Well, thank you for your patience! In exchange I offer nostalgic bleating on an era long gone.
I've been playing S.T.ALKER lately (I always get bored adding the dots) and let me tell you, it's quite an intriguing game. Not so much at the start but as the game world opened up so did my thirst for answers. I bring this up because while the game is enthralling, graphically and story-wise, the AI leaves much to be desired. Despite the characters all being relatively capable in the areas they inhabit, at times you'll just witness some really odd behaviour like someone just calmly strafing away over hills and valleys, aiming his gun at some figment of his imagination.
It's oddities like this that actually make the game more endearing to me. In today's flawless gaming world, you rarely get miniature failures but rather complete meltdowns as the game sends you to a bluescreen, ejects the entire DVD drive and changes your homepage to error.log. Roll on the patches.
Shortly after the switch to 3D and when complex AI began coming into play (more complex than look at player, fire projectile, anyway), my friends and I used to roll with laughter at the odd ideas the computer-controlled players sometimes had. You had to use your imagination to make up for graphics, so it was funny when you convinced yourself that this was a living, breathing team-mate, and he went ahead and started running in place in front of the wall. Picture a character running in circles on a bridge before jumping in the air and plunging off the edge, usually with a curt scream. You were used to those types of things because, frankly, that was the norm. I'm not saying you couldn't play the games as your characters were on par with lemmings, I'm just saying that you could forgive occasional randomness like this because it just came with the package.
That's probably why I get such a kick out of the chaos in Stalker. It gives it a sort of retro charm like the playable video games in San Andreas. A character might walk in one direction, pushing another character out of the way, while the other character stands still, arms folded, not really caring. They might even push you, the player. I had a wave of teammates give me a free ride as I stood in front of one and was pushed along. Oddly enough, however, there's a high concentration of chaos occurring at a specific area in the game. It might be because this is as close to a "city" as you get and there are frequently over 15 characters for the game to keep track of in a relatively small area. Admittedly, most of them are sitting around chatting or playing the guitar, though. As I was walking by on my way to trade some salvaged weapons for money, I came upon a dead guy. Just like that, a dead guy lying in the middle of the road. This was especially odd because this is a no-tolerance zone, so much so that when I tried to take out an annoying guard who repeats "git out of heer, Stokker." whenever you pass by him, I had a world of hurt brought down upon me. Yet here was a dead person, and nobody seemed to care. Naturally, I looted the body and moved on. This wasn't a "game body" placed there by the designers, though, as you can't loot those. This was a genuine NPC who had just kicked the bucket. Imagine my surprise, then, when I came upon another body in the same place on a future visit. Now, I know this was not the same body, as that one was still there. So now there were two dead bodies next to each other in the middle of the road. Either there was a sniper nearby or the bar was serving salami past its sell-by date, as they were just outside it.
Later on I found a visibly shaken NPC crouching with his gun drawn a few paces from the same place. If there's one thing the game does well, it's angst, as characters walk to and fro, gun drawn, alternating between stand and crouch and overall just looking like the last chicken in a box anticipating being taken away. In any case, there was now only one body, but one of the three NPCs usually sitting around a fire in a barrel a little further down had apparently keeled over and died. One of the them was visibly shaken, the other was just sitting down. When I came back, they were happily seated, playing a song on the guitar next to their dead colleague. Now that's a harsh world.
Just to clarify: I'm not looking for every future game to be populated with complete idiots (like online gamez lolz!!!1). I'm just saying that when a game can provide the immersion and storyline to captivate me, I'm willing to overlook the strange happenings as the rest more than makes up for it. And why not - you get a laugh out of it, and a blog topic to boot. I don't want gaming to be a chore. By all means get the AI working, the storyline down, and overall just give me the escapism I crave. I'll forgive other miniscule problems though, as I'm well aware of how far games have come.
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Antibiotics. Plenty.
STALKER, of course.
The National and The Decemberists
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A small stuffed dolphin toy