Kieron Gillen studies System Shock

[Wrestlevania]

In The Girl Who Wanted To Be God, Kieron Gillen takes a scalpel to Shodan, the AI villainess from the brilliant System Shock universe.

The article was originally printed in last month's (August 2006) UK edition of PC Gamer magazine. It's not short, weighing in at 4,000 words plus, but it's an engaging read none the less.

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On a related note; it's been announced that System Shock 3 is actually in production. Before you get too excited though, a couple of things to consider:

• No-one involved in making the original two games is working on the third title.
• It's been handed to the group responsible for the monumental disappointment The Godfather.

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[BigJKO]

Fantastic article. Never finished System Shock 2, so.. quite a lot of spoilers. But I never would've finished it anyway, so this a very neat read.

[miffy495]

Damn. That was really, really good. I kinda want to play SWAT 4 after reading that, honestly. It's the only Irrational game I never got around to trying.

[DanJW]

Nice, very nice. May be long for some people but i enjoyed every paragraph. The S&M simile made me laugh too, but in appreciation.

But... he mentions System Shock 3 in the forward. What? anyone got anything on this?

[BigJKO]

Yes, Wrestle mentions it in this thread's first post.

[MrHoatzin]

The first few paragraphs of that article made me want to suffer through installing the game. I've never played it when it was new, and last few times I tried to make it run, it didn't want to. After a good two hours, a few apps of dubious legality and some down and dirty BIOS hacks it works! Hot shit! Before I started messing with this, I put a ham in the oven. I just started the game proper and the ham is nearly ready.

[MrHoatzin]

Also a propos the SS3 -- there is Bioshock, the true SS3. Rejoice!

[DanJW]

Yes, Wrestle mentions it in this thread's first post.

Doh. I reached the line and assumed everything under it was a massive sig

Heh, interesting about what the Gillen's article says about how Shodan would be weakened by a third outing, in light of this news. I can easily see the Godfather team taking this amazing character and doing something horrible. My guess? She will be downloaded into a hot blonde human body

[MrHoatzin]

Tomorrow is the first day of classes. This was a mind-numbingly wrong time to install this game.

[Erkki]

I started playing it about a year or two ago, but stopped quite early. I think it was the respawning zombies. Zombies usually annoy me in games, and combine that with respawns...

[miffy495]

Tomorrow is the first day of classes. This was a mind-numbingly wrong time to install this game.

Seriously? Your classes are starting this early? U of C doesn't start up for another 2 weeks yet. Ample time to play a game or two.

[SpiderMonkey]

Before you get too excited though, a couple of things to consider:

• No-one involved in making the original two games is working on the third title.
• It's been handed to the group responsible for the monumental disappointment The Godfather.

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Counter-point: They do have Doug Church in their employ at the moment, so maybe they've given it to his trustworthy mittens.

[Wrestlevania]

Counter-point: They do have Doug Church in their employ at the moment, so maybe they've given it to his trustworthy mittens.

Ah OK, I stand corrected.

Fingers crossed they won't butcher this into the equivalent of Prey with a smart-mouthed female antagonist. I can't honestly see it turning out any other way though.

[Marek]

Doug Church is at EALA (EA Los Angeles) creating new IP with Steven Spielberg.

The people who made The Godfather are at EARS (EA Redwood Shores).

[Oath]

Does anyone know if The Godfather did well or not? The game was total shit, but that may not have held it back (360 version seems just as pathetic, if not more).

[painaxl]

I didn't think the Godfather was that bad...

It was hyped to death as a superhugemegaawesome game, but it had its moments, I thought. Maybe my expectations weren't as high.

[MrHoatzin]

The only redeeming quality of Godfather is the relatively robust character creation system that allowed me to create Stephen Colbert. After that it's all downhill.

GTA - fun + humbug = Godfather

[MrHoatzin]

The problem of all properties that change hands incompetently, especially in this industry, is that the person that gets the development doesn't really understand--or never attempts to understand--what it is on a deeper level that makes the thing awesome to begin with.

Look at the Escape from Monkey Island. It was a parody of itself. They failed to go to the source of Monkey Island, to what inspired Monkey Island, they failed to bring in much in terms of freshness, and looked solely on the earlier games for inspiration. Likewise, I dread thinking that then new Bethsoft Fallout team failed to watch A Boy and His Dog and read the right dystopian books. Having played Godfather, I know that these people failed gloriously to capture the spirit of the movies. Yes, sure, the super-saturated dark colour is there, and so is the quaint music and the superficial grittiness of film, but what made the films cool is misunderstood. Scarface! What if he lived in the end?! is no less sacrilegious.

More and more, with every new property that is fucked up in the sequel, I think that to make a proper, quality postscript in someone else's universe, one needs to dissect and tear apart the original and recreate something completely new from the parts, paying homage to the most important theme, the spark of genius first, and superficial style elements second.

[Wrestlevania]

After a good two hours, a few apps of dubious legality and some down and dirty BIOS hacks it works! Hot shit!

- I found my SS2 disc!

- I'm suffering the same no-go as you, Kingz.

Was pretty sure you (or someone else) had linked to a couple guides for getting the game running earlier, but I can't find them now. Which guides did you use to get it running on your system?

[MrHoatzin]

http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=69958

That one. The things that actually helped me are the patch, cracking the disc protection, the archaic codec (someone linked to an installer on one of the later pages of the thread), the user.cfg hack, and turning off the hyperthreading.

[Wrestlevania]

Thanks Kingz, much obliged.

My laptop's 64-bit so, whilst I don't have hyperthreading to worry about, it's run older games at twice the speed you'd expect. I'm guessing this is because the game engine uses the processor tick rate to gauge "real time", so having double the tick means things run uber-fast.

It's actually ruined* my retro PC gaming in the majority so far.

* I'm especially gutted that I can no longer play Freedom Fighters as that was awesome. I did contact EA about this a couple of years back. They said that they had no plans to patch older games to be compatible with 64-bit processors. Which is understandable, but still sucks.

[brkl]

SWAT is awesome in LAN multiplayer, even with just two people, but preferably more. It's a bit fucked (why can't we have AI teammates?), but good good fun.