Thanks for the replies.
Starforce is a copy protection thing which has received negative press - it does bad things to your PC, apparently, which is enough for me to be wary of it. A Google should explain more.
I'll keep an eye out on Day 8 - thanks for the warning.
My copy will be dispatched on Tuesday, so I should have it by the end of the week. Based on the demo, I wouldn't say it's impossibly broken at all. It has a lot of charm and I absolutely love the survival mechanics. One thing I hate about modern games is recharging health bars. Where is the fun in that?! Depending on how motivated I feel I might, maybe, write a feature on this for a website I write for.
I am really disappointed to hear about the censorship though. Can kids still die in a crossfire between NPCs, or are they immortal now like they are in Fable? If so, that somewhat reduces the grim reality the game is trying to portray. I mean, you could break into a house, kill the parents, but the kids would still be running around like invincible robots... In the Russian version, did the child gangs fight with each other ever? I'm curious to know to what degree this censorship affected the mechanics.
My other question then would be:
Is it possible to mod the game to undo the censorship?
Was the censorship the result of major changing of the original code, or was it simply switching a 1 to a 0 in some of the NPC data files so the collision detection was removed? I remember making my own custom STALKER mods because all you needed was to edit some text files (very versatile!). I don't know how the file structure works here, but I'm hoping it's easy to fiddle with?
Does anyone know what other changes were made between the Russian original and the UK release?