Hi, I don’t have much to say about the *current state of things* on this website, at least beyond what others have already said. I’m going to miss Jeff Gerstmann’s presence on Giant Bomb, but I'm excited to see what this new team can cobble together (Dan and/or Bakalar, my DMs are open if you'd like to listen to my pitch for turning Dubious Wheels/Towers/etc into a GB Feature.) I’ll leave it at that. For the time being, yours truly will keep posting his blogs on Giant Bomb, but should I need an alternate place to put these, I will make it known.

Hello and welcome to the concluding installment of The Wheel of Ukraineous Video Games, my randomizer wheel feature to remind you that, despite all the shit happening elsewhere in the world, there is still an ongoing war in Ukraine and some of the people there have made some video games. I know! Weird to think about.

Heroes of Annihilated Empires

Developer: GSC Game World

Release Date: May 9, 2007

Time Played: A little over two hours

Troubleshooting: None, surprisingly

Would I play more? Nah, but please look forward to the inevitable, eventual, possible, probable(?) Wheel/Tower/Geometric Shape of Dubious Strategy Games

Before they were “The STALKER people,” GSC GameWorld were “The Cossacks People.” Cossacks is, to my basic understanding, a historically-inclined RTS series whose greatest claim to fame was its ability to support massive numbers of units on screen at once, very mucha game about cranking out hordes of units to counter your enemy’s hordes of units. However, for this feature I decided to instead check out Heroes of Annihilated Empires, their fantasy follow up to the Cossacks games. It’s, um. Fine?

Now, my RTS chops begin somewhere around C&C Red Alert 2, Age of Empires II, or Warcraft III, and end at around Battle for Middle-Earth 1. I’ve said before when I was talking about Dawn of War: I’m not great at the genre and my ability to enjoy it broke around the time I started to understand things like “Micromanagement” and “build orders” and thus things that weren’t just building a bunch of dudes and destroying the enemy base after 90 minutes. In some sense, this is that, and if I was still 12 I’d absolutely be on board with any sort of game that has a “make infinite amounts of units” tab as a basic feature.

However much the basic gameplay appeals to the lizard brain end of RTS, the transition from historical to fantasy lacks a certain je ne sais quois, a certain sizzle, that I want out of this stuff. For a fantasy strategy game, there isn’t quite enough fantasy weird involved. Spearmen and archers are spearmen and archers, regardless of faction, and it never quite goes as hard as I’d like it to. It’s no Lords of Magic, no Warlords Battlecry, no Spellforce or any other number of extremely mid-range fantasy RTSes I can think of. I think the baseline appeal of a fantasy series is the concept of the fantastical, as blase as that sounds. This? Not nearly bonkers fuckin crazy enough, even if having a lot of skellingtons on screen at once is an impressive achievement.

Of course, I spent most of my time in the game with the campaign, which feels like an attempt to incorporate Warcraft III style hero mechanics on top of Cossacks’ “pump out lots and lots of dudes” mechanics. Unfortunately for me and everyone involved, the first few missions of the campaign are… lethargic. Alas, the adventures of good voice acting Elfman and his amazing voice acting are mostly contained in a series of back-and-forth wars of attrition, at least as far as the first handful of campaign missions were concerned. Not everything for this feature is gonna be a winner, I guess.

Chasm: The Rift

Developer: Action Forms Ltd.

Release Date: September 23, 1997

Time Played: Around 90 minutes

Troubleshooting: None. There’s a pre-packaged DOSbox config made by the DUSK guy, of all people, which runs and remaps the game’s controls to about what you’d expect from a shooter.

Would I play more? Eh, possibly?

Chasm is a game which caught my attention thanks to Civvie11’s video on the subject. As what may be one of the first (if not *the* first?) Slavjank FPSes on the market, it’s mostly remarkable for its technical dark wizardry and various tricks, which would become a running trend going forward. In a world where Quake II was only a handful of months away from blowing the lid on exciting new technological developments such as “colored lighting”, there’s something undoubtedly insane about Chasm looking and moving the way it does *in software* and *in DOS.* There’s location specific damage on enemies! In 1997!

It’s an eclectic mix of those technological achievements, combined with off-kilter level design and attempts(?) at storytelling which really give it that coveted Eurojank energy. It’s fast but not quite Quake Fast, counteracted by how labyrinthine, puzzle-y, and flat the levels are. Weirdly enough, those two things together are a bit contradictory. This level design is also one of those things which started to frustrate after a while, and is probably why I’d relegate Chasm in the “curiosity” category, rather than an out and out banger. Only a little bit dubious, but definitely an interesting part of history.

Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason

Developer: Action Forms Ltd

Release Date: April 15, 2009

Time Played: a little under two hours

Troubleshooting: Yes, several

Would I play more? Zzzzzzz

Cryostasis is a game that sticks out to me mostly because it was championed by one Dave Snider, former site engineer for Giant Bomb and noted advocate for eastern bloc weird shit. Imagine my surprise when I found out it was made by the same developer as aforementioned Chasm, being Action Forms’ last video game before they descended into mobile dev hell. They also made the Carnivores games, which… seem like shooters where you shoot dinosaurs? Future research may be required; they seem, um… dubious.

Regardless, I came into Cryostasis expecting a kind of weird eastern bloc cult hit. What I found was, to my own misfortune, kind of a slow and plodding affair. Maybe it’s playing a chain of these things back-to-back-to-back, but it wasn’t nearly as weird as I was expecting. Cryostasis is a game where you wander around an old Soviet icebreaker for reasons initially unknown, fighting weird snow ghouls and venturing into the memories of the crew before their deaths. Initially, you just have your fists and a set of very awkward melee weapons, but eventually you get the world’s most awkward bolt action rifle (and I assume, other guns at some point.) I hope my effusive praise for games like Metro is proof I’m not against slow-burn atmosphere, but in my two hours with the game I never felt like I encountered anything which quite justified my time.

Sure, maybe in 2009, the era of peak brown shooter, this was revelatory, but I’m left indirectly comparing Cryostasis to Zeno Clash, which literally came out a week later, and Return of the Obra Dinn, which does the “venture into the memories of the dead'' thing far better. Moreover, I don’t think I found a game that crashed quite as consistently as Cryostasis did. Having been delisted from both Steam and GOG for what I have to imagine are publisher reasons, the technical problems people were having 13 years ago are… moreso on modern operating systems. I won’t get into the process, but even after I went into .ini files and did window capture shenanigans (which didn’t work, so I just had to resort to the nuclear option of display capture) it still crashed multiple times on and off stream. This one was a real disappointment, especially given its cult status. Maybe it gets better after the first two hours (of a 6-8 hour game) but I’m gonna invoke Wolpaw’s Law here and say my time is better spent playing more viscerally terrible good interactive entertainment.

STALKER: Call of Pripyat

Developer: GSC Game World

Release Date: February 2, 2010

Time Played: A little over two hours, on and off stream

Troubleshooting: see below

Would I play more? Yes

Oh hey, what a convenient endcap for this feature. Of all the games surveyed in this feature, I think it’s probably fair to call STALKER the most popular? Influential? Important, even? Definitely the most distinctly “Ukrainian” of these games, at least as far as cultural identity and influences are concerned.

I’m not going to restate what I said about STALKER from my Shadow of Chernobyl write-up. The fundamentals of the series still holds true, and if you like yourself some desolate surreal irradiated wastelands, do I have the video game for you. Instead, Call of Pripyat is a significantly more approachable game and far more of a traditional open world affair than its predecessor. Even in vanilla form, it seems like if you’re going to play one of these games, one should play this one, straight up. Don’t play Clear Sky, apparently. No one likes Clear Sky.

But I didn’t play this one vanilla. See, in contrast to SoC, in which I used a “vanilla plus” modpack focused mostly on audiovisual and quality of life stuff, the mods I installed for Pripyat more directly affect the gameplay. Instead of going nuts, I opted for just two well-received, popular mods, both of which seem rad as shit. Gunslinger significantly changes a lot of the ballistics modeling present in the game, adds a bunch of bespoke animations (including for stuff like first aid and bandages), new weapons in that very Tarkov-esque gun porn way, and generally enhances the basic feel of the shooting. AtmosFEAR 3, on the other hand, significantly alters the in-game weather systems, including dense-ass fog, dark-ass nights, and new forms of anomaly storms. It’s impressive as hell, and significantly improves the mood and tone of what is already a moody game. (also one of these mods, I don’t remember which but I assume Gunslinger, also includes a pretty impressive HD texture pack which makes all the foliage and dilapidated concrete look extra depressing.)

See, the real reason I want to talk about Call of Pripyat isn’t the game itself which, to reiterate, seems like the best game I’ve covered for this feature, perhaps barring Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments. Instead I want to talk about what it’s like to poke one’s head into a long-running modding scene for a cult classic series of games. I’ve certainly dipped my toe into “fan mods” and “fan patches” before. I’ve said before that one shouldn’t play any of Troika’s games without fan mods, just as I’ve installed a bunch of shit for Morrowind and then played exactly two hours of Morrowind multiple times. Looking into the STALKER modding scene is its own beast. While other games may limit themselves to “curvy bodies” and “clean faces” and “remove encumbrance,” the mad lads modding this game go further. Are the mods compatible with one another? Are they supported in English? How many forum posts do I have to read between various people talking shit about each other’s mods? It’s a mystery!

I had to follow a youtube tutorial step-by-step to get just the two mods mentioned above to play nice with each other, and it turned out *that* video gave me different steps than the ModDB page *or* the Steam community guide where I initially found out about them! Friends, I’m here to say… we’ve been spoiled by Steam Workshop. We’ve become soft with easy streamlined mod managers, like the one I used for System Shock 2. Entering the world of the STALKER modding scene is to be reminded of a different age. Not just for the breadth, depth, and quality of offerings on display, but also because it’s a game in and of itself to figure out how to get everything installed correctly. It was a refreshing experience and also I never want to do it again if I can avoid it. (I won’t be able to avoid it)

The corollary to this is STALKER Anomaly; a fan project comprising numerous mods and mod ideas that I find more impressive than a lot of retail products. It has a lot of the stuff I mentioned about Gunslinger and AtmosFEAR, but like, eight more mods on top of those. It combines all three games (Shadow of Chernobyl, Clear Sky, Call of Pripyat) into a single massive sandbox with a bunch of tweakable mechanics for whatever experience you’re looking for. Wanna turn on fast travel, or make it so you can sell broken weapons to merchants? You can do that! While it’s perhaps a tad too open and a tad too “make your own progression” survivalist hell for my liking, I say with absolute sincerity that people should give this one a look. Oh, did I mention it’s a stand-alone thing? You don’t even need any of the games in question! It’s nuts! Check it out!

Alright, that’s it for me and this feature. I hope I’ve given these games and their developers the spotlight they deserve, because I’ve found some goooood shit here. I mean, hell, I’ll probably end up playing Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter at some point this year to follow up Crimes and Punishments, but until then I have great news: my next project is currently ongoing. Perhaps there will be write-ups about it. Maybe one write-up is already in process. Maybe you should check out my twitch channel and/or youtube archives to see what else I've been up to? Who can say? Well, I guess there's one thing I can say...

Slava Ukraini!