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GSC Game World is closed, officially. 1C’s Sergey Galyonkin offers more info here, if you can stand the piteous Google translation. Truly a sad day. Good luck to all of GSC’s former employees.

The article below represents months of work and appears in Well Played 2.0, a game studies textbook published by Carnegie-Mellon University under the guidance of Professor (and Celebrity Guest Editor) Drew Davidson.

Each chapter of Well Played discusses a single game or franchise, with both meanings of the well-played phrase in mind: the game must be well played as a book is well-read, and it must provide something to better the medium as a whole. Beyond that, the analytical expectations are dependent on the writer. My chapter was about the STALKER franchise, which I know and love well.

I really wanted to do a “director’s cut” version of the article for Tap, including self-made, narrated gameplay videos and the like, but a recent computer crash has eaten up all my STALKER saves. It’d just take too much time to put a project like that together. Instead please accept the odd embedded YouTube video, plus some additional pix and multimedia that don’t appear in the book.

This is a textbook chapter, not a blog post. As such it’s even longer, boringer, and more pedantic than I usually write. It even has footnotes. Enjoy!

There’s, uh… There’s gonna be a STALKER TV show.

I certainly doubt that GSC will attempt to develop another proprietary engine. — Me, April 5, 2010 That’s the kind of wisdoms you can expect from yours truly, my friends: completely inaccurate ones. Word comes across the vines of grapes that Ukrainian developer GSC Game World is hard at work on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 with plans …

During a conversation over one particular weekend, our beloved fellow columnist Gregg B announced to me that he had, during one particular Demon’s Souls boss encounter, utilized an artificial intelligence (A.I.) glitch to his advantage.  Shame on you brother I said, without inquiring for the full story.  However, it did get me thinking about A.I. within videogames…

Review by Steerpike S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat Developer GSC Game World Publisher BitComposer (U.S.); Cenega (Europe) Released Feb 3, 2010 (U.S.); Oct 2, 2009 (CIS) Available for Windows Time Played Finished Verdict: 5/5 Gold Star “Call of Pripyat isn’t perfect either; but as a third-generation evolution of an idea so blindingly ambitious, it sure as …

So Oles Shishkovtsov, CTO of 4A Games – the new Ukrainian developer behind the upcoming Metro 2033 – has reiterated his insistence that S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s (proprietary) X-Ray engine is not being used, in whole or in part, on Metro 2033. Of course, Shishkovtsov created the X-Ray engine, and left GSC Game World just before the first …

Meet our new mascot. This Snork is now officially owned and branded by Tap-Repeatedly, and will represent us at several major functions in the coming months. It was a rigorous interview process, but ultimately this Snork – Edgar – won out over Zombie #14 from Deadly Shadows’ Shalebridge Cradle mission. None of the above is …

1UP illuminates us this morning with a review of Borderlands, Gearbox’s anticipated open-world shooter whose chief claim to fame is the procedurally generated weaponry that literally allows for something like twelve million firearm variants. I bet you can’t guess what score they gave it.

I know, I know, I am perhaps a little over-enthusiastic about STALKER and its follow-up. Flawed though they were, both games captured atmosphere like essentially no other, and as such I am enthusiastic over the looming release of GSC Game World’s latest Chernobyl-drivern installment, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat. According to GSC, the team listened carefully …