Snooglebum

Why can't I enjoy System Shock 2?

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I bought it with the GOG sale, had never played it before.

 

It's nerve racking / intense too have to play it how I used to have to play every FPS quick saving after every encounter.  It's amazing just how easy and streamlined games have become.

 

I'm in medical area right now.  The first hybrid with a ranged weapon just walked into a tiny room I was looting.  I literally yelled "OH SHIT' when he stormed through the door.  Too intense!

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The most bizarre part of playing this for the first time is that I have to keep remembering myself that this Bioshock is the spiritual sequel, I say to myself "Oh look, that must be the Big Daddy of the the game!" and when

Shodan made her appearance and told me it was her guiding me all along I thought this is just like the big reveal in Bioshock! Only Shodan is... unsettling? Is she just God like or can she just mess with me because I have cyber implants? 

 

And yes, I'm using spoilers for an old game... I am aware I'm not the only one playing it for the first time.

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I played this when I was a kid, but either only the demo or I was just too terrified to continue at some point. In any case I picked it up today on gog and am further in than I've been. Man it is so good. Using SHTUP and nothin' else.

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I feel stupid for not knowing this by now, but do psi-powers work on anything mechanical? I can't use them to blow up cameras at least. I keep thinking like Bioshock and thinking I can hack them, instead of hacking the camera central which is what you have to do. 

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I love the turn this thread has taken, given its title :)

 

e: most psi powers that don't work on robots are marked as such in the description if memory serves. I think pyro doesn't work on robots, and cryo does but it's probably best to quicksave and test for yourself.

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I had this wonderful moment when I was going up a lift and a "Big Daddy Bot" greeted me with the love of hot lasers. I knew it wouldn't help, but I hit the lean left button and... I dodged the laser shot? And since I had the special ammo that does more damage to bots, he went down pretty quick... it hilarious, at least to me.

 

I had a scary moment when I saw a

giant evil thing made of teeth, flesh and doom

. I don't know why but this game seem scarier because when ever I see a corpse or message it seems to add to the atmosphere of the horror of what happened here, you don't see people gore for the sake of gore, you see them and I can imagine their fate in a more effective way than most modern games. 

 

I think it does better even than BioShock, I know the Adam turned them into monsters, but here you see people who resisted or people who... gave up and committed suicide. I don't remember that happening in BioShock.

 

I also like that you only find out about the origin of Midwife bots through a audiolog, the game doesn't spoon feed you the story and doesn't treat you like an idiot, when you enter a room and see a corpse, you can figure out the morbid details yourself. I'm pretty sure a modern game would have to mention that the character was killed in it's sleep, committed suicide or what ever happened to them.

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I love the turn this thread has taken, given its title :)

I'm pretty happy to see so many people all over the net having a great time with the game, I feel like the things I've been saying about the game all along have been validated a bit. I always felt like a bit of an apologist, because whenever somebody dug up a copy to check the game out, they almost invariably ended up being disappointed with it.

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Every time I've tried to before I've come away disappointed with myself. You really have to put some effort into not being some kind of a Modern Video Game Asshole about it when things are super complicated and difficult (and ugly). Also terrifying.

 

 

edit: just stumbled upon the "videogame" -> "video game" word filter. clever girl

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I'm pretty happy to see so many people all over the net having a great time with the game, I feel like the things I've been saying about the game all along have been validated a bit. I always felt like a bit of an apologist, because whenever somebody dug up a copy to check the game out, they almost invariably ended up being disappointed with it.

 

I came across a post just like that on the Irrational forums... Can't believe they people are let down by this game, but I think expectations may be too high for some.

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Every time I've tried to before I've come away disappointed with myself. You really have to put some effort into not being some kind of a Modern Video Game Asshole about it when things are super complicated and difficult (and ugly). Also terrifying.

 

Indeed. It took me several years of owning the original (yes, I own the original CDs!) before I finally forced myself to get through the game. It was just SO intense, SO freaky (especially when those goddamn spiders appeared), that turning off spawning was the only way I could enjoy the story and atmosphere without needing to change my underwear every two minutes.

 

The great thing is that the game doesn't seem to "cheat" to get its scares. It's not just about wandering into a pitch dark room and something suddenly going "boo!". Or about bad guys that can move 50 times faster than you. The situation feels real, and the scary moments feel completely earned.

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Yeah, one of the scariest parts for me so far (and I'm not far in, really) was I went back to the first deck where I'd seen and largely ignored one of those big yellow bots earlier (it had been disabled), and it wasn't there anymore, because for whatever reason it had woken up and started walking around. I only had a wrench and a shitty pistol so it turned into probably the closest thing to being Ripley in the original Alien I've experienced in a vidjagame. Probably this game is going to have more than one situation I could apply that to. 

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I came across a post just like that on the Irrational forums... Can't believe they people are let down by this game, but I think expectations may be too high for some.

BioShock kind of ruins the game for a lot of people, they go seeking it out expecting much more of a shooter when it is absolutely an RPG first and foremost. It's the difference the first Mass Effect and its sequels, or Deus Ex and its sequels. An RPG that looks like a shooter versus an RPG that actually feels like one. SS2 is a first-person RPG from before designers all decided that the dice rolls need to go and that the systems need to be simplified.

There's basically none of that instant gratification from more modern games, it's not immediately fun and accessible, everything is confusing and you're weak as hell. I mean, SS2 is still new enough to have lengthy and elaborate tutorials, but if you're not paying attention to that shit and willing to read between the lines, when the game actually starts, you're pretty well boned. It really just lets loose in full earnestness, there's no attempt to make sure you understand one mechanic before introducing another, it's just suddenly all there at once and it's all important. SS2 can at first be a really off-putting experience for a lot of people, i believe.

There's also the matter of BioShock having repurposed much of SS2's plot. Going back to it from BioShock makes what were once truly surprising twists seem visible a mile away.

Yeah, and then just the high expectations, it's one of the biggest cult favorites in the history of PC gaming, to which you can add the mystique of it being a game that had become difficult to obtain. So yeah, it had incredibly high expectations built up around it.

The great thing is that the game doesn't seem to "cheat" to get its scares. It's not just about wandering into a pitch dark room and something suddenly going "boo!". Or about bad guys that can move 50 times faster than you. The situation feels real, and the scary moments feel completely earned.

I've said this multiple times about the game, it's one of the only horror games i've ever played that successfully builds its horror through tension instead of surprise. Not even the games it's directly influenced do that.

Man, and the sound design in that game. For how goofy and primitive the enemies appear, the things they say are frequently creepy as hell. I mean, and i love the cyberpunk vibe the dnb soundtrack gives off, but the ambient music is even more notable, it's just so god damn unsettling. SS2 remains to me as one of the very, very best examples of sound design in a horror game.

Yeah, one of the scariest parts for me so far (and I'm not far in, really) was I went back to the first deck where I'd seen and largely ignored one of those big yellow bots earlier (it had been disabled), and it wasn't there anymore, because for whatever reason it had woken up and started walking around.

If you didn't realize, the reason the robot starts roaming around is because you released it. You opened the door to that cargo hold via one of the objectives you were hunting down.

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The real scariest moment of System Shock 2 is when I got a message from Shodan tweeting at me... I know it's probably someone hired by GOG or something like that... but I chill ran down my spine.

 

This is probably the only game to scare me, many games make feel "uncomfortable" or tense, but this one? Shodan bloody scares me...

 

What really saddens me is that I doubt there would be a SS3, modern games treat us like idiot and can't be subtle... SS3 would be like Dead Space and vomit gore at our face instead of making us see the slow process of what happened.

 

Oh, and Shodan would swear like a "Mofo"... :oldman:

 

I really have to say how impressed I am by this game, I usually don't enjoy games from this era that aren't adventure games, but this is the one PC game from the 90's you should play.

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Yeah, SHODAN is the kind of video game villain that few developers have the vision (or budget) to write these days, with not only a fully-realized agenda but a fully-realized personality separate from it. A villain that utterly despises the protagonist but is willing to use him for her own ends is always more fun to interact with than the supremely abstract "final boss" of most games. I mean, everyone remembers this SHODAN quote, because it is embodies the subjective feeling of playing System Shock 2 perfectly:

 

L-l-l-l-l-look at you, hacker-r. A pa-pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone. (Panting and) panting and sweating as you r-run through my corridors. (How how) how can you challenge a perfect, immortal machiiiiine?

 

The closest conterpart I can think of, which combines narrative role and performance so well, is Jon Irenicus from Baldur's Gate II, but he doesn't have the same menace that SHODAN has, which often prompted me to get up and turn on some lights during my playthrough

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All this chat makes me want to see a Black Mesa style remake.

I pretty often get some kind of an itch to try to remake an old game on a modern engine, which I instantly have to reign in with "yeah dude you'd need a team and probably money to pay them with and you're way better off making something of your own anyway". But someone should totally do it.

 

Lazyweb.

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Frankly, it looks good enough with the mods I used, but what engine would they use? The Bioschock one isn't for public use, right?

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Yeah, SHODAN is the kind of video game villain that few developers have the vision (or budget) to write these days, with not only a fully-realized agenda but a fully-realized personality separate from it. A villain that utterly despises the protagonist but is willing to use him for her own ends is always more fun to interact with than the supremely abstract "final boss" of most games. I mean, everyone remembers this SHODAN quote, because it is embodies the subjective feeling of playing System Shock 2 perfectly:

The amusing part is that the quote wasn't even in System Shock 2. It was in System Shock 1.

 

 

(The better game)

 

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So now we have to campaign for the first game all over again? XP

 

But, come to think of it, why did they just get SS2 on GOG and not SS1? Does someone else have the rights for the first one?

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You can get the first one for free if you Google "System Shock Portable". I think the rights are so confusing that nobody knows who owns it anymore. That's my guess anyway.

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It's kind of amazing discovering that this game is really difficult and inaccessible for people. I remember buying it when it came out, and it didn't feel like that at all, it just felt like an amazing video game. But now that I've revisited it I can see where people are coming from, and I'm having a lot more trouble with it than when I originally played it.

I do like the game more than Bioshock. Bioshock is much more impressive as an aesthetic, but I loved the character classes in System Shock 2 and how that would impact how you experienced the environment. Bioshock rolled it all into one so you were simultaneously a fighter, engineer, and psionic badass. That was a fine design choice, but I loved how in System Shock 2 you had these three discrete choices without being totally shoeboxed into playing a particular kind of way. I can't think of too many other games where that initial character choice would impact how you experienced and played the rest of the game, and that's something that I think a lot of RPGs and strategy games should look at more closely.

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System Shock 2 doesn't even have any hard delineations between its classes, you still have access to everything no matter what your starting point is. What it really comes down to that they give you a giant sandbox to build your character inside of, there are so many choices to make, but there's a very tight economy of resources to invest into that progression. Even though there isn't a rigid class system, you end up having to build a fairly rigid class to be effective. Not a lot of games achieve that kind of character building, it's very interesting. The restrictions feel meaningful because they're self-imposed to an end, rather than borne out of a rigid and arbitrary class system.

I think it also makes the game endlessly replayable, with how much depth there is to explore in its systems.

I'm really curious to see what the "1999 mode" of BioShock Infinite will exactly be, or if it'll even be in the game after how many times that thing seems to have shifted course.

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