![]() ![]() With a combination of first-person shooter and role-playing elements, players decide how to tackle the game’s obstacles by choosing which weapons to use and skills to upgrade. System Shock 2 places players in the role of a lone soldier that is tasked with investigating and battling the source of an alien infection that has turned the crew of the Von Braun spacecraft into killer psychopaths. As I discovered soon into my first playthrough of the game, modern games have truly spoiled both my expectations regarding the amount of provided in-game assistance as well as the complexity involved with solving puzzles. With the gracious help of GOG.com, I was finally able to secure a copy that could run on my modern PC and operating system and, for the first time, experience the beloved classic. In System Shock 2, SHODAN pulls back the curtain in the middle of the game to show the player both that they haven’t been working for the person they thought they were helping, and that they’re going to have to keep following an evil computer’s orders if they want to make it out of the Von Braun alive and in one piece.It’s been 14 years since System Shock 2 redefined a genre on PC and caused terror in the minds of gamers. This leaves the player with little to do other than work their way towards to final boss who just revealed his true nefarious intentions to you. In BioShock, the story takes a big twist close to the end of the game. I’ve always preferred the way that Levine applied the twist in his earlier work, however. ![]() “Would You Kindly” is now such an iconic turn of phrase in gaming that it’s become a meme in its own right. He applied a similar twist to the end of BioShock’s story eight years later when the game revealed to its players that the phrase “Would You Kindly” was actually being used to control the mind of that game’s player character. You can see how this scene had a big impact on the career of Ken Levine, who wrote System Shock 2. But doing so involved winding my way through several areas of the ship crawling with zombified versions of my former fellow passengers. I was supposed to rendezvous with this woman, Dr. Apparently all hell had broken loose on the spaceship, and we were two of the only people left alive. Shortly after starting the game up and walking through the preliminary character-building section, I was dropped into the Von Braun and told by a disembodied voice coming from an intercom about what had just gone wrong. Little did I know what was in store for me. This is just a cheap rip-off of Event Horizon, comparing it to a campy cyberpunk movie about people dying in a remote spaceship. Its monsters were chunkily polygonal, and they moved around the game’s gloomy spaceship setting in a slow, plodding way. ![]() Even by the standards of late-nineties PC games, System Shock 2 didn’t look great. Both of these now-legendary games were heavily inspired by the original System Shock, which came out for the PC in 1994. I first picked up System Shock 2 up after I heard about the lineage it shared with the original Deus Ex, another stellar first-person RPG. Let’s all remember in turn just how scared we were when we first stepped into the Von Braun spaceship. ![]() The first full title produced by Irrational Games when it was still a tiny spin-off from Looking Glass Studios, this terrifying hybrid of a first person shooter and RPG first came out 15 years ago today. Before there was BioShock, there was System Shock 2. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |