Fortunately, yet another recent game works perfectly on Linux. Unfortunately it only runs perfectly within a fairly narrow boundary.

For those unfamiliar with the premise. Stalker is set in the future, in an area called "The Zone", an area teeming with strange phenomena that puzzle scientists the world over. Phenomena which are likely related to the nearby Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Now the first thing I'll mention is that I loved this game, but there were a few things that annoyed me, for one thing the weight limit was pretty low and you got tired too easily for someone running for their life. Secondly, you couldn't buy ammo off other stalkers, you couldn't sell weapons to them either, now if I was surrounded by mutated dogs and bandits, I'd want a bigger gun. Thirdly, the bandits kept respawning, but the NPC's didn't, so eventually the bandits just take most areas over.

These are pretty big things, so I'll hold off replaying the game until I can get a mod to fix them. That and a decent enough video card to play the game at full detail, with bloom and everything. Beyond that however, Stalker's pretty much perfect, not only for the graphics, which are fairly awe inspiring, but mostly for the advanced artificial intelligence displayed by the inhabitants. They're not geniuses, but they're smart enough to behave realistically. Far more interestingly, they're smart enough to know when to give up and leg it from the roaming packs of mutated dogs that like to just eat wanderers.

Remember, they're only stray little doggies when they're alone. If there's three of them, they'll take you down if you're wounded. If there's a dozen or more, they'll take down anything that moves. More importantly, this relates to something mentioned earlier. Most NPC's aren't immortal, except for the story critical ones, even they however aren't immune from damage. Rather the game places all the character's meetings with them such that the player won't have an opportunity to kill them. Other NPC's however, are on their own. They'll be slaughtered by bandits, wild dogs or just walk into an anomaly and be thrown up into the air and imploded. This lends a feeling of realism to the world, it also lends a feeling of bleak pointlesness. Granted, not a bad achievement in a horror game, but it still sucks to have your allies, with whom you've fought off three bandit assaults, get slaughtered by a lucky shot or just by being overwhelmed.

This brings me to the first problem that exists with running Stalker on Wine. Even with GLSL, the game won't display light sources properly in DX9 mode and always crashes within 10 seconds or less of executing the game. Fortunately, all the DX8 problems have been fixed in the latest revision of the wine code. Other than the DX9 issues, the game runs pretty much perfectly.

Installing it is in itself fairly straightforward. Simply install the game as normal, then apply the GLSL registry alteration, then you're done. From what I can tell, the game runs acceptably without GLSL, but any pistols picked up past the first may appear reversed. It should also be noted that in earlier versions of wine, you might get some graphical glitches, such as no menu text, however this doesn't interfere with game play.