Stalker clear sky isn't as cool as Shadow of Chernobyl.
The modding community doesn't exist and the game is extremely buggy, even after all the patches.

I got Clear Sky free with my CPU... I personally don't like it. It seems to run like crap, looks like crap (especially for the performance I was getting), and you are often left very confused as to what you are supposed to do. However, the latter problem could stem from the lack of me playing the original.

Clear Sky is just tooooooooo freaking hard. I get so mad when I play it. It's a good game but the whole... figure it out for yourself thing.. gah! Coupled with loading time whenever you die.. or move to a different spot.. grrrrr

(loading.......... loaded: "yay!!!" BOOM! dead... loading... loaded: Boom! run away...loading......loaded: oops wrong way.. loading...)

you get the idea, I spend more time loading than I do playing.

I remember playing through STALKER.  I grew tired of the aiming and installed a mod for heightened accuracy.  That increased my enjoyment of the game tenfold.  From there I installed a few other mods to make the game harder to offset the accuracy increase (such as allowing enemies and animals go anywhere they want, rather than being limited to specific zones).  It was a very fun game, with an interesting story. 

My favorite thing about it though was their use of sound and visuals.  They did a really good job in creating a type of sci-fi/fantasy setting, especially in the later areas like Pripyat and Yantar.  I especially loved the area where the mind ray thing (name escapes me for the moment) was.  I had my bass turned up so everytime the towers emitted their "rays" my entire room would vibrate.  Really pulled me in.

As for Clear Sky, I heard a lot of bad things regarding performance and glitches when it launched, so I decided to wait and see.  Now I'm waiting to see if the publishing team ends up adding Clear Sky to Impulse.  If not, I'll purchase it myself later.

Bara

I actually bought Clear Sky for my bf on his bday cuz he roughly mentioned some sort of interest in it.. and he played it ONCE. lol I've played it... twice? maybe three times?

I do think they had a cool story and liked the overall game style, but I just could not deal with the loading and lack of instructions.

Game is pretty fun, but the anger problem for me is a bit much. lol I get raving mad when I play that game. lol

For those that would be interested in getting stalker but aren't sure how it would run on their cpu they put out a betchmark tool a while ago. It'S free and does not requirer the game. It will take you ona  guided tour of the swamps 4x times under different lighting conditions and weather.

http://cs.stalker-game.com/en/?page=news&subpage=1&item=119

And to compare lost of people ahve posted their results and rigs here.

http://www.gsc-game.com/index.php?t=community&s=forums&s_game_type=xr2&lang=en

MishYu you boyfriend does ahve a bad as cpu. Expecialy the video card. If he has long loading time he could try to upgrade his ram. Does he have DDR1 or DDR2? Does he have extra free slots? Also if he has a quadcore it would be best if he had 4 sticks of ram, that way the cores arent fighting each other for ram space.

lol you can't call a winxp 32bit rig a "badass comp"

I played through ClearSky last year, its very good and with the later patches pretty stable from my experience.

The atmosphere and environment is what really sets this game apart from the likes of Crysis, its hard at the beginning where the non-upgraded weapons can't shoot for sh*t but later on you'll be auto sniping like a CounterStrike spawn camper. Most importantly though you have a reason and a motive for exploring the landscape in this game something that is sorely missing from most other FPS games IMHO.

Personally I can't wait for the new Stalker:Call of Pripyat.

BTW : If you're into FPS games I can't recommend Left4Dead highly enough.

[e digicons]:karma:[/e]

My personal experience with 64 bit XP has been one of frustration. Microsoft has basically abandoned it. Very tough to find drivers, updates, etc.

I built my computer expecting to use XP 64 bit and ended up swapping it out for 32 bit Vista. Long story short, I have a nice chunk of RAM that isn't even addressable to my OS.

Yay.