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When STALKER first came out, it was kinda buggy. For some, that’s a no-fly zone for the almighty wallet. Understandable. Then the game got patched, but, you know, $50 is still a pretty sizeable chunk of change. So you decided to skip out on it again. “Later,” you probably thought. That’s fine too.
Now, though, there are no excuses.
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl – one of the most underrated open world shooters of recent years – is completely free. Go to Gametap, download, and enjoy. That’s roughly two mouse clicks between the haves and have-nots. Even your mother could do that. Do you want to be laughed at for being less computer-literate than your mother? Didn’t think so.
Ok. That’s the end of our spiel. Have at it.
Comments are closed on this article
silentrob187
May 19, 2009 at 10:17am
Well I ignored the warnings from others and signed up for the free version at Gametap. The download completed late last night and I played the game for about 15 min. I went to bed woke up and tried playing today but when I go to start the game it tells me that I do not have enough room to download the game...problem is I did a full download.
CS told me to redownload the game and free up space on my C: drive.
GAYtap will only save to your C: drive. My C: drive has enough room for an OS (15 GB) and a few small programs. This was done intentioanlly by me to keep my OS small and easy to defrad. I have a 1TB HD that I cannot access with this stupid software/crapware. If you use GAYtap know that you have no control over where the files are stored.
This is 2009 you idiots at GAYtap. Why they hell would I want to spend money to use a system that is so gay! You need to fix this aspect of your service or like me and all the others on this thread will never use your crap even if it is free.
BTW the game looks awsome from what I played. I may use Steam and just pay to get it.
lifebringer
May 18, 2009 at 5:52pm
Hi Arkweld! Let's begin.
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"
If you can't see what's wrong with torrenting this game then you're probably too stupid to comprehend the plot.
This is from an independent small developer and whatever arrangement Gametap have for offering this free it doesn't make it free everywhere. Any residuals related to downloading this game will not reach GSC by taking it from other sources and since I like this series I think they deserve to be compensated for it.
"
First off, you must be what, thirteen? Okay, maybe you're nineteen, still. Education has nothing to do with ethics -- there is absolutely no correlation whatsoever. If YOU can't comprehend that, you have no place dealing with either, and you should probably just quit life altogether.
Yes, I realized GameTap probably made some agreement with the owners of the game that allows them to provide it for free, but this is why I'm using the serial provided by GameTap. If you'd like to write a letter to the STALKER developers/distributors and/or GameTap saying that they should provide a free method for people to download the game DRM/obstruction-free, be my guest. I'd be happy to endorse it. However, I'm not going to waste my time debating the ethical views of obtaining the game from different sources.
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"This game has been under 10 bucks at GoGamer for months. If that's not cheap enough to prevent you dolts from stealing a copy then the PC gaming world really is fucked. Because the "supporters" of PC gaming are intent to fuck it up."
Yeah, it's still ten bucks. I was aware of this game well before release, but I can't spend time playing every single game that comes out (granted I'd love to). So a good indicator I've used is meta-ratings like those categorized on gamerankings.com or metacritic.com. Sure, I've fallen in love with games with an average score of "80" or so, but I simply don't have the time to play every game out there. So unless it's highly reccomended to me by a few friends, I'm not going to play a game unless either it has a great average rating or for another personal reason (any Blizzard game, any HL game, etc.).
The "82" that STALKER comes up with just wasn't enough to justify me paying for it at the time, and I'm not willing to pay $10 and go through with the credit card transaction (even if it WAS on Steam) for a two year old game with a B average. If it's free, though, maybe I'll kill an hour or two with it one night and see if I like it.
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Edit: just tried to fire up the game (pre-patch), and it wouldn't run -- I assume that although it accepted the serial, it won't run without some sort of no-cd crack, which I'm not willing to do. That's too bad, because I'd like to try the game for an hour or two (or three...) depending on how much I liked it. But you'd have to pay me REAL money to use a web-based launcher like GameTap...
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"And this is one more indication how the mean IQ of MPC readers is dropping on a monthly basis."
Actually, I've been subscribing to MaximumPC for...jeeze, at least 5+ years -- I just don't find most articles worth posting my comments on. Seriously though, thanks for playing.
God, I love when meaningless comments pages turn into detailed forum posts.
KaylaKaze
May 18, 2009 at 12:26am
I loved Gametap until about a week ago. It helps that my account is only $5 a month since it's grandfathered in. But it's been shit since the new web interface. And then, last week, it decided I needed to redownload all my games and erased all my saves. Add that to the fact that since the new web version, customer support has gone from where you could call them or chat live in a javascript chat, to now the only way ou can communicate is through email and waiting like a week for a response. I was in favor of the web interface when they first started talking about it, because it COULD work if they had decent people working on it, but they don't. Gametap's DRM is extreme even to the point of encrypting your saves and ini files so you can only play a game the way THEY want you to and you can't back up your saves.
arkweld
May 17, 2009 at 8:29pm
If you can't see what's wrong with torrenting this game then you're probably too stupid to comprehend the plot.
This is from an independent small developer and whatever arrangement Gametap have for offering this free it doesn't make it free everywhere. Any residuals related to downloading this game will not reach GSC by taking it from other sources and since I like this series I think they deserve to be compensated for it.
This game has been under 10 bucks at GoGamer for months. If that's not cheap enough to prevent you dolts from stealing a copy then the PC gaming world really is fucked. Because the "supporters" of PC gaming are intent to fuck it up.
And this is one more indication how the mean IQ of MPC readers is dropping on a monthly basis.
lifebringer
May 17, 2009 at 2:55pm
Like many of the comments posted above, my reaction to Gametap was: what the hell is this crap?
Nathan, the FIRST thing you should have mentioned after saying the game was free is what others posted: namely, that there's no x64 support and the game is provided by a web-based interface.
It also prompted me to remap my X: drive to a different drive letter (I have my Win7 install on a "sandbox" partition mapped to X:)...what the HELL? You want ME to change MY drive's letter for YOUR stupid free web-based game program? HELL no...THEY should change THEIR stupid drive-letter requirements. There's twenty-six letters and I'm using less than ten of them...
The ~5gb files ( ch0.dat, ch0_1.dat, and others, placed in the All Users\App Data\GameTap folder) downloaded in a few hours for me, but there's no executable anywhere within the GameTap main folder, and my guess is that those files are disc image files, although I couldn't mount the largest one myself. It's possible those files are simply the game data and the executable is elsewhere within the GameTap folders or downloaded from the web-client at each launch. In any case, I'm not remapping my X: drive to another letter for their stupid program, and there's no way in HELL I'm going to be required to visit this website and run their plugins everytime I want to launch the game.
So... I'm downloading the game from a torrent now (which I hardly think is wrong...) and I plan to use the serial provided by GameTap to play...hopefully that works. If it doesn't, I'm gonna be pissed...
Nathan, I (as well as others, I'm sure) appreciate the good intentions, but next time please save us the trouble and explain the catch when you use the word "free," because in this case, it's a pretty important catch.
KaylaKaze
May 18, 2009 at 12:33am
Duh. All Gametap's files are encrypted and the only way to run it is through the web interface plugin. It mounts a virtual drive on X: which it decrypts the files to and hides the entire thing from the OS.
mike2060
May 17, 2009 at 1:36pm
I've been thinking of getting this game but wanted to try it out first so it looks like I'll get a chance to.
uncleck
May 17, 2009 at 11:39am
1) No 64-bit support;
2) Browser-based game (unless you upgrade your membership for $$).
That's two deal-breakers in one package. Fail and fail.
Lazar
May 17, 2009 at 11:39am
I just started downloading (free membership) , and its going 550 kbps +
bigtoyota479
May 17, 2009 at 11:00am
If you have the free sub to Gametap, they throttle your download. You have to pay to get the faster DL.
Granted, 5 KB/s is way slow, but I wouldn't expect it to reach the full 3 MBps dl's you're used to. Their servers are probably swamped right now with people downloading this game as well.
Brad1776
May 17, 2009 at 10:51am
The game is downloading at 5Kb/s... 51 hours left... I have a 3Mb connection people... This should be going faster.
bigtoyota479
May 17, 2009 at 10:35am
First off, no 64-bit support. There goes my account. Second, you have to play it with their browser plugin, so they can monitor what you play and how long you play through their service. Sorry folks, the only people allowed to do that is Valve's Steam service.
GameTap gets an Epic Fail rating from me. Their plugin sucks, it's false identified by some AV as a trojan (which it's not), but that means they are spying on you in ways they shouldn't be. Valve's Steam never gets a false positive, why should these guys? Invade my system? Don't think so. See ya!
nmanguy
May 17, 2009 at 9:03am
The impossible has happened! You wrote "$50" instead of "$40" in your article.
cssftw
May 17, 2009 at 8:11am
I signed up for a free account 3 times and it won't log me in. And it won't go to step 2 of the setup.
The game's 19.99 on Steam...There goes my hopes of playing it... :(
NoCtrl
May 17, 2009 at 8:07am
You can sign up for a free trial. But it's not completely free when you are supposed to be a paying member. Sheesh, I hate how "free" gets misused.
Devo85x
May 17, 2009 at 7:49am
Is the game downloading or streaming? i checked for where it was downloading to and didnt find anything
Cache
May 17, 2009 at 6:44am
They can't support x64 Windows, then I can't support them. Maybe--aside from the glaring bugs when it was released--no one wanted to purchase the game because they were so unimaginably stupid as to not bother supporting a modern system that most heavy gamers would be using in the first place?
Heck--why don't they just tell people you can't play the game unless you are using a Pentiun II chip with a voodoo video card?
jacob938
May 17, 2009 at 6:40am
im getting awful DL rates over gametap this thing is broken :P
cant complain tho, im getting a free game :D
Devo85x
May 17, 2009 at 7:44am
if you look down at the "SIGN UP" part, theres one that lets you join (and yes download this game) for free...
joeyjr
May 17, 2009 at 5:54am
I just built a new system running Vista 64 bit version and installed the game from Steam.
I had a problem that I could not save the game and I contacted THQ's support team to see if they could help. The same day I received a how to on fixing this, which was very eazy. It turns out that The game saves the game from a file in the root directory of Stalker :Shadow of Chernobyl named fsgame.ltx. I was told to open the file with Notepad and edit the first line. The line reads as follows:
$app_data_root$=true|false|C:\|Document and Settings\All Users\STALKER-SHOC\
change to (Note: you may have to change how this file opens to notepad under properties first so you can read it)
$app_data_root$=true|false|C:\|Users\Public\Documents\STALKER-SHOC\
Also, I was able to copy and paste my saved games from the of my old system to the new one from the locations. I think this is a pretty good game and I hope this helps.
joeyjr
jchornbe
May 17, 2009 at 5:35am
It's 2009 and they issue a blanket policy that they don't support 64-bit systems? Idiots.
Hitchitch
May 17, 2009 at 5:35am
What, No 64 bit support, thats poop, Im only trying to download the game not play a browser game, CHEAP, VERY CHEAP
