The other day I got a beta key for STALKERs latest build. I thought I' d share!

I reckon the game still game looks good for an engine that was meant to be released with Half-life 2 3 years ago! And whats more it runs quick as well. Maxed everything - it averages around 40fps quite often staying at 60fps. Only when you come across those ' fire-barrels' does it get a little choppy. But I think thats an optimisation issue (or lack of it) myself..

There' s so much atmosphere its unreal - small things like audible wind blowing dust around and moving grass, bird noises and lens flares during the day, the sun coming in and out from behind the clouds, moving cloud shadows etc...the lightning effect during storms is particularly awesome!

Theres very subtle distance blur and HDR too which just works. The overall style is very realistic, gritty, repressed...but when the sun comes out, it actually feels warm!

The sound plays a big part in creating the atmosphere of course. Gun sounds and ricochets are cool. The guns are accurate, but with a realistic variance to where the bullet lands.

Only negatives are that you do notice slight pop up with the grass occasionally, but no more than with Oblivion. The gfx do look flat sometimes when the lighting effects aren' t in play (the screens were taken mostly during the day or when lightining struck!). And theres a ' full HDR' option in the user.ltx file which looks kinda cool if a bit overbright at times, but slows my machine down to a crawl! [:' (]

Anyway, enough of me ranting in awe of STALKER. Here' re the screens!
Spec: Core2Duo6400@2.4GHz, 2Gb DDR2-800 RAM, ATI X1900XTX 512Mb.