where we’re going, baby, ain’t such word as no

Ah, Chernobyl in the springtime… The sunsets are to die for, until you realize that you're facing eastward, and the faint glow on the horizon is due to fission, not fusion.

Recently, I’ve been burning up a lot of free time playing STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl for the PC. The game, which had been in development so long that some were starting to write it off as vaporware, is an open-ended RPG/FPS hybrid best described as a cross between Fallout and the Elder Scrolls games. The premise of STALKER was loosely inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, about a quest through a radioactive dead zone where even the laws of physics have begun to break down, but set within the real-world environment of Chernobyl’s “zone of exclusion.”

In the game’s alternate universe, the Chernobyl reactor experienced a second, more violent, meltdown, and the quarantined area has become a haven for looters, scavengers, and other predators, both human and inhuman. The player’s in-game avatar has been plunked down on the periphery of the “Zone” with no memory of his former life, only the crudest survival gear and a PDA containing an order to hunt down and kill someone or something called “The Strelok.”

While there is a sequence of missions to the further the overarching plot of the game, I’ve been content so far simply exploring the rather large and extremely haunting game world, with its not-quite-unpopulated assortment of ruined villages, farmsteads, and industrial areas, searching for caches of weapons and supplies, and picking (or avoiding) fights with some of the more unfriendly inhabitants.

The “Garbage” level, with its abandoned truck yards, trash piles, and heaps of abandoned building materials, reminds me a lot of the old North Woburn dump, before they capped off the landfill and built a Target store and Raytheon plant next to it. The verisimilitude extends to the stands of cat’o’nine tails poking up through scattered scummy microponds. Granted, the environmental hazards of that locale involved accidental chromium (or some other toxic byproduct of Woburn’s old tanneries) poisoning, rather than radioactive fallout or hidden gravitational anomalies.

It’s been a very entertaining, if frustrating experience. The free roaming aspect of the game, combined with excellent enemy AI scripting (human opponents will aggressively seek out cover and advantageous positions, the aggressiveness of certain creatures depends on the size of their pack) and draconian inventory management rules based on item weight, makes for a steep difficulty curve where quicksaving is an absolute necessity.

The game has some minor -- or major, depending on the OS and video card – bugs and stability issues (the current patch did fix many of the worst ones), and it can take a while to get it running smoothly at a decent framerate, even on a machine whose specs definitively exceed the ones recommended on the box. That’s par for the course in current PC gaming, however (and it will only get worse as Vista’s hidden eccentricities come to the fore over the next twelve months or so).

Tech hassles aside, STALKER is an extremely engrossing game set in an incredibly detailed game world, and it’s easy to burn away ninety minutes merely conducting house to house searches in an ruined Ukrainian farming village in hopes of turning up a unique piece of loot. Just be sure to scout out the positions of your enemies before starting a firefight. It’s always the fellow hiding in the bushes with a sawed-off shotgun who will do you in.

On to the music portion of our program:

It would take a massive environmental catastrophe to get me to post a track by The Smiths. Actually, this particular Smiths’ track was indirectly inspired by the Chernobyl disaster, or rather how the event was presented by Radio One. DJ Steve Wright followed a news announcement of the 1986 disaster by playing “I’m Your Man” by Wham! “Panic” was Morrissey and Marr’s response to that bit of callous frivolity.

Horrible, isn’t it? It should be obvious to everyone that when an atomic death cloud is looming on the horizon, the proper Wham! Song to cue up would be “Young Guns (Go For It)”:

Hey sucker, what the hell’s got into you?

Cesium-137, Iodine-131, and Strontium-90. Thanks for asking! Got any bone marrow I can borrow?

Wham! – I’m Your Man (from a 1985 single, collected on If You Were There, 1997) – If I was pressed to name the precise moment new wave music died, I’d hem and haw and offer several weasel-y qualifying statements before answering “The release of Wham!’s ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ single.” That first utterance of “Jitterbug” was the final nail in the coffin of the dark futurist and new romantic visions of the early 1980’s, and heralded the rise of a saccharine, day-glo dance-poptopia.

The Smiths – Panic (from a 1986 single, collected on Louder Than Bombs, 1987) – Carter USM covered this song on the b-side to “The Only Living Boy in New Cross” single and, as blasphemous a statement as this may be to Smiths’ enthusiasts, I prefer it to the original. Carter’s version added a level of invective bite that was sorely lacking in The Smiths’ original rendition.