Quote of the Day: Jim Rossignol

The message for the games industry is clear: you don’t have to have pretensions to art – because here is a game that could not be more unpretentious in an artistic sense – for your game to have a serious message. Even the manshooter can be about something, without having to carefully distance itself with irony or hyperbolic absurdity. But crucially there is also scope to do shooters differently on a mechanical level. They do not have to be linear rollercoasters, nor multiplayer menageries. They can be slow. Even contemplative. –Jim Rossignol, “On The Importance Of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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The End of a Decade

This year was a curious one, and I don’t mean to refer to the VG industry alone: 2009 was, after all, the first full year of The Slowdown for us three, and boy, it sure went past real fast. For various reasons, this year has also been a very trying one for each of us, yet we were still able to find the time and enthusiasm to write and post together. Taking up writing, I’m certain, has only worked to enhance our enthusiasm and interest in the medium. As if to commemorate the very end of the decade, though, my relatively recent motherboard had to be shipped over to Germany for replacement recently.

You’ve probably also noted how we’ve yet not engaged ourselves in the “best of” discourse, at all; we enjoy making lists just as much as the other guy, sure, but perhaps unsurprisingly also tend to get over-analytical and –intellectual with the concept.

Slowdown Boys

Therefore, as our final post of the year, the three of us have jotted down our personal lists of the decade. The simple rule was not to make it too difficult for ourselves. Therefore, I have sought to paint an impression of the zeitgeist, warts and all. Very subjective. Nabeel wanted to paint a portrait of himself as gamer, and Richard hoped to be accurate and inclusive. The games listed below have not been included based on their perceived merits or qualities; instead, we selected them with the aforementioned focuses in mind.

All three free-form lists after the jump. Here’s to a new gaming decade, everyone!

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bitComposer Publishing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat

German publisher bitComposer Games report they are to publish GSC Game World’s latest game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat in the fall:

bitComposer Games has secured the worldwide rights to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, the next first-person shooter from Ukrainian developer GSC Game World and follow-up to the highly successful S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: … the newest episode seamlessly connects to Shadow of Chernobyl. The release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat for Windows PC is scheduled for Fall 2009.

This turn of events was largely presaged in GSC Game World utilizing a different publisher for each game in the franchise so far: With Shadow of Chernobyl, they utilized THQ, and Clear Sky was published by Deep Silver respectively. Looking from the outside in, I would personally wager that GSC Game World’s relationship with Deep Silver was marred somewhat by the publisher’s odd insistence on prematurely publishing untested patches for the game – not once but twice – first with 1.5.06 and again with version 1.5.09, further contributing to the pre-existing stigma of the game series’ assumed instabilities.

Though there’s a decided dearth of footage – some twelve screenshots in all – available for this forthcoming prequel at the moment, you can nevertheless take a gander at the game’s official website. bitComposer Games, then, are an all-new company, founded only last March, and are planning to come out with a slew of titles all to be published Q3 2009, including “RACE On“, the obscure “Scorpion: Disfigured” and “The Void”.

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Weather Forecast: Clear Sky?

As you’ve probably realized by now, I’ve grown very attached to following up on the Clear Sky aftermath, gorging myself on new information as it arrives.  The company’s intriguing track record combined with early releases is very enthralling…

We’ve heard by now how Clear Sky’s North American release date slipped due to a botched print job, how the game was released in unfinished state, and how some players had patiently sat in front of Steam, counting down its unlock date counter only to discover the game was not playable even after the counter had run its course.

Against this backdrop, it feels like kicking a downed opponent to report that at the time of writing, the game’s multiplayer component is working neither on Steam nor in its ingame browser. This seems to be related, in turn, to the fact that GSC Game World‘s official company website has been down for the past two weeks. The common factor for both issues is, according to a reliable source, that the GSC systems admin is currently on vacation.

While it’s not too rare to have the development team go on vacation right after release – Nabeel reminded me of the BioShock launch – with Clear Sky, nevertheless, it resembles an oversight with the game’s non-Russian audience: Clear Sky was released early in Russia, but the UK launch date and the US release were delayed to the 15th of September. There is a chance the aforementioned issues could have been very well avoided if the staff had stayed on board up until the game was released worldwide.

Finally, the publisher, Deep Silver, cleverly redirects all Clear Sky support over to GSC’s forums, where we’ve all heard how the development team does not read the English forum. Does this mean what I think it means, that the English-speaking player base has no official tech support for the game? If so, what does that even mean, say, under the EU law?

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Breaking News: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky

Though Clear Sky has not fared all that badly in reviews so far – despite complaints of show-stopper bugs and ubiquitous brokenness – scepticism has begun to rear its ugly head in terms of the probability of GSC Game World’s ability to salvage the game with patching, and not in the least because of claims that the game still contains bugs that were already present in the original Shadow of Chernobyl.

The general atmosphere of the GSC Game World forums currently resembles that of launch-day BioShock forums (Nabeel, having been a moderator there, can surely testify): A vocal, angry minority (“Angry Internet Folk”) of customers feel they’ve been grievously wronged by a second failed launch in the row and that GSC should have learnt the lesson by now.

A moderator on the forums has confirmed that the project manager for Clear Sky, Anton Bolshakov, has been fired and replaced by Ruslan Didenko, the main game designer.

Despite the aforementioned shortcomings, a second patch (1.5.04) has already been released for the Russian version of the game. Adding fuel to the fire of confusion is the way version numbers are incremented for the Russian/UK releases of the game (1.5.x) and ROW (1.0x). For instance, the 1.01 patch takes the game to 1.5.03 UK. It is my understanding that both patches break save game compatibility.

I jumped relatively late on the Shadow of Chernobyl bandwagon, and played the game with the 1.0.0.6. patch. In that shape, the game worked well and only suffered from one or two broken quests and bogged-down performance. I’ve decided to take the same route with Clear Sky as I did with Shadow of Cherobyl, namely: Wait.

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