So, you've played STALKER: Clear Sky and after hours of frustration, bugs, patching, and utterly failed game play, you're pissed as all hell. The good news is that if you haven't played the original in awhile, there are three great reasons to give it another spin: Oblivion Lost, Sky4ce, and Float32. As you've probably noticed, many of the top games these days have a huge community mod following. These three in particular stand out as must haves and really overhaul the game to what it was meant to be. In their early stages each promised to enhance varying aspects of the game, but now that they have matured combining them gives STALKER a completely different feel... and for the better!

Let's start with Oblivion Lost 2.2, the latest release as of this article. Designed as a complete reinvention of STALKER, OL adds all the elements they TRIED to use in Clear Sky without success. Faction wars, random deadly blow outs (pictured above), cooperative play, a larger selection of weapons and armor, tweaked game balancing, random and moving anomalies, new enemies, sound and weather overhaul, and a ton of additional features. OL really is STALKER as it should have been from the beginning! I definitely recommend installing this and starting a fresh game. You'll really feel as though Clear Sky was a completely botched attempt at doing what a couple of people implemented for free.

After spending the last two weeks playing Clear Sky, the follow up to STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, I thought I would give a few impressions of the game and maybe do a bit of ranting while I'm at it. When the original game came out I wasn't quite sure what to expect after only seeing screen shots and reading a hand full of reviews, but as the second release, Clear Sky has a lot to live up to. The first game wasn't exactly a mind blowing experience, but it was innovative and overall had some amazing atmosphere to it. There were many points in the game where I was actually scared or felt completely emotionally involved because of the wonderfully created environment. Simply put, I enjoyed playing it and Clear Sky promised to be just as good, if not better.

Unfortunately, after about thirty hours of game play I have to say that Clear Sky fails to deliver and disappoints in a huge way, but more on that in a bit. First, I want to point out all the ways that the game succeeds or at least attempts to succeed in delivering what we all expected. Without a doubt, one of the most impressive features has to be the world's weather and day/night system. The game literally convinces you on many occasions that you are in a living and breathing world through its use of an actively clocked in-game time. The sun rises and sets with stunning beauty, complete with DX10 god rays and volumetric lighting.

For the unfortunate person who is a gadget freak and likes to stay current with the latest technology, running the Creative X-Fi turned out to be a real pain in the arse under Linux. For a very long time there was absolutely no support from any of the open source drivers, and Creative announced that they would maybe at some point release open sauce drivers of their own if we were good children. Thankfully, they did. BUT, as expected, they were buggy as hell, confusing, and only for x86_64! Well, I guess free is free.

Regardless, getting the drivers to work under Linux was still a right royal pain, until earlier this year when Open Sound System released a slew of diffrerent distribution packages claiming they had an easily installable and workable driver set for the X-Fi. I was skeptical at first, but after installing a very painless RPM for Fedora 9 off of their website, the sound worked great! No problems whatsoever and Songbird seems to play very well with it.

Unfortunately, a few months have gone by now and I just today decided to do a full upgrade to the latest Fedora 9 updates which broke the OSS package. :(

Whenever a new kernel is installed, the package detects the change and rebuilds the drivers against the updated kernel. This has worked fine for the past couple of updates, but the latest bump to 2.6.26.3-29.fc9.x86_64 was a bit much and the compile failed.

They're here! I've been getting lots of requests from eager birdies wanting to try out Songbird 0.7.0 RPMs on Fedora, and the wait is finally over. I'm sorry it took a bit, I had a wedding to go to over the weekend which took up most of my time and the rpm builds turned out to be a bit more complicated than a simple version bump. As always, the rpms are built on the official Fedora 9 build servers, although you might find that they work ok on Fedora 8 as well. I'm once again providing i386, x86_64, ppc, and ppc64 packages. Thank you for all the kind words from those of you that got some good use out of the 0.6 rpms, I'm glad to be of service. You might be interested to know that so far over 500 Songbird 0.6/0.6.1 rpms have been downloaded from countries all around the world. Thanks again!

When installing these I recommend that you remove your Songbird profile (~/.songbird2) first to avoid upgrading issues. This isn't a problem with the rpms specifically, but there have been some upgrade bugs reported to the developers when going from 0.6 to 0.7. To be safe it is usually good to start clean. As always, feel free contact me if you have any issues or questions.

I'll admit, lately I've been a bit behind the times with gaming. After FF2 and Valkyrie Profile 2 came out, I haven't really turned it on much. The PS3 and XBOX 360 look amazing, but ehhh, so much money when I know they're just going to get cheaper... and so will the games! Honestly, I'm going to wait for the platforms a bit longer, so lets focus on the PC. I recently (and reluctantly) moved to Vista in order to get DirectX 10, but honestly, I'm glad I did because I couldn't wait any longer to play a couple of these.

First up is Mass Effect... and holy shit is this an awesome game! I hadn't heard much about it prior to release, so I was a bit surprised that I missed it. Not only does it look amazing, but it runs great even with all of the eye candy, but as we'll soon see, only eye candy doesn't necessarily make a good game. Mass Effect need not worry though, this game has got it all. The scope of the game is amazing! I've tried describing it a couple times to people that have never played it and the best combo I can come up with is Oblivion meets KOTOR... essentially a full blown space RPG. The amount you can customize your character is fairly in depth, the story is very addicting, and just the free reign you have to explore the galaxy is amazing. Did I mention you can also land on random planets and explore in an armed rover at your will? Yep. It kicks some serious ass.