@@hazukichanx408 To be frank it was a flashback dream induced from being knocked out after the pyrogeist exploded, but he ran out of the room as he was passing out. Makes sense for dangerous mutants to kick someone while they're down. Plus I think he almost ran past an artifact when he was in such a hurry.
I hope he just skims clear sky, aside from the faction war things (which iirc dont even work without mods) it really didnt offer much over the original
@@LeetROFFi4 I never finished Clear Sky because of that bit. I didn't expect that I would have to go so long without any resupply or chance to repair my gun. I ran out of Medkits and my main gun broke so I was trying to get through the hospital with a Pistol and 2-3 shots in the Grenade Launcher. I never did it and never went back to it.
Kinda funny fact about Controllers in Shadow of Chernobyl, they don't have a melee attack, so you can kind of just run up to them and knife the shit out of em while they try to run away, it's great
Fun fact: the Snork was the winner of a community contest the devs held during development of the game. Fans could hand in their own artwork for a monster, and the devs chose the winning artwork to be created and inserted into the game.
Particularly ironic that the "get out of here Stalker" is such a perpetual meme... when it's a mistranslation, and he's not supposed to sound so hostile.
@@NicholasBrakespearI like to imagine everyone including other Dutiers always walk through there as fast as possible looking at the ground to avoid making eye contact with him.
@@NicholasBrakespear I don't speak Russian, but I played the game with Russian voices a while ago. To me it sounded like he says "Move along" or something like that.
10:30 in later games Freedom stalkers adopt elements of hippie and rasta speak in russian dub. 11:15 He's actually modelled after Maxim Popenker, a gun studies expert who even got few collabs with Forgotten Weapons and is quite a figure in possoviet gun owners community.
Freedom has the same kind of hippie speech in English too, one of my favorite characters, Uncle Yar, is voiced by Steve Blum in the English dub, it's really funny hearing him play a hippie sniper dude. I played Stalker before I learned about Maxim Popenker's website, so when I saw a picture of Maxim I went "wow, he looks just like Skinflint!" Maxim's content was really helpful in learning about a lot of the Eastern Bloc weapons featured in Stalker.
In the first game there's a quest to kill a pig so they can have a barbecue for Bob Marley's birthday. When you turn it in he says something like "Good job, bro. Jah will never forget you."
I'm still pissed at Maxim because as a Russian-American bilingual, he didn't even acknowledge my offer of help with proofreading his English language articles. Dick.
the stalker trilogy would have been so much more realistic if you had to deal with melting plastic furnishings and your magazine falling out for no reason whenever you used the l85 rifle
You can kill poltergeist with a few up close shots. They are manifested as those electrical disturbances that move around and throw things, bit they actually have a physical body that is revealed when killed.
Try Dark Souls next. Start with "Remastered" version (60 fps). I know it's like completely different thing, but if you want that feeling of "I DID IT" there's no better place to go
Fun fact: in real life folklore Poltergeists are indeed often linked to random fires. Also, the PDA info section on mutants actually features a photo of the Poltergeist. In it it's a humanoid creature without legs.
i love the style of civvie's S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. the cinematic intro, action movie-esque sequences with constant music, the intertitle cards, it's just cool.
I love to imagine a S.T.A.L.K.E.R walking along, seeing a floating, semi-sentient ball of fire floating around a room towards him and just blandly being like "Yep, uh-huh, not going that way."
1:00 It's a massive upgrade. The unique weapons have much better condition so they degrade more slowly. Also, shooting in full-autio degrades weapons faster than semi-auto. So use semi at almost all times unless you think you can handle having to change out weapons faster
Measure twice, cut once, or in this case aim and shoot respectively. Getting good with semi-auto and rare short burst really helps killing enemies fast without burning through ammo and your weapon condition (and without letting them shred your health and suit). Also, stealth works nicely, it's just very hard and unforgiving (and once you start killing people, your stealth is burned, even if not immediately so). (Also, stealth auto-fails on load due to a bug)
@@DinnerForkTongue Interesting. IIRC the autofail was because you became visible for split second after load, regardless of geometry between you and NPCs, so that shouldn't have mattered.
The cure for methanol is to drink ethanol, so always make sure to drink double, if you get sick with the shady stuff, the normal vodka will put you right. Always carry vodka to treat samogon poisoning.
I love the assault on the army base. It's one of the first times in game you get to feel truly powerful. You've got an okay-ish gun, plenty of targets, enough ammo and medical supplies to just drip feed HP directly into your soul. First time in the lab is always a kinda creepy and very confusing experience - hope you enjoyed it. A shame the freedom questline bugged - there's some good stuff there but that's just the stalker experience cant force it to work.
Hey Civvie, long time STALKER player, if you quick save and quick load in front of the trader, their stocks will reset allowing you to buy more ammo and supplies. :) This will solve your 5.56 ammo crisis.
@@thecandlemaker1329 I actually thought he was saying something along the lines of "weaklings" in ukranian slang as a sort of meta-joke, and it took me a minute or two for it to click that he wasn't.
Blind Stalker? Not a big deal, my vision is augmented Edit: Civvie11 I want Pro Deus Ex. You got 5 months to do it before I add you to list of NSF casualties
Cool fact: the DUGA-3 radar system in the real-life zone (featured in the upcoming Heart of Chornobyl) was dubbed "the brain scorcher" by the CIA before the disaster, as they genuinely believed it was some kind of experimental long-range mind-control device. The DUGA-3 was also used as model for the wall surrounding the city in the Divergent movies.
That Duty / Freedom split quest where you end up either siding with one side or the other bugged out for me, but in my favour. Played both sides and each one ended up assuming I was support them over the other. Ended up with great faction relations for both Duty and Freedom which made life super easy not having one of the 2 most well armed factions as a bitter enemy.
That's not a bug, it's a viable strat. I help Bullet and Serega in the Dark Valley, then warn Lukash about the Duty guys but don't get involved in their fight, so Duty doesn't turn hostile. Then I do jobs for both Voronin and Lukash that don't involve fighting the other faction - stuff like killing mutants, fetching items, and so on. Makes the last leg of the game super easy when you're SWIMMING in good gear like armor, guns and specialized ammunition. Seriously, Voronin hands out 9x39 SP-6 like it's candy on festival day.
I remember buying this when it came out, knowing nothing about it other than it was inspired by Roadside Picnic. I really just wanted a fancy new PC game to test my upgraded rig. I ended up playing it all damn night, then fell alseep in class the next day and got detention. Games so absorbing that they start causing problems for you IRL are the fucking best.
Someone needs to mod in the "spiderweb" from the first trip in the book as an anomaly for shits and giggles. You barely see it, get no indicator when walking in and then randomly die over 10 hours later.
@@waltervoidbringer4491 IIRC Burnt Fuzz (as it's called in the game) does hurt you if you run/jump into it. It only appears in a handful of locations though and most people never collide with it. Mods like Anomaly add it in way more places where it makes sense, which also adds atmosphere. Something about it deeply unsettles me even from a distance. Just what IS this stuff anyway? It's slightly psychic, that much is obvious...
Well I don't think so. The FUCKING snowstorm level in Dark Souls II DLC gave me real life nauseating migraines that lasted for a couple of days. Let me tell you, I did not enjoy it.
Hah, yes ! The moment where you acquire a scoped weapon for the first time, and are actually able to kill things reliably. Such a turning point in the gameplay y'know, going from survivng in the Zone to being an actual MENACE !
The L85/SA80 is a piece of junk both in-game and in-reality but, using it as a semi-auto 5.56 light DMR is rewarding. It's the first gun you get where you can really reach out and crush someone.
Oh you poor soul, you really thought the IL 86 was an upgrade. My greatest experience with that pile of dross was having it jam twelve times while I was being chased around a tree by a bloodsucker. Never again.
I cannot wait until his reaction to the end, and eventually trying to piece together the purposefully-vague overarching story. Maybe, we can convince him to play Lost Alpha and get even more confused!
Is Civvie ever going to use the bolts to test for anomalies, or does he not know about them? Edit: Okay, I do remember Civvie walking with the bolts out for a hot second in an earlier part of this series. Sorry - all this background radiation might be causing me a brain bleed
IIRC, in the film the characters only had a few bolts and had to retrieve them. Also, most of the film's anomalies were time distortions, while the game has all sorts of different phenomena to keep you on your toes.
@@Three60Mafia Then you never played correctly nor bothered to learn, the bolts are not a gimmick, not only they are useful for spotting anomalies but also there are some anomalies you can prematurely trigger to pass safely.
I was thrilled to find out Civvie played STALKER, as I have recently played all three and I am currently starting Anomaly. I actually went through the entirety of SoC without knowing poltergeists and pyrogeists were killable enemies; the game gives next to no indication that you are supposed to shoot them because they look just like anomalies, particularly the orbs made of fire or lightning that just move around a fixed path. I DID know there were enemies called poltergeists because I picked up the encyclopedia entry before entering X18, but I DID NOT know that they looked like they do because the PDA photo is a photo of what they look like when you kill them, not a photo of one that is alive. I spent like 10 minutes in the pyrogeist room wondering what the hell I was supposed to do to open the door before I finally just threw a grenade which happened to kill the pyrogeist and the door opened. I love this series but lordy there is too much Slav Jank (tm) to ignore.
There are mods that restore some unfinished content - and this was actually not a problem before, because the poltergeists - just like bloodsuckers - use their normal form and just chill and walk around the lab. But the biggest clue is that - they can't stay in ghost form for too long and they must go back to their normal state, and the way they do this implies they need to focus and that ghost state makes them confused and tired - they are also vulnerable here, because the moment they stop being ghosts and again look normal, they kinda fall to the ground and shake and hold their heads while getting up. And in ghost form they are actually blind and go through you if you stand still. So they are kinda a joke in these mods, because you can just walk everywhere and if you spot one you can "stalk" them and wait for the moment they become visible. Burers on the other hand become a lot more dangerous because now they have a close range fireball attack that is a insta-kill mostly.
Glad he's playing the original first, not leaping into the mods. I love GAMMA, but the original releases are a unique experience. Here's hoping he continues right through to Call of Pripyat. Also, would love to see a Metro playthrough. Seriously though, why does he still hate leaning? Garrett the master thief died for our sins, so that we could all lean in heaven forever... and Civvie don't even care. EDIT: Oh my god, he leaned after all! Garrett be praised! I mean it was just the once, but still.
@@NicholasBrakespear The original had a strong horror direction lost in the redesign to Last Light. The skinny models and mostly underbuilt characters added a sense of desperation and vulnerability, and truly set aside who actual serious men were (Rangers, Nazi elites). Artyom is a weedy hungry 20 year old adolescent, and most of the grown men aren't much tougher. The character and model redesigns for Last Light are much bulkier and stronger looking. Just the fact LL Artyom gets uniform to wear but 2033 Artyom has to wear a homemade jacket and wool gloves gives a massive difference in presentation and feel. LL also prioritized a move in the action shooter direction. The ability to incapacitate most enemies with a single button press encouraged a faster and more direct playstyle. The ratio of human to mutant encounters was raised.. 2033 goes hours at a time between human enemy encounters, most of LL is spent with hostile humans. The gunplay is vastly improved for Metro Last Light, which also makes it a more actual less horror experience. Finally, LL has fewer levels that just dwell on the Metro as a character and a setting. Levels like Lost Catacombs, Ghost, and Anomaly are just generally not included, and the supernatural aspects of the metro in LL are generally toned town. I haven't played Last Light in about 6 years, sorry if I'm inaccurate.
"There's plenty of different Anomalies here too, and I found that, alot of them, you can just run through if you are quick enough.... Okay, not THAT one..." Civvie 11, 2023. R.I.P Man, but I did have a good laugh from it though, so cheers man, for making it through.
I am so glad Civvie's playing this. Now we just need EHERM SYSTEM SHOCK 1 (Not the remake, the og) NO NO SHOOT FREEDOM, YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO KILL DUTY!!!
Fun fact - unique weapons and armors have more durability, so they can server you well for much, much longer. also props for not installing any mods like Complete for the 1st playthrough - vanilla is vanilla, even if it hurts
I'm honestly surprised how carefully he played throughout this, I've played this game so much and yet I'm still too comfortable brute-forcing my way through the game lol.
If you stealth through the military base instead of going in gung-ho, the STALKER system is *just* barely enough to make some of the most tense stealth you'll ever see this side of Thief. Especially if you go in at night when the patrols are less numerous. Also being able to shoot poltergeists with bullets I feel was a mistake; they should have been incorporeal because the tension they bring - until you realise a few bullets dispatches them - is unparalleled.
There is no sweeter feeling than teabagging military boys with Makarov when i was young and stupid enough to go 'fuck around and find out' around military base for medpacks and weapons. I died a million times though but still. You are experiencing STALKER the right way,Civvie.Also,that ending? I have a feeling you will absolutely love Clear Sky :)
"the guy made a wish that came true and the zone grew 5 kilometers." "Imma wish for it to grow 10 kilometers." they will make a true slav out of you yet civvie. 😂😂😂
a little joke added in the anomaly version is if you get to the wishgranter you can wish for the zone to disappear and the game will crash to desktop but the fatal error window is titled "wish granted".
To ensure that you always have safety saves, make a hard save whenever you enter a new region of the Zone (or X-lab) for the first time and/or before starting or accepting any mission or side-quest. Also, since you went to the Army Warehouses before going to the Dark Valley, or if you do so on later playthroughs, you have the opportunity to scrounge up some really good gear. 10:30 That always reminds me of Auntie Entity referring to Mad Max as "raggedy man." 11:10 Crystals are some of the best artifacts. Two is enough. Combine with two Moonlights and one Mica or Slug and you've got an effect combo, especially if you're wearing any of the scientist suits (SSP-99, SSP-99M, SEVA, or PSZ-9Md). 11:15 He looks kind of a lot like Max Popenker circa early 2000s. 13:58 Think of 5.45 as a "pre-Bar" caliber and 5.56 as a "post-Bar" caliber. We old-school zoners used those terms. 9x18 is pre-Bar, .45 is post-Bar, but 9x19 is fairly universal throughout most of the Zone (and mid-game). 9x39 and 7.62x54R are late-game calibers. You might find some to play around with around mid-game, but they're best reserved for later. 12-gauge is cheap and common, so feel free to go berserk with shotguns. You'll quickly find that slugs and darts are disappointing to the max, so sell all of those ammos if you want to. Buckshot maintains its usefulness, especially against mutants. Blunt projectiles (pistol slugs and shot pellets) don't do much against armor, though. 15:40 Be sure to make use of stashes. There are several different kinds. Blue footlockers, OD green footlockers, toolboxes, backpacks, pipes, safes, half-buried safes, and other such bric-a-brac. Try to find a place to stash stuff in every region of the Zone if you can manage it. 16:50 In some mods, you can recruit that guy to fight alongside you (or any other NPC that you're friendly with). In any case, you can equip him with a weapon to increase his chances of survival. He'll pick one up on his own, but I prefer to make sure that he has something good. 17:23 [cue "Here We Are" theme from Undertale]
One of the scariest encounters I had was in the room with Lukash in a dialogue box with him and one of the guards just decided to blast me with the shotgun point blank. Fucking came out of nowhere.
im surprised there wasnt a compilations of civvie tyring to get all the meat chunks and souls from the garbage and dying 10s of times or watching some of them fly up into the atmosphere to never be seen again then finally coming to the realization that he can just shoot them to them back, behind the anomalies then run through and pick them up but only after 30 mins of trying to brute force it i do this every playthrough :|
I’m genuinely happy that at the very least some games can still challenge Civie’s playstyle of “Kill everything in the vicinity because I feel like it” without it being too overly difficult for him to quit or change the approach. It’s interesting to watch!
0:26 Just run up in it's face and stab it. Controllers in SoC don't have a melee attack and they'll walk away to try to make distance for their psychic attack. Think like Revenants in Doom
I'm loving that you're enjoying this game so much. The gunplay definitely gets a bit better once you graduate away from the rusted Soviet junk you find at the start. It's funny that you comment on bugs not being present in the modded versions, when honestly they'll always be there even in "cleaned up versions." Vanilla is still best for the first run, glad to see it's generally treating you well. As for people complaining about bolts, as someone who has played these games a ton at a certain point I just resorted to trying to run past or tank anomalies if I could. For the anomaly that sucks you in I found that if you run fast enough you can usually "escape" from its gravitational pull or whatever.
What makes it even funnier is that if you read the in-game flavor text, it TELLS you that the gun is an unreliable piece of shit to the point where the British military didn't want it, which is why large numbers of them were written off as "retired" and ended up on the black market (and consequently, in the Zone).
Gotta love those classic stock sound effects... Pretty sure those bullet ricochets were also in Crimson Skies and the grenade launcher explosions were in Raptor: Call of the Shadows
@@karry299Marathon and Halo are good. Marathon is way better than vanilla Doom. Sourceport sucks compared to GZ Doom but that’s because the Aleph One developers are anal purists.
BTW the trader repair script mod is a must in this game, otherwise you'll be saying goodbye to a lot of good friends. It's a huge quality of life improvement while not taking away from any of the game's character or mechanics.
oh yeah, shotgun ammo is really really heavy by the way. Dunno if he finds this out but if he's doing what I did my first time then he's grabbing every pack he sees
Huh, it took me this long to notice that both "get out here stalker" Duty guy and Bullet are voiced by Robin Atkin Downes, the voice of TF2 Medic and Travis Touchdown
There is one weapon that stopped me from quitting S.T.A.L.K.E.R, the Thunder 5.45. With that weapon you are unstoppable! killing your target from long-range with 10-20 bullets without having to do headshots is amazing. The best thing is that it uses 5.45 ammo, that ammo is everywhere!
one thing about this game is that heavily rewards you for using your firemodes. don't feel bad about not knowing this, cause the game doesn't tell you it at all. still love stalker though
Having inmates play STALKER for the first time blind could be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Though whatever Civvie did to get into prison, this may be a just punishment.
“This game is haunted” truer words have never been spoken
"Blind Stalker" was my nickname in elementry school.
? What?
same
Are you still blind?
Wasn't it delicious sausage?
As in you were blind and a stalker? or you predominantly stalked blind people?
It's not a bug, it's an anomaly!
"And when he died instantly upon exiting a cutscene?"
"That's... also an anomaly, yes. Very mysterious, that's the zone for you!"
@@hazukichanx408 well, it was not a good idea to doze off while some poltergeists were still alive...
@@hazukichanx408 To be frank it was a flashback dream induced from being knocked out after the pyrogeist exploded, but he ran out of the room as he was passing out.
Makes sense for dangerous mutants to kick someone while they're down.
Plus I think he almost ran past an artifact when he was in such a hurry.
He was refering the fact that his body went flying on the sky, even out from the map...
@@hazukichanx408 lost to the sun
18:13 And to think people wanted you to play the game modded and rob us of moments like this. Absolute gold
to be fair, that happens even in the modded versions
This happened in my heavily modded Anomaly game. Fucking hilarious.
It not a bug or glitch, it's a feature.
GAMMA enthusiast here, can confirm this also happens in that modpack.
@@ayuvir GAMMA here too, can confirm.
Amazing aim for playing blindfolded
Well, 5.56 caliber weapons were always more accurate than 7.62, that's why. Still, nice.
He's not blindfolded, that's stupid. His eyes were surgically removed in '83.
@@Twisted_Logic what do you think goes over his eyes?
@@jamesdrummond7684 Nothing. There are but vacant pits bared to the open air, screaming in agony
@@KajuTheRudeMonkethere's no 7,62 in the game
That anomaly wall that tossed CIVVIE into the air a bunch is one of my favourite in the cannon. Just a cluster of mincers, walling off whole paths.
vanya sucked into a whirligig and sprayed all over me... i'm still wearing that boy in a few pairs of my clothes
That bit made me really frustrated the first time I've played SoC, until I've learned that sometimes, you just have to let go.
I loved trying to get all of the meat chunks and the goldfish before they were sent into orbit
@@disgorgingconsciousness2250 iirc you can just shoot them out. I'm a bit foggy about that
2:34 "This game is haunted". Oh Civvie, you don't know how right you are yet.
Lab X18 amirite
Makes me wonder, how much is the extra janky nature of clear sky gonna break him.
The railroading with screw him more i reckon
I hope he just skims clear sky, aside from the faction war things (which iirc dont even work without mods) it really didnt offer much over the original
Hospital and boss-helicopter.
@@LeetROFFi4 I never finished Clear Sky because of that bit. I didn't expect that I would have to go so long without any resupply or chance to repair my gun. I ran out of Medkits and my main gun broke so I was trying to get through the hospital with a Pistol and 2-3 shots in the Grenade Launcher.
I never did it and never went back to it.
I love Stalker, played SoC and CoP tons of times, but have never gotten more than a few hours into Clear Sky. I just can't handle the jank.
There was a stalker, who had had a dream of being a pilot. He definitely flew.
Kinda funny fact about Controllers in Shadow of Chernobyl, they don't have a melee attack, so you can kind of just run up to them and knife the shit out of em while they try to run away, it's great
This is completely new info to me and I played the game in 2007 first 😂
lol thanks, even as a huge stalker fan, i didn't know that.
probably because you meet about 2 controllers in the entire game
Yeah, I always did that. It's the most effective way of dealing with them.
I eagerly await the end-total count of *primal scream of rage*s that happen in this series. It deserves a counter.
Up! Up!
I'm convinced that the game is programmed to kill you every 15-20 minutes
Fun fact: the Snork was the winner of a community contest the devs held during development of the game. Fans could hand in their own artwork for a monster, and the devs chose the winning artwork to be created and inserted into the game.
"Get out of here stalker" and "I said come in, don't stand it", will be forever scribed in my brain :)
Particularly ironic that the "get out of here Stalker" is such a perpetual meme... when it's a mistranslation, and he's not supposed to sound so hostile.
@@NicholasBrakespearI like to imagine everyone including other Dutiers always walk through there as fast as possible looking at the ground to avoid making eye contact with him.
@@NicholasBrakespear I don't speak Russian, but I played the game with Russian voices a while ago. To me it sounded like he says "Move along" or something like that.
@@salt-upon-wounds9909 It's Ukranian, not russian though.
@@questinmcanswerton3987 game is ukrainian, but it was in russian language originally.
10:30 in later games Freedom stalkers adopt elements of hippie and rasta speak in russian dub.
11:15 He's actually modelled after Maxim Popenker, a gun studies expert who even got few collabs with Forgotten Weapons and is quite a figure in possoviet gun owners community.
Freedom has the same kind of hippie speech in English too, one of my favorite characters, Uncle Yar, is voiced by Steve Blum in the English dub, it's really funny hearing him play a hippie sniper dude.
I played Stalker before I learned about Maxim Popenker's website, so when I saw a picture of Maxim I went "wow, he looks just like Skinflint!" Maxim's content was really helpful in learning about a lot of the Eastern Bloc weapons featured in Stalker.
In the first game there's a quest to kill a pig so they can have a barbecue for Bob Marley's birthday.
When you turn it in he says something like "Good job, bro. Jah will never forget you."
In Anomaly, Freedom are just in full ganja.
I'm still pissed at Maxim because as a Russian-American bilingual, he didn't even acknowledge my offer of help with proofreading his English language articles. Dick.
5:55 the first time in history anyone has been excited about getting their hands on an SA-80
the stalker trilogy would have been so much more realistic if you had to deal with melting plastic furnishings and your magazine falling out for no reason whenever you used the l85 rifle
Was hoping someone would say something about it! Lol
You can kill poltergeist with a few up close shots. They are manifested as those electrical disturbances that move around and throw things, bit they actually have a physical body that is revealed when killed.
Stalker is one of the rare games that's so oppressive and difficult I actually felt like I had accomplished something real when I finally beat it.
Try Dark Souls next. Start with "Remastered" version (60 fps). I know it's like completely different thing, but if you want that feeling of "I DID IT" there's no better place to go
Play Pathologic 2 as soon as possible. Report back when you’ve completed the assignment
Fun fact: in real life folklore Poltergeists are indeed often linked to random fires. Also, the PDA info section on mutants actually features a photo of the Poltergeist. In it it's a humanoid creature without legs.
IIRC, it's 'psych-projecting' its 'ghostly form' or, subtracting your perception of it. Your choice in perspective, I guess.
i love the style of civvie's S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. the cinematic intro, action movie-esque sequences with constant music, the intertitle cards, it's just cool.
I love to imagine a S.T.A.L.K.E.R walking along, seeing a floating, semi-sentient ball of fire floating around a room towards him and just blandly being like "Yep, uh-huh, not going that way."
Unironically, sounds like a good in-universe rendering of a newer 'journeyman' STALKER.
@@labrat810 No kidding, it actually does!
1:00 It's a massive upgrade. The unique weapons have much better condition so they degrade more slowly. Also, shooting in full-autio degrades weapons faster than semi-auto. So use semi at almost all times unless you think you can handle having to change out weapons faster
Measure twice, cut once, or in this case aim and shoot respectively.
Getting good with semi-auto and rare short burst really helps killing enemies fast without burning through ammo and your weapon condition (and without letting them shred your health and suit).
Also, stealth works nicely, it's just very hard and unforgiving (and once you start killing people, your stealth is burned, even if not immediately so).
(Also, stealth auto-fails on load due to a bug)
I personally just use the bandits weapons and never worried about condition
@@everinghall8622 the chad lootgoblin vs the virgin sharpshooter
@@ferrousscale
Funnily, stealth doesn't autofail if you equip the knife. It doesn't have equip or de-equip rustle sounds.
@@DinnerForkTongue Interesting. IIRC the autofail was because you became visible for split second after load, regardless of geometry between you and NPCs, so that shouldn't have mattered.
Fun fact: Blind Stalker is a common condition when you drink some shady vodka in Eastern Europe.
The cure for methanol is to drink ethanol, so always make sure to drink double, if you get sick with the shady stuff, the normal vodka will put you right. Always carry vodka to treat samogon poisoning.
@@MortabluntWait, that's a thing?
Looked it up. Holy shit, it really is.
I love the assault on the army base. It's one of the first times in game you get to feel truly powerful. You've got an okay-ish gun, plenty of targets, enough ammo and medical supplies to just drip feed HP directly into your soul.
First time in the lab is always a kinda creepy and very confusing experience - hope you enjoyed it.
A shame the freedom questline bugged - there's some good stuff there but that's just the stalker experience cant force it to work.
There is a saying:
"There are no bugs in STALKER, only anomalies."
PLEASE keep playing! This is one of my favorite games.
That anomaly that throws you in the air was game working as intended, no bugs at all.
It's the fabled Lift anomaly.
Hey Civvie, long time STALKER player, if you quick save and quick load in front of the trader, their stocks will reset allowing you to buy more ammo and supplies. :) This will solve your 5.56 ammo crisis.
Crossing my fingers for a Clear Sky play. 💪
oh fuck
STALKER is my favourite game series of all time.
CS sucks.
Unmodded...and unpatched. That would be something to look for.
@@Undarial The CD release version.
@@BeerDone oh god, you sick bastard *flashbacks intensifies*
10:58 The way Civvie pronounces "casuals" is just peak 🧑🍳🧑🍳🧑🍳
It's very close to actual Ukrainian pronunciation, by the way.
@@thecandlemaker1329 Yeah, but who cares about xoxols?
@@AB0BA_69 People who are not rashist scum.
@@thecandlemaker1329 I actually thought he was saying something along the lines of "weaklings" in ukranian slang as a sort of meta-joke, and it took me a minute or two for it to click that he wasn't.
6:48 I believe i can fly 🎵
I believe i can touch the sky 🎵
Blind Stalker? Not a big deal, my vision is augmented
Edit: Civvie11 I want Pro Deus Ex. You got 5 months to do it before I add you to list of NSF casualties
When due process fails us, we really do live in a world of terror.
Good thing my moral judgment is also augmented.
Oh my god JC a bomb!
@@NicholasBrakespear a bomb is a bad choice for close range combat
Now there is a crossover I would play, Deus Stalker
The GEP gun is great for silent takedowns
Cool fact: the DUGA-3 radar system in the real-life zone (featured in the upcoming Heart of Chornobyl) was dubbed "the brain scorcher" by the CIA before the disaster, as they genuinely believed it was some kind of experimental long-range mind-control device. The DUGA-3 was also used as model for the wall surrounding the city in the Divergent movies.
just got home after a great night, got six beers in the fridge and this pops up in my feed. fuck yeah civvie, your timing is impeccable.
Hell yeah brother
6 beers in 23 minutes. You can do it champ.
I am about 4 scotches in and this pops up I feel you brother
@@Charles-bi6ll I just cracked open a Colt 45 and saw this on my feed.
Truly blessed.
@@zigfaustcracking open a colt one with the boys
I know you probably don't really care, or look through the comments much, but your vids have gotten me through some bad times. Thank you.
Easily your best series. As a fan of the Thief and Fallout 4 videos, these take the cake. I hope we get the whole series.
That Duty / Freedom split quest where you end up either siding with one side or the other bugged out for me, but in my favour. Played both sides and each one ended up assuming I was support them over the other. Ended up with great faction relations for both Duty and Freedom which made life super easy not having one of the 2 most well armed factions as a bitter enemy.
Ooh, that's nice!
That's not a bug, it's a viable strat.
I help Bullet and Serega in the Dark Valley, then warn Lukash about the Duty guys but don't get involved in their fight, so Duty doesn't turn hostile. Then I do jobs for both Voronin and Lukash that don't involve fighting the other faction - stuff like killing mutants, fetching items, and so on.
Makes the last leg of the game super easy when you're SWIMMING in good gear like armor, guns and specialized ammunition. Seriously, Voronin hands out 9x39 SP-6 like it's candy on festival day.
That ending, yep that's classic STALKER all right
I remember buying this when it came out, knowing nothing about it other than it was inspired by Roadside Picnic. I really just wanted a fancy new PC game to test my upgraded rig.
I ended up playing it all damn night, then fell alseep in class the next day and got detention. Games so absorbing that they start causing problems for you IRL are the fucking best.
Someone needs to mod in the "spiderweb" from the first trip in the book as an anomaly for shits and giggles. You barely see it, get no indicator when walking in and then randomly die over 10 hours later.
@@chemicalderrick i mean, the hanging moss thing is in the games. Doesn't do shit though, except making the screen go fuzzy
@@waltervoidbringer4491 IIRC Burnt Fuzz (as it's called in the game) does hurt you if you run/jump into it. It only appears in a handful of locations though and most people never collide with it. Mods like Anomaly add it in way more places where it makes sense, which also adds atmosphere.
Something about it deeply unsettles me even from a distance. Just what IS this stuff anyway? It's slightly psychic, that much is obvious...
@@chemicalderrick Burnt Fuzz is like an anomalous moss, isn't it?
Well I don't think so. The FUCKING snowstorm level in Dark Souls II DLC gave me real life nauseating migraines that lasted for a couple of days. Let me tell you, I did not enjoy it.
Hah, yes ! The moment where you acquire a scoped weapon for the first time, and are actually able to kill things reliably. Such a turning point in the gameplay y'know, going from survivng in the Zone to being an actual MENACE !
The L85/SA80 is a piece of junk both in-game and in-reality but, using it as a semi-auto 5.56 light DMR is rewarding. It's the first gun you get where you can really reach out and crush someone.
Oh you poor soul, you really thought the IL 86 was an upgrade. My greatest experience with that pile of dross was having it jam twelve times while I was being chased around a tree by a bloodsucker. Never again.
Wow, such realistic portrayal of this marvel of british engineering.
Even worse because he looked right at the Obokan at Barkeep
the bar sequence was simply phenomenal. rewatching this one was such a pleasure.
Love this series, it takes me back to the old, high effort let's plays like that one trespasser lp from somethingawful.
When we getting Proteus as a guest
Some of the SA LPs were classics. That era is long gone now though.
Stop hitting me in the feels 😕 I miss those forums, the un-ending story co-written by lots of dwellers was batshit insane and hilarious
RIP lowtax
Civvie and a game with existential crisis as one of its major factors is a perfect match
I cannot wait until his reaction to the end, and eventually trying to piece together the purposefully-vague overarching story.
Maybe, we can convince him to play Lost Alpha and get even more confused!
@@labrat810 I'm not sure if he'll play clear sky or not. So Lost Alpha would be a stretch. But I'd be happy if he did.
The use of Jane from Deadwood saying "shut the FUCK UP!" was heartwarming
God I love this game!
*An anomaly janks out Civvie so hard he flies through the roof and becomes human spaghetti*
God I love this game!
I'm digging the sweet intro graphic for this series. Props to Katie.
Is Civvie ever going to use the bolts to test for anomalies, or does he not know about them?
Edit: Okay, I do remember Civvie walking with the bolts out for a hot second in an earlier part of this series. Sorry - all this background radiation might be causing me a brain bleed
Next video: "Yeah i know about the bolts, please keep telling me in the comments to use bolts."
been playing stalker for years, never used them. Its more of a gimmick.
IIRC, in the film the characters only had a few bolts and had to retrieve them. Also, most of the film's anomalies were time distortions, while the game has all sorts of different phenomena to keep you on your toes.
I thought walking around with the bolts equipped might stop people from commenting this. I was incorrect.
@@Three60Mafia Then you never played correctly nor bothered to learn, the bolts are not a gimmick, not only they are useful for spotting anomalies but also there are some anomalies you can prematurely trigger to pass safely.
8:06. haha I love how he put a pic of the Chernobyl elephant foot. "monolith"
I noticed that too.
I was thrilled to find out Civvie played STALKER, as I have recently played all three and I am currently starting Anomaly. I actually went through the entirety of SoC without knowing poltergeists and pyrogeists were killable enemies; the game gives next to no indication that you are supposed to shoot them because they look just like anomalies, particularly the orbs made of fire or lightning that just move around a fixed path. I DID know there were enemies called poltergeists because I picked up the encyclopedia entry before entering X18, but I DID NOT know that they looked like they do because the PDA photo is a photo of what they look like when you kill them, not a photo of one that is alive. I spent like 10 minutes in the pyrogeist room wondering what the hell I was supposed to do to open the door before I finally just threw a grenade which happened to kill the pyrogeist and the door opened. I love this series but lordy there is too much Slav Jank (tm) to ignore.
There are mods that restore some unfinished content - and this was actually not a problem before, because the poltergeists - just like bloodsuckers - use their normal form and just chill and walk around the lab. But the biggest clue is that - they can't stay in ghost form for too long and they must go back to their normal state, and the way they do this implies they need to focus and that ghost state makes them confused and tired - they are also vulnerable here, because the moment they stop being ghosts and again look normal, they kinda fall to the ground and shake and hold their heads while getting up.
And in ghost form they are actually blind and go through you if you stand still. So they are kinda a joke in these mods, because you can just walk everywhere and if you spot one you can "stalk" them and wait for the moment they become visible.
Burers on the other hand become a lot more dangerous because now they have a close range fireball attack that is a insta-kill mostly.
LOVING this playthrough, my favourite so far. Slowly the pro skills are coming along 💪 dope shit
The scream of rage at the end just sums up the stalker experience.
LOST Alpha tooi?
Glad he's playing the original first, not leaping into the mods. I love GAMMA, but the original releases are a unique experience. Here's hoping he continues right through to Call of Pripyat. Also, would love to see a Metro playthrough.
Seriously though, why does he still hate leaning? Garrett the master thief died for our sins, so that we could all lean in heaven forever... and Civvie don't even care.
EDIT: Oh my god, he leaned after all! Garrett be praised! I mean it was just the once, but still.
Eh, Metro is not a proper slavjank its just jank. It has no ambition - just a linear adventure with a meh story
I would love to see Civvie do the original 2033, the 2009 version, not the redux. And yes there is a massive difference.
When he talked about mods I assumed he meant ZRP et al.?
@@Mortablunt Oh yeah for sure. I was rather shocked at how different it felt and looked. The original release had more... weight to it somehow.
@@NicholasBrakespear The original had a strong horror direction lost in the redesign to Last Light. The skinny models and mostly underbuilt characters added a sense of desperation and vulnerability, and truly set aside who actual serious men were (Rangers, Nazi elites). Artyom is a weedy hungry 20 year old adolescent, and most of the grown men aren't much tougher.
The character and model redesigns for Last Light are much bulkier and stronger looking. Just the fact LL Artyom gets uniform to wear but 2033 Artyom has to wear a homemade jacket and wool gloves gives a massive difference in presentation and feel.
LL also prioritized a move in the action shooter direction. The ability to incapacitate most enemies with a single button press encouraged a faster and more direct playstyle. The ratio of human to mutant encounters was raised.. 2033 goes hours at a time between human enemy encounters, most of LL is spent with hostile humans.
The gunplay is vastly improved for Metro Last Light, which also makes it a more actual less horror experience. Finally, LL has fewer levels that just dwell on the Metro as a character and a setting. Levels like Lost Catacombs, Ghost, and Anomaly are just generally not included, and the supernatural aspects of the metro in LL are generally toned town.
I haven't played Last Light in about 6 years, sorry if I'm inaccurate.
"There's plenty of different Anomalies here too, and I found that, alot of them, you can just run through if you are quick enough.... Okay, not THAT one..." Civvie 11, 2023. R.I.P Man, but I did have a good laugh from it though, so cheers man, for making it through.
Respect for uploading the video while being blind 🔥
I am so glad Civvie's playing this. Now we just need EHERM SYSTEM SHOCK 1 (Not the remake, the og) NO NO SHOOT FREEDOM, YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO KILL DUTY!!!
I needed this today. Thank you Civvie.
Civvie and Katie doing S.T.A.L.K.E.R, gametubing at its finest, thank you Sir and Madam....
Katie isn't real lol
@@iunnox666 thanx for the headsup, does he edit himself then? saves typing on the next praise..
One of the best games ever, so much fun.
The bugs just add to the nature of the zone.
Fun fact - unique weapons and armors have more durability, so they can server you well for much, much longer.
also props for not installing any mods like Complete for the 1st playthrough - vanilla is vanilla, even if it hurts
I'm honestly surprised how carefully he played throughout this, I've played this game so much and yet I'm still too comfortable brute-forcing my way through the game lol.
i kinda expected civvie to be reluctant the whole time but i think its super cool that hes legitimately engaging with the game
6:43 The Slavjank Space Program is still alive and well, I see!
Another Civvie classic. Also, props for rocking the L85 rifle even though its awkward ammo type is a pain compared to the Zone’s standards.
Hi morning civvie, greetings from Argentina hope you have a nice chill Friday with Katie and Cmouse 🤗
If you stealth through the military base instead of going in gung-ho, the STALKER system is *just* barely enough to make some of the most tense stealth you'll ever see this side of Thief. Especially if you go in at night when the patrols are less numerous.
Also being able to shoot poltergeists with bullets I feel was a mistake; they should have been incorporeal because the tension they bring - until you realise a few bullets dispatches them - is unparalleled.
Never thought I'd see someone happy to use an SA-80
There is no sweeter feeling than teabagging military boys with Makarov when i was young and stupid enough to go 'fuck around and find out' around military base for medpacks and weapons.
I died a million times though but still.
You are experiencing STALKER the right way,Civvie.Also,that ending? I have a feeling you will absolutely love Clear Sky :)
"the guy made a wish that came true and the zone grew 5 kilometers."
"Imma wish for it to grow 10 kilometers."
they will make a true slav out of you yet civvie. 😂😂😂
a little joke added in the anomaly version is if you get to the wishgranter you can wish for the zone to disappear and the game will crash to desktop but the fatal error window is titled "wish granted".
@@mercurioslevin1877 I saw this first hand and when I did it I was laughing my ASS off
To ensure that you always have safety saves, make a hard save whenever you enter a new region of the Zone (or X-lab) for the first time and/or before starting or accepting any mission or side-quest. Also, since you went to the Army Warehouses before going to the Dark Valley, or if you do so on later playthroughs, you have the opportunity to scrounge up some really good gear.
10:30 That always reminds me of Auntie Entity referring to Mad Max as "raggedy man."
11:10 Crystals are some of the best artifacts. Two is enough. Combine with two Moonlights and one Mica or Slug and you've got an effect combo, especially if you're wearing any of the scientist suits (SSP-99, SSP-99M, SEVA, or PSZ-9Md).
11:15 He looks kind of a lot like Max Popenker circa early 2000s.
13:58 Think of 5.45 as a "pre-Bar" caliber and 5.56 as a "post-Bar" caliber. We old-school zoners used those terms. 9x18 is pre-Bar, .45 is post-Bar, but 9x19 is fairly universal throughout most of the Zone (and mid-game). 9x39 and 7.62x54R are late-game calibers. You might find some to play around with around mid-game, but they're best reserved for later. 12-gauge is cheap and common, so feel free to go berserk with shotguns. You'll quickly find that slugs and darts are disappointing to the max, so sell all of those ammos if you want to. Buckshot maintains its usefulness, especially against mutants. Blunt projectiles (pistol slugs and shot pellets) don't do much against armor, though.
15:40 Be sure to make use of stashes. There are several different kinds. Blue footlockers, OD green footlockers, toolboxes, backpacks, pipes, safes, half-buried safes, and other such bric-a-brac. Try to find a place to stash stuff in every region of the Zone if you can manage it.
16:50 In some mods, you can recruit that guy to fight alongside you (or any other NPC that you're friendly with). In any case, you can equip him with a weapon to increase his chances of survival. He'll pick one up on his own, but I prefer to make sure that he has something good.
17:23 [cue "Here We Are" theme from Undertale]
One of the scariest encounters I had was in the room with Lukash in a dialogue box with him and one of the guards just decided to blast me with the shotgun point blank. Fucking came out of nowhere.
why he killed you
Civvie doesn't do this game justice. It's a whole universe and he just scratches the surface.
Funny that the L85 would be the "gun that hits things" given its very poor reputation IRL
Not just in real life, that gun is trash in game too. Somehow that SUSAT scope manages to be the worst of both magnified and unmagnified optics
That intro song absolutely SLAPS
Song name?
im surprised there wasnt a compilations of civvie tyring to get all the meat chunks and souls from the garbage and dying 10s of times or watching some of them fly up into the atmosphere to never be seen again then finally coming to the realization that he can just shoot them to them back, behind the anomalies then run through and pick them up but only after 30 mins of trying to brute force it
i do this every playthrough :|
I’m genuinely happy that at the very least some games can still challenge Civie’s playstyle of “Kill everything in the vicinity because I feel like it” without it being too overly difficult for him to quit or change the approach.
It’s interesting to watch!
0:26 Just run up in it's face and stab it. Controllers in SoC don't have a melee attack and they'll walk away to try to make distance for their psychic attack. Think like Revenants in Doom
Even when they can melee, I usually bumrush 'em. I WANT THAT NOISE TO STAHP, NOWAH!
Good tip, I always wasted grenades
Please never stop this series
Intro and Outro are gold love it, cant wait for more!
I'm loving that you're enjoying this game so much. The gunplay definitely gets a bit better once you graduate away from the rusted Soviet junk you find at the start. It's funny that you comment on bugs not being present in the modded versions, when honestly they'll always be there even in "cleaned up versions." Vanilla is still best for the first run, glad to see it's generally treating you well.
As for people complaining about bolts, as someone who has played these games a ton at a certain point I just resorted to trying to run past or tank anomalies if I could. For the anomaly that sucks you in I found that if you run fast enough you can usually "escape" from its gravitational pull or whatever.
-Looks L85
"Finally a weapon with a scope now i can hit things"
He doesnt know.
Funnily enough the L86, its bigger cousin, is actually used as a precision weapon so Civvie may not be wrong here
@@ayyyyph2797 Laughs in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. atrocious bullet spread.
What makes it even funnier is that if you read the in-game flavor text, it TELLS you that the gun is an unreliable piece of shit to the point where the British military didn't want it, which is why large numbers of them were written off as "retired" and ended up on the black market (and consequently, in the Zone).
Gotta love those classic stock sound effects... Pretty sure those bullet ricochets were also in Crimson Skies and the grenade launcher explosions were in Raptor: Call of the Shadows
7:50 It's still sad to see the old Sarcophagus gone.
Haha, I love the ending. I have done that rage many a time with Stalker.
God this brings me back to my first STALKER playthrough….
You had me at the C.H.U.D reference good sir. ❤
One day, Civvie will run out of boomer shooters to review, and his captors will force him to review Halo: Combat Evolved.
I mean with his hatred for Halo he might make the radiation emitter and escape
@@commando7238 Well, hey, at least it's marginally better than Marathon. Level design is still garbage, however.
Oh, god no...
@@karry299Marathon and Halo are good. Marathon is way better than vanilla Doom. Sourceport sucks compared to GZ Doom but that’s because the Aleph One developers are anal purists.
BTW the trader repair script mod is a must in this game, otherwise you'll be saying goodbye to a lot of good friends. It's a huge quality of life improvement while not taking away from any of the game's character or mechanics.
Not everyday I see someone use the SA80 and grenade launcher in SoC.
I didn't even know that grenade launcher was in vanilla SoC.
I love buggy, janked out games. I could watch Civvie play them all day.
At around 07:56 you show a picture of the NEW sarcophagus. Wasn't that built after the events of stalker?
Yes
Coffee, smoke and civvie. Good start to my morning.
oh yeah, shotgun ammo is really really heavy by the way. Dunno if he finds this out but if he's doing what I did my first time then he's grabbing every pack he sees
Huh, it took me this long to notice that both "get out here stalker" Duty guy and Bullet are voiced by Robin Atkin Downes, the voice of TF2 Medic and Travis Touchdown
Well my Friday now just got started. Thanks #Civvie11
There is one weapon that stopped me from quitting S.T.A.L.K.E.R, the Thunder 5.45. With that weapon you are unstoppable! killing your target from long-range with 10-20 bullets without having to do headshots is amazing. The best thing is that it uses 5.45 ammo, that ammo is everywhere!
Cheeki breeki and prosper my friends
one thing about this game is that heavily rewards you for using your firemodes. don't feel bad about not knowing this, cause the game doesn't tell you it at all. still love stalker though
Stalker? I hardly know her!
This game is truely haunted.
Some real night of the operah shit.
The pinnacle of the occult.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? I hardly know her!
Having inmates play STALKER for the first time blind could be considered cruel and unusual punishment.
Though whatever Civvie did to get into prison, this may be a just punishment.