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Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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Stalker video

Looks a bit good.

THQ has released a new five minute 66MB Stalker DivX trailer. Starting with real footage of Chernobyl, the camera zooms in on the power station and the footage artfully switches to in-game material. Unless you're looking for it, you won't notice the transition - this set us up to be awed by GSC Game World's incredible-looking engine.

Featuring a good dose of gameplay and more than a glimpse of what the engine is capable of, the video runs us through the game's basic features, showing off character designs human, animal and mutant in nature within the astonishingly detailed environments. It then moves on to exhibit the game's physics capabilities, using vehicles and humans as test subjects, and even shows the player climbing into an abandoned car and taking it for a spin. Finally, the video makes great effort to wave the various advanced graphical effects we'll be privy to under our noses, with all sorts of shadows, bump mapped and shiny surfaces and lush vegetation to dribble over. Yeah, it looks nice.

Anyway, if you fancy having a peek at the game that is, in our books, most likely to give Half-Life 2 a decent run for it's money - and we trust that you do - you can grab the file from Worthplaying right here. Get to it.

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