Post by Jägerbomber on Jun 21, 2016 4:13:56 GMT
Just finished my playthrough of the original System Shock... I'd like to play the 2nd one eventually as well, but I'm probably gonna take a break for a while as getting through this one kind of wipes you out.
Yes, Bioshock is a spiritual successor to System Shock, only the 2nd of which was made by Ken Levine and Irrational Games/Looking Glass (after Thief). Yet Warren Spector made the first one and I believe left before the 2nd one. But the similarities of System Shock (1 and... I would guess 2 as well) are huge.
Haha, maybe that's why the boss fights in SS1 and B1 are both so awkward and lackluster...
Like... There's a crazy amount of similarities... like Ken Levine's been making pretty much the same game all this time....
System Shock 1 is basically Bioshock in space, but with Doom graphics. Yes, that old. Down to the person/thing that talks directly to you, fully voiced recordings from the crew that you pick up, the gardens, stations that help you out (in this case, recharge), even down to the little puzzles you have to solve along way....
But oh baby these controls... (and mostly the HUD, since I used the Enhanced Edition which gives you direct mouse aiming/looking). This was 1994 - came out less than a year after Doom. I'm honestly curious how long this took to make and if they had played Doom by the time they were far into this. The controls of this game are... kind of designed like... with the aim of a rail shooter, yet of course you're walking around like a first person game. In the standard control method, you turn your camera by clicking the 4 edges of the screen.... Crazy (to think about now). The Enhanced Edition mostly fixes this by giving the aim directly to your mouse.
But the HUD.... is AMAZINGLY convoluted when you're first trying to figure it out. It's not really that bad, but you can see all the thought processes of how they were trying to figure out how to make it work, just about. Here's the most interesting, and kind of cool thing about it. This is a game of no UI menus. Even though there is a pause, there is no pause to look through your inventory, though it's not really a gameplay issue other than turning into a HUD clutter issue. Here's the cool concept: on both the bottom left half and bottom right half of the screen along the sides are 5 buttons (unlabeled if you turn the full HUD display off to see better, but mousing over can show a label). The kind of weird thing is... The 5 buttons on both sides are the same 5 buttons. You can choose 2 of the 5 to be either on your left or right. Kind of cool, yet causes issues sometimes as well.
Then on the bottom in the middle is finally your inventory, 4 (again) unlabeled buttons (until mouse over), which is very very simply - columns of words, though even so, not so easy to wrap your eyes on when first trying to figure out what the hell it's doing. A lot of configuration for your first go... But you can only have 1 of the inventory menus open at 1 time because of how much screen space is taken. Also, it took me like half the game or more before I figured out how to see a description of any of the things in my inventory... though the items that I was still curious about were either not actually very useful, or.... didn't have a description that told you what to do with it, even though it was important.... (lol oh and um.... there's also a specific decapitated head (yes) that you need for something.... And guess what.... I found that out after I had carried the head a ways and just dumped it in a spot because my inventory was full.
and I had to go searching for it... Luckily, I managed to leave it on the same level that you retrieve it on.... )
But seriously, the overall HUD, in fullscreen mode, is MASSIVE and takes like a third of your screen. And that's not including the additional large buttons it puts of along the sides of the upper half of your screen as you gain powers, though they still don't really get in the way.
Then there's the player stance display (which I'll get to in a sec) and the health and charge meters on the top, though they aren't that big. Here's the other really interesting primitive thing about this game, and being one of the first 1st person 3D games... This game (or the camera) acts like your body is an actual thing. Something you need to and can work with. Or I should say, more accurately, like you are a rubber poll. Guess what! This game has lean!! And crouching! AND prone!!! One other thing it's got too... 2 of its guns are gatling or machine guns... WITH FULL BODY RECOIL..... Not "push whole body backwards" kind of recoil, but (I guess oddly) plant your feet and lean back recoil.... though unrealistically far back (again, like a rubber poll). Luckily, your camera doesn't tilt back, but you still have to compensate for it moving downwards as you... I guess kind of drastically fall backwards with your feet glued to the floor. There's actually quite a few places where you have to duck into a low, usually hidden, doorway and sometimes even have to get down on your stomach and crawl. The leaning is actually the full motion. It can seem of slow, but it's based on how long your hold the lean button. Again, this is all in a Doom-like environment and graphics, though no you can't see your body, except in the top hud which showed your stance. (Oh, but you can see your guns... but they're so ridiculously small on the bottom of your screen, they're just silly... and generally not worth looking at and blocked by the hud anyways. Oh, you can find a lightsaber though... (but no force powers I don't think)).
What else... Each level has a hacking terminal for... the ship. I was surprised to see these because these take you back to completely wireframe rooms and tunnels that "you" are flying through. Unfortunately, this in a way makes them the worst part (or worst designed part) of the game because flying inside tunnels of wireframe rectangles can really get you spun around and crashing into a wall that you didn't know was a wall and not an opening.... There's a lot of strange things going on in there, yet the gameplay in there is different, yet largely simple. How how objects look is confusing. For one, for some reason the directional arrows (of which some locations they seemingly forgot to put some...) are fully 3D block arrows with full pyramid tops floating in space, other than an shape or design that's easier to read from different points. They aren't like even on a wall, and also I wish they had actually covered more of the walls in colors instead of making 95% of them blank/see-through. There's collectable spinning rectangles for your abilities. Some of them have a wireframe shape attached to them indicating that some other security somewhere is still holding it off from you (though I never really have pinpointed what these security points might be on the physical ship, though I'm sure I've unlocked some at times... maybe). Then there's these other shapes that... have various names if you click towards them, though I still can't explain what all of them are or do. But the ones that are shaped... I guess kind of like an H or something are security mines. Yet they don't explode, but continuously damage you if you come too close, and can't be destroyed, which is annoying. There's some other shapes as well, yet seem to do nothing? Some other ones sometimes are locks to a door on the ship. Then there's the enemies. Most of them are 3D medieval jester clown heads that shoot at you. The cool thing is that you can actually deflect their bullets with your own bullets, but you're pretty rabidly charging directly at them while doing so. Yet just about every enemy in the hacking sections dies pretty quickly. Though there are sometimes faces that look like Andross' polygon face in the original Star Fox released the year earlier, that have a little more health. Getting killed or damaged in the hacking terminals hurts yourself in the "real world," (though not 1:1) but never takes away your last bit of health... except for ending the game by dying to the endgame boss.
Anyways, I don't think there's all that much for that needs to be said story-wise (game-wise there might be stuff I'm not recalling at the moment). If you've played Bioshock 1, except for the story theme being different, the game itself goes pretty much identically... but again, with Doom graphics. In certain ways, it definitely was a game history shock (ha!) and kind of a cool thing to go through. Even just wrapping my head around the old controls and HUD. (Though I wouldn't have been able to handle not having direct mouse control...)
Oh yeah, I remember one thing that cracked me up... In the gardens, behind a bush (rotating 2D ones which you have to wrap your camera around to look behind), there's loot to be found and... a stereo playing the nature sound effects. Sadly, it didn't seem that I could destroy it though... 
One thing I am recalling that made me sad was, maybe I just sucked and didn't really figure them out, but none of grenades I used had a delay and like all detonated on impact, so they always ended up being more deadly than useful for me, so I ended up mostly not using them... even though it gives you tons.
My few subs are probably gonna hate me for it, but I just dumped my playlist of my playthrough unedited on Youtube. But stupidly again, I didn't record the first day I played, which I got quite a lot done.
Oh my goodness I didn't even notice that the guys who released the Enhanced Edition are remaking it. It looks like the combat needs working on (and speeding up), but looks like they've really got the environments down. And I do know that Warren is trying to make System Shock 3 published by these guys.
Yes, Bioshock is a spiritual successor to System Shock, only the 2nd of which was made by Ken Levine and Irrational Games/Looking Glass (after Thief). Yet Warren Spector made the first one and I believe left before the 2nd one. But the similarities of System Shock (1 and... I would guess 2 as well) are huge.
Haha, maybe that's why the boss fights in SS1 and B1 are both so awkward and lackluster...
Like... There's a crazy amount of similarities... like Ken Levine's been making pretty much the same game all this time....
System Shock 1 is basically Bioshock in space, but with Doom graphics. Yes, that old. Down to the person/thing that talks directly to you, fully voiced recordings from the crew that you pick up, the gardens, stations that help you out (in this case, recharge), even down to the little puzzles you have to solve along way....But oh baby these controls... (and mostly the HUD, since I used the Enhanced Edition which gives you direct mouse aiming/looking). This was 1994 - came out less than a year after Doom. I'm honestly curious how long this took to make and if they had played Doom by the time they were far into this. The controls of this game are... kind of designed like... with the aim of a rail shooter, yet of course you're walking around like a first person game. In the standard control method, you turn your camera by clicking the 4 edges of the screen.... Crazy (to think about now). The Enhanced Edition mostly fixes this by giving the aim directly to your mouse.
But the HUD.... is AMAZINGLY convoluted when you're first trying to figure it out.
It's not really that bad, but you can see all the thought processes of how they were trying to figure out how to make it work, just about. Here's the most interesting, and kind of cool thing about it. This is a game of no UI menus. Even though there is a pause, there is no pause to look through your inventory, though it's not really a gameplay issue other than turning into a HUD clutter issue. Here's the cool concept: on both the bottom left half and bottom right half of the screen along the sides are 5 buttons (unlabeled if you turn the full HUD display off to see better, but mousing over can show a label). The kind of weird thing is... The 5 buttons on both sides are the same 5 buttons. You can choose 2 of the 5 to be either on your left or right. Kind of cool, yet causes issues sometimes as well.Then on the bottom in the middle is finally your inventory, 4 (again) unlabeled buttons (until mouse over), which is very very simply - columns of words, though even so, not so easy to wrap your eyes on when first trying to figure out what the hell it's doing. A lot of configuration for your first go... But you can only have 1 of the inventory menus open at 1 time because of how much screen space is taken. Also, it took me like half the game or more before I figured out how to see a description of any of the things in my inventory... though the items that I was still curious about were either not actually very useful, or.... didn't have a description that told you what to do with it, even though it was important.... (lol oh and um.... there's also a specific decapitated head (yes) that you need for something.... And guess what.... I found that out after I had carried the head a ways and just dumped it in a spot because my inventory was full.
and I had to go searching for it... Luckily, I managed to leave it on the same level that you retrieve it on.... )But seriously, the overall HUD, in fullscreen mode, is MASSIVE and takes like a third of your screen. And that's not including the additional large buttons it puts of along the sides of the upper half of your screen as you gain powers, though they still don't really get in the way.
Then there's the player stance display (which I'll get to in a sec) and the health and charge meters on the top, though they aren't that big. Here's the other really interesting primitive thing about this game, and being one of the first 1st person 3D games... This game (or the camera) acts like your body is an actual thing. Something you need to and can work with. Or I should say, more accurately, like you are a rubber poll. Guess what! This game has lean!! And crouching! AND prone!!! One other thing it's got too... 2 of its guns are gatling or machine guns... WITH FULL BODY RECOIL..... Not "push whole body backwards" kind of recoil, but (I guess oddly) plant your feet and lean back recoil.... though unrealistically far back (again, like a rubber poll). Luckily, your camera doesn't tilt back, but you still have to compensate for it moving downwards as you... I guess kind of drastically fall backwards with your feet glued to the floor. There's actually quite a few places where you have to duck into a low, usually hidden, doorway and sometimes even have to get down on your stomach and crawl. The leaning is actually the full motion. It can seem of slow, but it's based on how long your hold the lean button. Again, this is all in a Doom-like environment and graphics, though no you can't see your body, except in the top hud which showed your stance. (Oh, but you can see your guns... but they're so ridiculously small on the bottom of your screen, they're just silly...
and generally not worth looking at and blocked by the hud anyways. Oh, you can find a lightsaber though... (but no force powers I don't think)).What else... Each level has a hacking terminal for... the ship. I was surprised to see these because these take you back to completely wireframe rooms and tunnels that "you" are flying through. Unfortunately, this in a way makes them the worst part (or worst designed part) of the game because flying inside tunnels of wireframe rectangles can really get you spun around and crashing into a wall that you didn't know was a wall and not an opening.... There's a lot of strange things going on in there, yet the gameplay in there is different, yet largely simple. How how objects look is confusing. For one, for some reason the directional arrows (of which some locations they seemingly forgot to put some...) are fully 3D block arrows with full pyramid tops floating in space, other than an shape or design that's easier to read from different points. They aren't like even on a wall, and also I wish they had actually covered more of the walls in colors instead of making 95% of them blank/see-through. There's collectable spinning rectangles for your abilities. Some of them have a wireframe shape attached to them indicating that some other security somewhere is still holding it off from you (though I never really have pinpointed what these security points might be on the physical ship, though I'm sure I've unlocked some at times... maybe). Then there's these other shapes that... have various names if you click towards them, though I still can't explain what all of them are or do. But the ones that are shaped... I guess kind of like an H or something are security mines. Yet they don't explode, but continuously damage you if you come too close, and can't be destroyed, which is annoying. There's some other shapes as well, yet seem to do nothing? Some other ones sometimes are locks to a door on the ship. Then there's the enemies. Most of them are 3D medieval jester clown heads that shoot at you. The cool thing is that you can actually deflect their bullets with your own bullets, but you're pretty rabidly charging directly at them while doing so. Yet just about every enemy in the hacking sections dies pretty quickly. Though there are sometimes faces that look like Andross' polygon face in the original Star Fox released the year earlier, that have a little more health. Getting killed or damaged in the hacking terminals hurts yourself in the "real world," (though not 1:1) but never takes away your last bit of health... except for ending the game by dying to the endgame boss.
Anyways, I don't think there's all that much for that needs to be said story-wise (game-wise there might be stuff I'm not recalling at the moment). If you've played Bioshock 1, except for the story theme being different, the game itself goes pretty much identically... but again, with Doom graphics. In certain ways, it definitely was a game history shock (ha!) and kind of a cool thing to go through. Even just wrapping my head around the old controls and HUD. (Though I wouldn't have been able to handle not having direct mouse control...)
Oh yeah, I remember one thing that cracked me up... In the gardens, behind a bush (rotating 2D ones which you have to wrap your camera around to look behind), there's loot to be found and... a stereo playing the nature sound effects.
Sadly, it didn't seem that I could destroy it though... 
One thing I am recalling that made me sad was, maybe I just sucked and didn't really figure them out, but none of grenades I used had a delay and like all detonated on impact, so they always ended up being more deadly than useful for me, so I ended up mostly not using them... even though it gives you tons.
My few subs are probably gonna hate me for it, but I just dumped my playlist of my playthrough unedited on Youtube. But stupidly again, I didn't record the first day I played, which I got quite a lot done.
Oh my goodness I didn't even notice that the guys who released the Enhanced Edition are remaking it. It looks like the combat needs working on (and speeding up), but looks like they've really got the environments down.
And I do know that Warren is trying to make System Shock 3 published by these guys.
