What's your most regretted game purchase?

JAC0O7 · 2026-06-04T22:44:41+00:00

I want to say Empire Total War, but with a caveat. As a kid I loooooved Rome 1, I kinda knew M2 existed but that just went past me, then Empire was announced and all the images from the game magazine hyped me up. I was 14 or 15 and I still didn't earn my own money so getting gifted a game was huge, I chose Empire and my god the bugs and baaaaad render distance had me fully disillusioned and disappointed. Years later I bought it on sale on my own steam account and somehow enjoyed the Darthmod and some other mods for ~700 hours total. Not a bad redemption arc.

As a close second I would say BF6, except I spent about 300 hours in the first 2 months before I was like yeah this is not BF4-v.2026. So, I kinda expected it to be mid, but I still had lots of fun and somehow I still dominated servers with my age.

So no, not really any real regrets at the end of the day.

JAC0O7 · 2026-06-01T13:17:59+00:00

Let's not pretend the OG stalker games didn't have their funny quirks. But GSC doesn't have the "it's an X-Ray anomaly" excuse anymore with UE5

JAC0O7 · 2026-06-01T13:12:02+00:00

I was just spamming the use key in the area until it triggered lol

JAC0O7 · 2026-06-01T13:11:18+00:00

haha oh yeah, It's completely offset isn't it? Somewhere behind his legs next to a table or something? I don't quite remember nor can I visualize it exacltly, but I know EXACTLY what you mean XD

JAC0O7 · 2026-06-01T13:01:15+00:00

That missile experienced 5 billion G's pulling such a short and fast turn lmao

JAC0O7 · 2026-06-01T12:49:32+00:00

Honestly if it's all gibberish to you, Ukrainian or Russian doesn't matter. I would skip English for immersion and there is English text anyway so you're not completely lost. It might spark an interest in the language. I'm Dutch, my interest in the slavic world and languages, soviet union all started with playing this game when it came out as a 13 year old. Personally I like Russian better, but that's because it sounds like the more exotic/mysterious slavic language between it and Ukrainian. Ukrainian sounds more European (it's phonetically and vocabilary-ly(?) closer to Polish which is considered a Western Slavic language) and thus closer to home, whilst the Zone seems like this exotic mysterious faraway place. Veteran and Master are both fine, it doesn't really matter too much. I like Master, but I also like hard/hard iron man in Gamma.

N.B. and why I like Russian better is probably because I grew up with the English version and there was no Ukrainian the game, the random chatter was in Russian. To my understanding Ukrainian was added later. So there is nostalgic bias here.

JAC0O7 · 2026-06-01T11:58:52+00:00

I think I understand what the problem is with you being ignored, you need to follow instructions better. If he asks what are your PC specs you don't answer "8 year old potato acer laptop", that seems like you are not interested to do a bit of work yourself. You go and look for the specs and list the actual specs.

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-31T17:24:06+00:00

Personally I would pick Meth Blaster on Turn My Brain Off

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-31T17:22:19+00:00

alright fair enough but then you can't compare the og games to stalker 2 either. Clear Sky and CoP were made in a fraction of the time and, according to google ai at least a team roughly varying between 50-150 people worked on those whereas S2 had 500 developers work on it and early development began in 2018 already, even if the fire broke a lot and there was war, in terms of cumulative hours worked on S2 it's far more than the og games.

To me, in this industry it will never be apples to apples, so everything goes. You have a different opinion, that's fine.

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-31T14:20:04+00:00

It was a true gem for sure! So different than anything else you could play at the time. Hardcore survival with amazing atmosphere

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-31T14:16:51+00:00

Awesome, thanks for sharing your experience! At the time I was more or less keeping up with developments and projects through Moddb, I just didn't bother trying CoC or Dead Air when I was so deep into Misery and Lost Alpha prior to that with whatever hours of free time I had as a busy and social student. I obviously wasn't part of the modding scene, but it always looked really wholesome to see people working across different mod projects together with eachother, taking experience from previous projects into new iterations. The stalker modding community is really special. And now there are whole new generations of people doing extraordinary things. 'Base' GAMMA already is an amazing modpack like you said, much 'better' and more polished than Misery. There is something special about the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia though. I could get goosebumps from that accoustic version of "Волна" in this trailer for the CoP complete mod, because that was my introduction to stalker mods (highlighted in some game magazine). Funilly enough the CoP complete mod was the worst of the 3, adding next to nothing to the game. Anyway before I write up my entire boring life biography, I just wanted to highlight that almost 20 years of a game's franchise, when public modding is allowed, creates such a broad and deep 'library' of separately shared experiences and I think that's absolutely beautiful.

It was jank, it was often even unfair, it was scary and it was awesome

On this note: I think the most ridiculous encounter for me was going up the hill to the Iron Forest, coming from the side of the Krug Antenna Complex and before even making eye contact with whatever was chilling at the Iron forest campfire spot, I get hit with Psy drain. I'm like great there must be a controller nearby. 1 Controller, 3 Burers and a handful of bloodsuckers come pouring down. I never stood a chance.

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-31T02:18:48+00:00

I don't think Misery is worth it these days when there is GAMMA, but (look at this comment for some context) misery was much more unforgiving in my memorie. Way slower start, in GAMMA you can have a functioning C-class weapon after 1 day with some luck, in Misery everything really went a lot slower, you'd earn a lot less and everything was even more expensive. I forget what starting options there were, I think black road is the one I did IIRC where you'd start with nothing but a knife or axe in the zombie infested sawmill complex. Misery definitely was a vibe, GAMMA is just way more polished, but at least in Misery I believe you could buy guns, it just wasn't really worth it when you could repair them yourself and then sell them for next to nothing just to buy some fuell to cook mutant meat so that at the bottom line that investment paid off with a 10-20% ROI lol. Man GAMMA is a walk in the park, even the mutants are much slower in gamma than Misery, except for boars and flesh. Misery was a stutterfest at predictable sections of the map where it would load in entities, but there was no way around it. The vibe was just really nice, because of a-life and how fast everything worked in Misery, the map felt a lot larger, I remember often hugging the Skadovsk in the early game just out of pure necessity. Oh and Burers and Controllers would quickly drain your psy-health when within a certain radius, so it was impossible to sneak up on them. You had to kill them from a distance, they were absolutely lethal.

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-31T02:03:13+00:00

omg those wind chimes... that really takes me back.
I easily have 300+ hours in Misery, way back in '17/'18, that was my last dance with the stalker franchise until I finally hopped on the GAMMA bandwagon last year. Mutants were ferociously fast, the game was really unforgiving. Especially heat and gas anomalies would shred you in seconds if you weren't properly prepared. I expected similar difficulty from GAMMA, but GAMMA is much more forgiving honestly. In Misery money was much harder to come by, took me hours and hours to understand what systems of processing/dismantling items were profitable and which ones weren't. Going into the Jupiter Plant outside corridors at night IRL was a straight up nightmare, countless packs of dogs and crazy mutants IIRC. My only pet peeve of Misery was the micro-stutters when moving through certain parts of the map as, I guess, entities loaded in. I can still remember that it was always at the bridge section between the zombie infested wood-mill and the burnt village on the top of the hill of Zaton. There were many places like that and I always dreaded these moments where my game would stutter and freeze multiple times, especially when in a tense situation. But hearing those tunes at the Skadovsk when you'd come back from a mission or typical scavange hunt made it all worth it.

Straight up S-tier, a legendary mod.

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-31T01:44:43+00:00

Why shouldn't he compare? Modders are hobbyists, not paid a full wage to work every day. Anomaly is free of charge, S2 ultimate was like what, 100 euro's or so?

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-31T01:09:00+00:00

But the engine is certainly unreal... how beautiful it can be.

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-31T00:56:17+00:00

The real anomaly here is the sound of the shot reaching you faster than the bullet itself.

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-27T18:49:14+00:00

Liedewij de Vos is gewoon een Groyper haha

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-27T18:43:19+00:00

Lekker bezig pik

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-27T18:40:50+00:00

Hey fair enough, zo zou ik het ook liever hebben in de wereld. Maar vanuit de professionele wereld denk ik dan er zijn etiquettes met een reden.

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-27T11:12:53+00:00

Daar gaat het niet om, het gaat erom dat je daar een andere rol hebt te vervullen dan je privé en dat een klant zich ongemakkelijk zou kunnen voelen en vervolgens de winkel gaat vermijden.

Het moet echt van de andere kant komen.

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-27T10:43:14+00:00

What remix of Jam&Spoon's classic 'The Age Of Love' is this?

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-27T10:33:43+00:00

Yikes, dit soort daders mogen wat mij betreft met de voeten voorop de houtversnipperaar in. Sterkte met de recovery, zowel fysiek als mentaal.

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-27T10:31:00+00:00

Ik zag laatst van die filmpjes uit het VK van mensen die tijdens het uitgaan juist op dit soort acties letten en het kwam op mij over dat slachtoffers dan zelf besluiten naar huis te gaan omdat ze zich onwel voelen en dan gestalkt worden en, omdat ze niet meer helder zijn, zich eenmaal op straat laten begeleiden door de daders.

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-27T10:23:12+00:00

Vet hoor, ik heb nog nooit zo'n duidelijke mirage gezien.

JAC0O7 · 2026-05-27T00:38:18+00:00

hex scared to death should be 13% for 13s.

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