I bought the collectors edition of STALKER, mainly because they were out of the vanilla edition and the manager gave me a staff discount. Nepotism, I love it too.
What did you have to, um, do to get that staff discount, Aaron?
BTW, what do you think of STALKER? I'm not thrilled, sorry to say...
Go to school with him. I'm not quite sure how you do it where you come from...?
As for STALKER... It's good, but nothing terribly great. Also, it's RPG elements more tighten the spectrum of people who can enjoy the game, rather than widening it I think. The only hybrid games I really enjoyed were along the lines of SS2, Dues Ex and so on. But they have other things going for them...
Of course STALKER was also weighed by the expectation of several years of development. The more times a game is on the cover of a single games magazine, the more disappointing it's going to be.