Call of Pripyat in my opinion is the best in the Stalker series. I'm into games that give me an open world to mess around in. When GoG.com started up its sale of all 3 games as part of an awesome deal, I jumped on it like a "snork" leaping out of an anomalous cave.

Getting the game to run on modern OS can sometimes be tricky though, so you can guess I'm also familiar with the X-ray engine and the problems it likes to give players who attempt to delve into this awesome series. While trying to get it to run on my windows 8.1 laptop, I crashed with the x-ray engine error. One thing I found a while back, was to run the x-ray engine as an administrator. That's one trick you can do to make it work on windows 7. Really cool of the GoG guys to implement that via the installer, It'll help alot of players.

My problem still persisted though, so I was like "What the heck?". Well, long story short, I went into the install folder and right clicked on the X-ray engine file ( its in the folder named bin), turned off admin and now the game starts up. Go figure. Hope this helps some people.

UPDATE: I found that the game doesn't want to run in DX9 with admin on. Setting it to DX 11 in the options works fine with administrator privileges. Windows 8.1.

Strange, I have the same OS and am playing with whatever GOG set it up with and no issues yet.

Same here - all three parts crashed immediatly after start with the x-ray engine error. Now trying to disable admin at the binaries - it works. Weird but true. Also Win 8.1. Thanks a lot, i gave a plus :).

Tried everything, never crossed my mind to remove the "run as admin" option. Now it works thanks to you. Cheers!

EDIT: Only works when I run the game through Stalker-COP.exe in Call of Pripyat FYI, other executables crash