I have in the past spent a fair bit of time playing the New California mod of Fallout NV, and that was impressive. However, FOLON sets an entirely new standard when it comes to Fallout mods. Yes, there are glitches. (Aren't there glitches in vanilla Fallout 4?) But nothing you can't fix with a little bit of Googling (yes, Buffout 4 and reducing your graphic settings can help you past the train crash). And the game is great. I have not finished it yet: No rush, I am enjoying the game, the ambience, the dialogs. And at each and every turn I am amazed, seeing just how much effort, how much work it must have taken to create a mod like this, which really is a whole new game on the scale of the original itself. I am grateful that the developers of FOLON never gave up. Thank you for a great (in many ways, whole new!) game. Concerning technical details, I manually (not using GOG Galaxy) installed FOLON on top of a copy of my pre-existing GOG GOTY installation with a few mods present. I then used the vanilla launcher to change the resolution back to my monitor's native 2K. My display card is nothing fancy, a fanless NVIDIA 1050 (this is primarily a work computer.) FOLON runs smoothly. Apart from the well-documented train crash, I had one or two crashes when a load never finished, but that's par for the course insofar as FO4 itself is concerned. I suppose this is my way of saying that I think many (most?) of the one-star comments here are undeserved and uncalled for, especially considering that it's a non-commercial mod, a labor of love.
I bought The Saboteur quite some time ago, and I thought I'd never get to play it. After all, who keeps a machine around with a quad-core (or lesser) CPU these days? Because, as noted in the store page, "at the moment The Saboteur is not compatible with CPUs that have more than four physical cores". But then... I discovered a patch. An insanely simple patch. Only a single byte needs to change in the main executable, Saboteur.exe: the byte at 0x9f56d0 from 0x76 to 0xeb. (Search the Web for patch programs or patched versions.) Yes. One lousy byte. That's it. Once I changed that byte, the game, which up to that point, altogether refused to run on my machine, came to life. And what a game it is! It's called the swan song of Pandemic Studios, which was shut down shortly after this game was completed. Set in Nazi-occupied Paris, the ambiance of the game is almost perfect. It reminds me ever so slightly of 1960s Budapest, where I grew up: the cobblestones, the old cars, the clothes. But Budapest has no Eiffel tower that you can climb, to be greeted by a panorama of the entire city. (Bring your sniper rifle, in case there are stray Nazis to hunt.) The songs are great (more than once, I refused to exit a vehicle in the game, because I just wanted to listen to Ella Fitzgerald finish her song about her desert caravan.) And the story is decent. (As it turns out, it was inspired by a real-life character, Grand Prix champion turned special agent William Grover-Williams.) About my only major complaint is the save system: You get to save your stats, but that's all. Your location, the environment, mission progress are not saved. (Makes you wonder why they even bothered with a quicksave function.) I can only guess that GOG has not published a patched version of the game for legal reasons. Still, with that single-byte patch, the game can be played on modern computers and it runs well. And it's well worth playing.
So here's the thing: My knowledge of Russian is very rudimentary. Nonetheless, once I finished the two Metro games, I decided to replay them again from scratch... this time, with everything (voice and text) in Russian. That should tell you just how atmospheric these amazing games are. But if you don't believe me, wait until you find yourself in a Metro station full of refugees, and come across this shadow play artist in one corner, entertaining some children. One of the saddest, yet most beautiful moments I ever saw in a game. When I began playing these games, I worried that the linear gameplay will feel constraining, but no, it felt surprisingly natural, because it was story-driven. A sequel is apparently in the works. I hope it will show up on GOG when it is released. Looking forward to it.
OK, I played all three S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games and like them all. I still think SoC is the best, bt CoP is a worthy ending of this trilogy. And it did something few other games ever managed: Almost gave me nightmares. OK, I hope I am not giving away much by way of spoilers, but as you probably know, once you finish the main story, the game remains open for free play. The final act of the main storyline in my case was an epic gunbattle in the middle of Pripyat, in the dead of the night. Once we "won", the NPC team was evacuated by helicopter, and I was offered the choice of either joining them (ending the game) or staying behind. Naturally, I chose the latter. So the NPCs board the chopper, the chopper leaves, its sound fades... and there I was, in the middle of a pitch dark Pripyat, completely alone, surrounded only by the corpses left behind by the battle. And it was the eeriest experience imaginable. So much so, I sensed almost a physical sense of relief when I finally made it back to a building that, much to my relief, was not abandoned but had NPC humans in it. Finally... light, voices, signs of life. Sheesh, get a grip of yourself! It's just a silly computer game! Yes, that's how atmospheric these games really are. As a footnote, not long after I finished CoP, I came across a picture on the Internet: A photo of the Yanov railway station, which is currently used as a warehouse. I recognized it immediately, because it looks just like in the game.
