison to most I've seen for FPS's, wasn't as exploitable as it was, I would surely never make it anywhere at all.