Hipsters of the World Unite; My Antidote to Modern Ultra Mainstream Gaming.

So before i launch into what the game industry is doing wrong lets look at some areas that are doing something right for a change.

No im not talking about some pretencions 2D bobble headed platformer that claims to be some art masterpiece but is really just Mario bros stapled to Dostoevsky pretending to be really clever. No I'm talking about real 3D games, games that can rival the AAA industry in their scope, range and prowess (and surpass them many times over in their ambition). And they are more often than not coming from Eastern Europe; 


Let us start with my personal favorite; 


S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

The STALKER series by rights shouldn't work, the original game sat in development for 7 years with various BETAs and iterations (none of which functioned) with many of the dev team leaving to found 4A games (we shall come to them later) before development on the 1st game had ended. But it does work, oh boy it does. A FPS hybrid set in 2012 in an alternative sci-fi universe of the Chernobyl Exclusion zone the mix on ingredients that combine to make the gooey goodness of the STALKER cake are kind fo hard to explain  to someone who hasn't played/seen them but its an amalgam between many different genres and sub-genres. The main advantage of STALKER is more to do with the FEEL of the game than anything, the atmosphere and setting are engrossing to say the very least. The word Immersion does not do this game justice

But there are a few things i can pick out off the top of my head The gunplay is pretty spectacular with a grounding in more tactical games. Bullets obey gravity, axis and generally behave like bullets and weapons have a relatively realistic degree of accuracy (or should i say inaccuracy) and a real weight to them. The setting is both horribly grounded in the zones reality and filled with pretty out there sci-fi concepts that make it both more intriguing and more dangerous and the games structure, somewhere between open world choices and modular level design, gives the game a "lose yet structured" feel. 


All three games; STALKER; Shadow of Chernobyl, STALKER Clear Sky and STALKER; Call of Pripyat are all worth a look but Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat are particularly special games.