For all its quickly respawning NPCs, despawning monsters, damaged quests, and normal bugginess that remind us what we imply after we speak about ‘eurojank,’ Stalker 2 is an bold, at occasions good, sport that positively has its viewers. An viewers prepared to miss, and even embrace, brokenness when it is in service to an atmospheric survival sandbox. Naturally Stalker 2 is fashionable in its residence nation, and the collection has at all times had a powerful following in jap Europe. One demographic I did not count on Stalker 2 to cowl, nonetheless, is Japanese octogenarians who occur to be presidents of erotic sport studios.
Granted, that demographic is made up of only one particular person so far as I am conscious, however it’s nonetheless testomony to how unexpectedly video games can transcend age and tradition.
Meet Japanese Stalker 2 fan, Seiji Nakamura:
日本最高齢エロゲメーカー社長・hal氏こと中村清治御大（83）のPC新調をお手伝いし、『S.T.A.L.Okay.E.R.2』のプレイ開始を見届けてきた。前作から15年ぶりの続編発売に喜びつつも、「80過ぎたじじいの目には字が小さすぎます！」とUI &字幕極大化MODを熱望されていました。 pic.twitter.com/gqZwoyyMAJDecember 8, 2024
Every part about this man’s vibe speaks to me; from the undersized monitor to the most important mouse cursor I’ve ever seen, from the ciggy within the mouth to the orange Intellimouse that simply screams ‘if it ain’t broke…’ Nakamura-san resides his finest life.
In keeping with the tweet, Nakamura’s delighted along with his new rig that is able to taking part in the eye-wateringly demanding Stalker 2, however is hoping for mods to extend the UI and subtitle measurement. “The textual content is just too small for an previous man over 80!” he is quoted as saying (by way of machine translation).
Digging a bit of deeper, it seems like Nakamura’s constructed a little bit of a status for himself in Japan. He was interviewed by IGN Japan again in 2020, the place he instructed the location that he performed the unique Stalker video games with round 200 to 300 mods. The interview sheds some gentle on how Nakamura fell in love with the collection, and in addition how he obtained into making “lovely lady video games.”
Nakamura talks about being a fan of the novel Roadside Picnic and Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, each of which impressed the video games, and observes similarities between the reactor at Pripyat and the reactor at Fukushima. “The enjoyment of taking part in S.T.A.L.Okay.E.R. is not simply the enjoyable of a shooter,” he instructed IGN Japan. “It is also emotionally compelling to the general environment, from the eerie depiction of a ruined underground lab to the great thing about the sundown over a Ukrainian forested space.”
Even when Google Translate bodged the interpretation a bit, I get the sentiment. Here is hoping somebody on the market creates the mods that Mr. Nakamura must take pleasure in Stalker 2. Or higher nonetheless, somebody purchase this man an even bigger gaming monitor!