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I confess I often have my problems with games that are considered absolute classics: Betrayal at Krondor, Myst (well, I'm not alone here), Doom, Ultima Underworld. System Shock is no exception.
It was released in 1994, when 3D games were still fairly new and synonymous with first person shooters. System Shock was one of the first, maybe the first game that transcended this genre. It added a real story, RPG elements, detailed difficulty levels: you can choose to play the game with easy puzzles and tough enemies, for example, or the other way round. And it was one of the first 3D games that rendered (in the CD version) at a higher resolution than VGA.
Great! you will say. So what are your problems with this game? Very simple: it's far too complicated for my taste, and the controls less than intuitive. Of course, as usual, the first level is kind of a tutorial level, but I couldn't even figure out how to pick up things and manage my inventory. I found I could play most games without studying the manual beforehand; if I couldn't, I usually didn't play them.
System Shock falls into the latter category.
Links
- The System Shock 1 Fansite Hub is really the only System Shock site you need. I doubt you will find any info its numerous subsites contain anywhere else.
- TSSHP (The System Shock Hack Project) is a project to reverse-engineer and recode (from scratch, but using the original datafiles) the 3D role-playing / shooter games from Looking Glass (System Shock and the Ultima Underworlds)
- The Hacker's Guide to Sin,
a complete mental breakdown of System Shock. "This page contains dark humour.
You have been warned."
if you think you have done everything there is to do in the game, the excellent hacker's guide to sin will change your mind ;)—Home of the Underdogs
- Reviewed by Doug Bauer
- Review by Martin Dietz
