System Shock We've come along way since Looking Glass Technologies released System Shock in 1994, which earned it the distinction of being first first-person game with an engine able to render sloping walls. Before then, gaming environments were limited to verticals and horizontals. System Shock by Looking Glass Technologies Making …
But Ultima Underworld II was my life :)
Before the internet made everything too easy I had found secrets and powerful items throughout the game such as this beast: http://codex.ultimaaiera.com/wiki/Axe_of_Firedoom
(can't check the link at work, hopefully it's ok)
On my second playthrough I made myself complete it without ever sleeping (in-game) and I think I only used 14 hours, game-world time to do it.
Hurrah for old games :)
SS1 was good, if a bit complex to play, but SS2 was simply awesome! It had real atmosphere matched by few other games. Weapons that degraded and had to be fixed, with limited supplies of ammo, were so different to the usual endless machinegun strafing in other games. I too have waited far too long for SS3, with much more anticipation even than any Duke Nukem news.
as far as I am concerned - excellent game which also had areas of different gravity and the engine did appear to be in fact full 3D, not just sloping walls! The Sprite enemies let it down, but still awesome.
Great game, now that is one I'd like them to remake with new graphics.
Agree. It's okay going back to abstract or cartoony graphics - no problem with Defender or Sonic the Hedgehog - but when it's supposed to be an immersive world it's difficult to revert from the quality of the most recent game you've played.
Something like this remade with a new engine would be of more interest to me than just another FPS or Fallout DLC.
Classic films get remade, albeit often with somewhat patchy results, maybe we're at the point where games could be done the same way. System Shock, Baldur's Gate - things with good writing.
Or is this being done already (officially or unofficially)?
of system shock.... the first game I bought after buying a PC and a copy of doom.
The best part was after inputting the fiendish to find code to the self destruct.
Just make my way back upto the shuttle bay and its game over.... oh fek... a big boss baddie... ... <gunfire> right in the shuttle and hit the launch........ oh double fek.... she's borked the shuttle.... what do I now? with the self destruct countdown ringing in your ears....
Giddy with joy as I enetered the shuttle thinking I had finally defeated SHODAN and escaped i was not emotionally or mentally prepared for this turn of events my response at the time was to pull the plug on the PC and declare:
"I still beat you SHODAN!"
Truely one of the greatest games I have ever played in so many ways.
System Shock / SS2 were masterpieces, a leap up from the environment that Doom et al offered in geometry (is that really a translucent bridge!) and in the flexibility your character had to lean round corners, peak over edges etc.
Sneaking around in the dark and jumping out of your skin with headphones was a rewarding and genuinely memorable experience, and the soundtrack and in-game sound effects were perfectly matched, whether creaking self-destructing service robots or psychotic vending machines.
I can still feel a sense of amazement at finding a hoverboard late in the game and seeing it transform the gameplay and present the environment in a new unexpectedly fluid way.
Still got the PC version sitting on my shelf.
I love this game, it was way ahead of its time, but the UI is pretty awful as it was designed before Quake and Duke 3D made mouselook the standard FPS interface.
Luckily there's a mouselook mod which makes it much more playable for modern gamers, and the mod also lets you re-define the keys too.
System Shock was groundbreaking but man, I loved System Shock 2 like no other game. Only the original Deus Ex comes close, and it misses the "creep out" factor of having one of those Cyborg Midwives sneak up behind you out of the darkness. And Shodan's "reveal" in System Shock 2 still gives me chills. They really don't make games like this anymore, and if Bioshock is any indication, I hope System Shock doesn't get a modern "re-making" for the console world. "Glory to the Many!"
...there was System Shock and then there was the CDROM edition of System Shock that had the voice work of Terri Brosius as SHODAN. That makes all the difference...if you're playing without her voice, you're missing a whole lot.
System Shock 2 with full surround sound (the Dark Engine kicked serious butt when it came to audio) is something to experience.
I was fighting for my life against crazed, murderous re-purposed humans when I managed to finally find the elevator. The door closes on a rabid monstrosity who until that moment seemed sure to beat me to a lifeless pulp. Then the monster is gone, techno music stops, and Girl From Ipanema starts playing. Best song in the whole story.
Pedantic, but it's a simple pipe. It looks like a pipe, and in three of the screenshots it even says WEAPONS: PIPE.
STOP CALLING IT A BLOODY CROWBAR!!1
This isn't Gordon Freeman.
I'm glad I wasn't the only person who found the controls difficult. I missed the game when it first came out but bought it a few years later as a budget re-release. It was fun, but the patting your head while rubbing your tummy control style spoiled a lot of the enjoyment for me.
Beta Grove put the shitters up me, and Edward Diego's reappearance at the end was magnificent. I suggested calling my son Edward Diego, but was overruled (probably just as well).
They offered me a job at Trioptimum. It never occurred to me to accept. Old habits die hard.
Keep the fries salted!
I'm fairly certain Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, which used a precursor version of this engine, also had sloping walls and floors. It was certainly fully 3D and allowed for non-rectilinear walls.
This game was the bee's knees back in the day. For some reason I remember some of the robots towards the end indicating their presence by uttering robotic garbage that sounded like "the world is a big headband" to me.
A remake would require not sticking to the email repository and allowing more interaction with survivors. I recall only one or two extremely short cut-scenes in the original of living fellow survivors, and one single-track email conversation with another survivor who is dead when you reach her, but the technology is certainly out there now to allow them to join up with the player.
Interactions with well-scripted, (simulated) living people were perhaps the only thing this game lacked, as you spent almost all of it rummaging around through dead people's email files.
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