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 In 1972, Soviet-Russian author/brother duo Arkady and Boris Strugatsky released the Sci Fi novel Roadside Picnic: Aliens arrive on Earth at six Visitation Zones, leave reality-warping artifacts and anomalies behind, and go right back to outer space, much like how people leave their trash behind after a roadside picnic; fortune-seekers, dubbed "stalkers", illegally enter these zones in search of artifacts and knowledge. In 1977, Antonina W. Bouis translates the book to English for the first time, and it becomes an acclaimed and influential novel across nations. In 1979, legendary Soviet-Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky loosely adapts the book into the equally respected and influential film Stalker. The Strugatsky brothers in-turn novelise an early screenplay of the movie as Stalker. In 1986, a blackout safety test at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Pripyat, Ukraine causes its core to explode. The surrounding area becomes highly irradiated and is closed off, dubbed the Zone of Alienation, the Exclusion Zone, or simply The Zone. The plant is hastily covered with a concrete "sarcophagus". Those who re-enter the Zone, particularly the scientists and engineers exploring the sarcophagus, are called Stalkers. The Strugatskys' book begins to show an eery prescience, and a mythology builds around the disaster. All of this was not lost on the Ukrainian game studio GSC Game World. Come the new millenium, they took inspiration from both books and Tarkovsky's Stalker, replaced the aliens with this mythology built around Chernobyl, and released one of 2007's favorite cult hits. Привіт, Сталкер. This is Shadow of Chernobyl. ------------------------------------------------ The Game SoC is an immersive FPS noted for its difficulty and realism. The nuclear wasteland setting draws comparisons to Fallout, but SoC is not a fun romp where you can strap any minigun you see to your back to sell later: the game requires strategy and management from the player. You can die very quickly from the advanced enemy AI, wander into a grinder anomaly by mistake, miss most of your shots if you're not close, use up all of your piddly carry weight without trying, or fail in some other spectacular bug/glitch-related way. Despite this, and in many ways because, SoC and its sequel Call of Pripyat are acclaimed cult favorites. The Story Many years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, a second explosion occurs in the Exclusion Zone. Mutated creatures, wonderous artifacts, and deadly anomalies appear throughout the Zone, and a group of explorers, scientists, and wealth-seekers called Stalkers jump right in to see what they can find. Word spreads of the Wish Granter, something hidden within the Chernobyl Sarcophagus that can gift whoever finds it whatever they want. You are "the Marked One", a stalker who turns up suddenly with amnesia, a tattoo on his arm saying "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.", and a PDA that simply says "Kill Strelok". With no other leads as to who you might be, you trek out into the Zone with only a pistol, a knife, a pair of binoculars, and anything else you can scrounge off the mountain of corpses you leave behind in search of this Strelok. Along the way, you just might uncover the secrets of the Zone and what exactly is the Wish Granter. The LP This is a straightforward playthrough of the standard version. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Complete is an available mod that fixes a lot of the game's bugs and adds new content, but I wanted to give an authentic experience, so the only mod I'm using is the bug-fixing Zone Reclamation Project. Don't worry, the funny ones never get fixed. All endings will be shown off, as well as at least one of each type of side quest, so you can consider this a completionist run (sidequests are radiant quests, so there's no way to do literally every one). My co-commentators are JigglyJacob and Highwang. Highwang is more experienced with the game than me but usually plays Complete and is somehow wrong about everything. Jacob knows nothing about the game. This LP was originally uploaded in full between November 5, 2017 and January 28, 2018 for my Patreon patrons before it began being made public in February 2018. ------------------------------------------------                                 ------------------------------------------------ 
ThornBrain fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Jul 5, 2018 |
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Feb 4, 2018 09:42
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This is a cool game and it's been forever since I played it without any mods, so this will be a to-watch for me. I remember the first time I played this game I was terrified of not having enough ammo for some reason, so I'd use as little as possible, pick up everything, and never drop or sell any. It was not optimal walking around with several thousand assault rifle rounds and boxes of shells and pistol ammo.
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Feb 4, 2018 12:43
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I've heard good things about this game but have seen nothing that'd give me a decent idea of how it plays- think like a VideogameDunkey video or something- so I'm looking forward to this.
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Feb 4, 2018 13:04
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I've actually done work on a tabletop RPG version of this game using GURPS. I ended up stumbling upon Soviet heavy metal while finding music for it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnwU-fAo0bY
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Feb 4, 2018 16:10
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Surprised you didn't go it alone on the first bandit camp. The stalkers' reaction when you say you're going to, and then when you come back to tell them you did it, is goddamn priceless. "Oh whatever, stupid bastard will be dead in a few minutes." "*Holy poo poo*.  "
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Feb 4, 2018 16:43
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Also, one of the things I do for a hobby (because I hate myself) is eating military rations. Thanks to Ukrainian and Russian rations, I have actually had the displeasure of eating "Tourist's Breakfast". 
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Feb 4, 2018 17:33
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I tried to play this back when it came out and failed spectacularly. I still remember how gloriously difficult and unnecessarily long this thing's development ended up
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Feb 4, 2018 17:37
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chitoryu12 posted:Also, one of the things I do for a hobby (because I hate myself) is eating military rations. Thanks to Ukrainian and Russian rations, I have actually had the displeasure of eating "Tourist's Breakfast". Part of me wants to say that it should be better if you fry it, but...
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Feb 4, 2018 17:44
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Atomikus posted:Part of me wants to say that it should be better if you fry it, but... Oh, I ate it cooked. All it does is melt the fat.
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Feb 4, 2018 18:25
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This is a rad game that I missed when it first came out. I only picked it up last summer and had a go at it. Still holds up real well. It scratches that wasteland survival itch like no other.
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Feb 4, 2018 18:28
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The stalker series is a very unique and engaging group of games and they really improved on the formula in the third game but I still have the most fond memories of SOC.
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Feb 4, 2018 19:07
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chitoryu12 posted:Oh, I ate it cooked. All it does is melt the fat. I don't go back to the original games much these days, but I still pop in to Call of Chernobyl every so often, just to wander around the world and enjoy the atmosphere. Cordon & Rookie Village aren't my favourite starting location, but they're second after one that's not in this game.
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Feb 4, 2018 19:14
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I was watching someone on Twitch play through this with STALKER Complete, and it's still buggy. I don't remember having too many issues when I played it on PC around the time of release. I had way more issues with Call of Pripyat. It's a pretty unique game and series, and I wish they had been able to make more of them. The METRO series is fine, but I would kill for a current gen STALKER game with modern graphics.
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Feb 4, 2018 20:16
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Nice; I consider STALKER to be my favourite game series of all time. I can't really decide on one favourite game though; it's either Shadow of Chernobyl or Call of Pripyat... or Morrowind. To me STALKER represents the last great immersive, PC-focussed FPS; something that should have been the start of great things but wasn't. The cancellation of STALKER 2 is still one of the greatest disappointments in games for me; up there with, like... Ultima 9. (I mean Ultima 9 just in general.) Still, man... there must be some Law of SA LP that states that highly moddable games shall always be either LPed in their vanilla state for the "authentic" experience, or flattened beneath the weight of all the dumbest joke mods the LPer could find, because "look at how wacky and broken this is, hilarious right guys lol". Not having a go at you or anything for the choice to go vanilla; it's just that while SoC is an amazing and incredibly important game, it was still pretty rough in a lot of ways and is improved enormously with the right mods, in my opinion. For a long time my go-to overhaul was Oblivion Lost, with all the cut-content it restored. More recently it's been Autumn Aurora 2, thanks to how much it improves and polishes both the gameplay and visuals. Anyway, yes; huge STALKER fan. I've long ago lost count of how many times I've played all three games. I'll try not to spam "hey you missed the hidden X behind the Y" in the thread too much. Having said that, did you end up grabbing the nice suit of Merc(?) armour hidden up under the roof of one of the buildings in the rookie village?  chitoryu12 posted:Also, one of the things I do for a hobby (because I hate myself) is eating military rations. Thanks to Ukrainian and Russian rations, I have actually had the displeasure of eating "Tourist's Breakfast". The "Tourist's Breakfast" is sort of painted as the most appealing food in the game, so now I have a new-found appreciation for how miserable life in the Zone is.
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Feb 5, 2018 01:01
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Did you try eating it in a depressing ruined wilderness while soaked by rain and mud and vodka? I don't think that would help, but maybe adding some radiation as well would do something for the taste. I'll try it if I can even find more. The only Russian canned meat you really find around here is beef or pork tushonka (the pork tastes extremely similar to Spam, just fattier).
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Feb 5, 2018 01:46
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This is an amazing game, once you patch it, mod it, beat it into submission... you can certainly play it unmodded, it's a thing that can be done, but like venturing into Chernobyl itself, it's not necessarily an advisable thing. Either way, the first few hours of the game are hell. You're weak, the guns you get are poo poo and the enemies are all aimbots who can cut you down with a single burst. It's a miserable experience and I can understand fully why some people play for an hour before giving up entirely. Once you actually get some decent weapons under your belt, however (there's an army base nearby which sends out 2-3 man patrols, the soldiers carry AKs, you work it out), the game transforms entirely. There's a ridiculous learning curve, but it's doable, and the game opens up so much once you get past it. Vodka healing radiation was an actual folk remedy across Russia, by the way, but especially in the area around Chernobyl. It was believed that vodka would 'purge' the radiation from your system. It didn't, of course, but after a few bottles, it was hard to give much of a poo poo either way.
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Feb 5, 2018 01:47
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I know entirely too much about STALKER and Call of Pripyat thanks to getting several really bad survivor itches and generally mucking around everywhere in these games looking for hideyholes and secrets and actually doing what stalkers do by going to anomalies and hunting artifacts by hucking bolts at them and getting gibbed by whirlygig's. Complete's pretty good for what it does and how much it works out-of-the-box but ZRP is probably the better mod. Kaboom Dragoon posted:Either way, the first few hours of the game are hell. You're weak, the guns you get are poo poo and the enemies are all aimbots who can cut you down with a single burst. It's more important to get good armor than a good weapon at the beginning of the game (hence why the free merc suit hidden in the starter village is such a boon.) NPC's are both held-back aimbots and the game is extremely fair. Deus Ex fair. Headshots are just as lethal to you as they are to the enemy and are going to be your number 1 source of death. Also those patrols are easy mode. My SOP is to Man Mode the railway checkpoint  Shotgun with slugs/darts is a surprisingly good medium-ranged weapon at the beginning of the game. The problem is getting a good stash of them.
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Feb 5, 2018 02:49
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Antistar01 posted:The "Tourist's Breakfast" is sort of painted as the most appealing food in the game, so now I have a new-found appreciation for how miserable life in the Zone is. Well, "reliable but poo poo" beats "poo poo and unreliable" any day, and it looks like the Zone isn't really spoiled for choice in that regard.
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Feb 5, 2018 02:57
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ThornBrain posted:In fact, the semi-sequel, Clear Sky, that is a huge problem with that one, because the enemies have laser accuracy with grenades. Alexeythegreat posted:I still remember how gloriously difficult and unnecessarily long this thing's development ended up ShoC finally came out the same year as loving Crysis. chitoryu12 posted:Also, one of the things I do for a hobby (because I hate myself) is eating military rations. Thanks to Ukrainian and Russian rations, I have actually had the displeasure of eating "Tourist's Breakfast".
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Feb 5, 2018 03:42
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Oh boy, I've been avoiding your BotW thread because I want to go into that fresh, but this. This, I can totally check out. I almost want to play this series, but my laptop is basically a potato at this point.
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Feb 5, 2018 03:57
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chitoryu12 posted:Also, one of the things I do for a hobby (because I hate myself) is eating military rations. Thanks to Ukrainian and Russian rations, I have actually had the displeasure of eating "Tourist's Breakfast".
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Feb 5, 2018 11:30
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Xander77 posted:That seems very unlike both the Soviet era canned rations, and the modern day salads. It does look like an MRI though, that's for sure. This one comes out of the Ukrainian ration, which is quite similar to old Soviet military rations. Modern Russian ones are a little better and have a little bit more variety (like stews with rice or noodles) and flexible rectangular cans instead of big round ones. In both Ukrainian and Kazakhstani rations, almost all of the food is gross canned meat like that or canned kasha with meat. Extremely bland and so greasy that it feels like you're coating the inside of your mouth with fat.
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Feb 5, 2018 15:40
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Perhaps you could try steaming the cans?
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Feb 5, 2018 17:43
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Out of curiosity, if you aren't using the Complete mod, which mods are you using? I was always under the impression that Complete was primarily bug fixes, plus a few UI tweaks as mentioned.
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Feb 7, 2018 08:53
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Kibayasu posted:Out of curiosity, if you aren't using the Complete mod, which mods are you using? I was always under the impression that Complete was primarily bug fixes, plus a few UI tweaks as mentioned. The Zone Reclamation Project http://www.metacognix.com/stlkrsoc/ Stalker Complete uses a much older version of this and it also does a couple of changes to the game that makes it much easier which I'm not a fan of.
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Feb 7, 2018 18:11
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A couple of reasons why SoC really needs mods (and I think ZRP does address these things, though I've never used it): 1) Night-time is dangerous and very dark (not the modern, bright as day but blue-cast "we're afraid of confusing the average-idiot-consumer" treatment of night-time; it's actually dark), but there's no way to sleep or otherwise skip time in the base game. 2) Weapons have durability (which I like), but there is no way to repair them in the base game. They did fix these issues in later STALKER games, but in SoC you're just out of luck without mods.
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Feb 8, 2018 00:14
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chitoryu12 posted:Also, one of the things I do for a hobby (because I hate myself) is eating military rations. Thanks to Ukrainian and Russian rations, I have actually had the displeasure of eating "Tourist's Breakfast". i have the thread bookmarked bman in 2288 posted:Oh boy, I've been avoiding your BotW thread because I want to go into that fresh, but this. This, I can totally check out. I almost want to play this series, but my laptop is basically a potato at this point. SoC is, fittingly, somewhat runnable on a potato. Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Feb 8, 2018 |
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Feb 8, 2018 00:47
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Antistar01 posted:They did fix these issues in later STALKER games, but in SoC you're just out of luck without mods. Not to mention the stuff that actually breaks the game that complete doesn't reliably fix. Sidrovich's door is notorious.
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Feb 8, 2018 01:17
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Mr. Fortitude posted:The Zone Reclamation Project Hah, I googled around for bug fix mods and that was the first one I found. Then I thought to myself "There's no way that's the one because look at that site."
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Feb 8, 2018 03:54
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Oh; armour too. Armour also has durability and can't be repaired in the base game. That probably ends up being more of an issue than the un-fixable weapons, really.
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Feb 8, 2018 07:16
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Antistar01 posted:Oh; armour too. Armour also has durability and can't be repaired in the base game. That probably ends up being more of an issue than the un-fixable weapons, really. Though in an early form of the game armor didn't lose durability ever because it was bugged. Stalker is a total mess but also one of the most brilliant games I ever played.
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Feb 8, 2018 15:26
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Antistar01 posted:Oh; armour too. Armour also has durability and can't be repaired in the base game. That probably ends up being more of an issue than the un-fixable weapons, really. i never felt like armor was a huge problem in the game, it was always pretty easy to get a fresh suit of good stuff, especially if you just artifact hunt a little bit poo poo now i want to play. maybe i'll install the latest one and go all in on those complete mods I actually have a soft spot for clear sky despite it probably being the buggiest PoS of the 3. Sloober fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Feb 8, 2018 |
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Feb 8, 2018 16:53
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I never played Clear Sky (LP prompt?) but I have heard hilarious things. The third game is really good though, and I enjoyed and completed it without mods way back when.
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Feb 8, 2018 17:51
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Always good to see a STALKER LP. I never did get through SoC but watching this has made me wanna go back and reinstall it.
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Feb 8, 2018 21:41
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Dogs, death traps, and drunkenness dominate.
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Feb 11, 2018 09:46
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The stashes in SoC are pretty goofy but with how frequently misc. quests and PDA coords repop the system can work out hilariously to your advantage if you play a long game. From what I hear, the bizarre difficulty-lethality situation is a result of the even more bizarre ghost bullet system.
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Feb 11, 2018 11:48
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Man, you sure like to aim low  This was funny Stash: Under the cross (duh)
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Feb 11, 2018 11:59
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chitoryu12 posted:Also, one of the things I do for a hobby (because I hate myself) is eating military rations. Thanks to Ukrainian and Russian rations, I have actually had the displeasure of eating "Tourist's Breakfast". Thanks, your endeavours are both fascinating and terrifying. I'm only a couple of pages in but have you seen or tried Indian ones? Supermarkets around my way sell ready-to-eat curries in MRE style pouches and one of the brands proudly proclaims that they are made using techniques developed for Indian army rations. They are actually really tasty (but oversalted) and contain recognisable lentils/veges/paneer - I get them for lunch occasionally with some microwaveable rice. Back on topic, my monitor is trash but this makes me think about the food items in STALKER. The bread doesn't look like long-life hard breads, so that makes me wonder who is baking it and where/how... Also if the game depends mostly on your skill, when do the guns stop being absolute trash that send bullets several feet to the side of where you are pointing them? The MP5 wasting half a clip missing a point-blank crotch shot is kind of depressing, or is this just because it's an inferior decadent capitalist gun?
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Feb 11, 2018 12:22
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Looking forward to this, it has been ages since I played it. Can't wait to see where it goes.
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Feb 11, 2018 13:40
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Thorn posted:It's an Ak-47 but they can't title it that. Oh how wrong you are. There're actually a shitton of AK variants and the 74 is the ill-timed 1974 version, that makes you think they just switched the numbers around for copyright reasons, that's chambered for a different round than the original AK-47: 5.45×39mm instead of the older 7.62×39mm. Actual gun-nuts, feel free to weigh in on the weapons we've seen so far.
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Feb 11, 2018 14:19
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