S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (PC) - Let's Play 1001 Games - Episode 846
0š„ Fan of the channel? Help support the series āŗ https://www.patreon.com/GamingJay1001\nš„ Follow me on Twitter āŗ https://twitter.com/GamingJay1001\nš„ Check out the website āŗ http://letsplay1001.com/\nš„ Check out the book āŗ http://www.amazon.com/1001-Video-Games-Must-Before/dp/0789320908\n\nI'm Gaming Jay: Youtube gamer, let's player, fan of retro games, and determined optimist... Join me in this series while I try out EACH of the video games in the book 1001 VIDEO GAMES YOU MUST PLAY BEFORE YOU DIE, before I die. The game review for each game will focus on the question of whether you MUST play this game before you die. But to be honest, the game review parts are just for fun, and are not meant to be definitive, in depth reviews; this series is more about the YouTube gamer journey itself. From Mario games to the Halo series, from arcade games to Commodore 64, PC games to the NES and Sega Genesis, Playstation to the Xbox, let's play those classic retro games that we grew up with, have fond memories of, or heard of but never got a chance to try! And with that said, the game review for today is...
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:_Shadow_of_Chernobyl
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is a first-person shooter survival horror video game developed by GSC Game World and published by THQ in 2007 following a long development. The game is set in an alternative reality, where a second disaster of mysterious origin occurred at the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, causing strange changes in the area around it. The game features a non-linear storyline and includes role-playing gameplay elements such as trading and two-way communication with non-player characters.
In the game, the player assumes the identity of the Marked One, an amnesiac man trying to find and kill the mysterious Strelok within the Zone, a forbidden territory surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It is set after a fictitious second Chernobyl disaster, which further contaminated the surrounding area with radiation, and caused strange otherworldly changes in local fauna, flora, and the laws of physics. The background and some terminology of the game are borrowed from the novella Roadside Picnic and its film adaptation Stalker.
A prequel, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, was released in 2008. A sequel, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, followed in 2010. There are also multiple fan remakes trying to restore the cut content from the original version of the game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Oblivion Lost Remake.
The X-Ray Engine is a DirectX 8.1/9 Shader Model 3.0 graphics engine. Up to a million polygons can be on-screen at any one time. The engine features HDR rendering, parallax and normal mapping, soft shadows, motion blur, widescreen support, weather effects and day/night cycles. As with other engines that use deferred shading, the X-Ray Engine does not support multisample anti-aliasing with dynamic lighting enabled. However, a different form of anti-aliasing can be enabled with dynamic lighting which utilizes an edge detection algorithm to smooth edges between objects.[11] The game takes place in a thirty square kilometer area, and both the outside and inside of this area are rendered to the same amount of detail. Some textures in the game were photographs of the walls in the developers' studio.[12] As of patch 1.0003 the X-Ray Engine supports "surround screen" monitor setups, including a 16:9 native resolution ratio.
The X-Ray Engine is among the first of its kind to feature real time Global illumination through a method called Photon mapping, the GI system runs entirely through the CPU on one core and was first seen implemented in a beta build as early as 2004 however remained experimental through ShoC development most likely due to its massive performance hit.