Digital Release of System Shock 2?

Maybe.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/02/11/system-shock-2-might-be-getting-a-re-release-on-gog-and-steam/

Sweet. Someday I may actually beat this game. It usually makes me feel so horribly uncomfortable that I usually end up stopping. One game to NOT play in the dark that is for sure.

I'll play it if it comes with native mouselook support.

Isn't this game better suited to a controller anyway?

Odd that the contract developer would be first to announce something like this instead of the actual publisher/rights holder.

Which is to say, EA and some insurance company, or at least that was the case back in 2011.

It's a shame you haven't. I thought the end was pretty great, definitely one-of-a-kind when it was released, even though the Shodown wasn't interesting gameplay-wise, it was still pretty epic considering how much of her voice you had to deal with during the game.

System Shock 1 is better.

Sort of, though I think I'd prefer keyboard + mouse.

What Kerzain is getting at is the original control scheme is archaic and painful, in the sort of manner that's usually reserved for old fashioned GUIs.

Am I not understanding what mouselook means or hasn't SS2 always had mouselook?

It has. SS1 is that one that had a brutally painful UI.

SS2 was the one where you could gimp yourself by choosing the wrong upgrade paths.

Did they ever fix the bug where at the final boss there were three starry, cube things circling it, except if you saved too many times, one of the cube things was invisible. The boss (some kind of stationary tree/tentacle thingy) was invulnerable until you blew up the starry cube things, but since one of them was invisible good luck.

Oh and monsters were constantly respawning down on the floor where you were. Great times if you were an expert hacker with only rudimentary gun skills.

The second time I played it, I was a wizard and it was much better.

I wonder what price point they'll decide on, and whether or not they'll do the original as well. I really hope so because they're both amazing games.

There was a high-def fan patch of some sort I never got to try out. I wonder if anything came of that.

That sounds like the room where I got stuck and had to stop. I just did not have enough ammunition to keep killing the endlessly spawning pink monsters.

Was still one of the greatest games I ever played.

I thought you could turn off the spawning robots if you were a hacker?

Also... wasn't EVERYONE a hacker? Who the fuck played this game without the basic hacking skills?!

I dearly love both games, but I love SS1 a bit more.

It appears that SS2 is going to be released first. It needs a lot of love to run on modern OS'es. I speak from experience here. Hopefully it will get that love, and the egregious Rebirth mod will not included (but the excellent SHTUP mod will be included). I think it also helps that the Dark Engine source code got out in the wild some years back, and I imagine this will be exploited by this mystery team to get the game whipped into better shape. SS2 is so, so good... but the engine was so, so fragile, even at release.

The Scharmers-Approved method of playing SS1 is to go this route: http://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=211.0.

What's wrong with Rebirth? Model updates seem pretty necessary if you're going to use higher resolution textures.

What makes you say that? I can't imagine why. It's got first person shooting and a tetris inventory system.


I love SS2 which I played first, but SS1 is better...if that can be imagined. I played it back in 2006. Here's an old thread about my experiences with it: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=24579&highlight=roguefrog

For what it's worth, System Shock 2 always ran like a dream on any computer I had as long as I turned off affinity for all but one core.

Wewt! I shall purchase it for the 4th time! :D

Heh, I remember trying repeatedly to get multiplayer to work, and constantly having it crash on us. Also, it was a major shock to see how ugly the player models looked and animated.

There's a lot of artistic license taken with the original designs. Or at least the Midwife.

The original designs have 10 polygons and no longer represent anything identifiable. Who cares.

If the mod is incomplete or crashes the game, then I care.

wow, google image search for system shock 2 midwives somehow yielded this amongst the images:

Angie's the midwife to a cardboard cutout of Derek Smart?

I didn't know he invented duckface.

It's arguably the most important thing he's ever created.

He'll be along shortly to tell you the entire story and the conspiracy behind why it's no longer called Derekface.

I don't think I've ever seen a picture of Derek *not* doing a duckface.

I thought I was terrible at the game because I couldn't beat that damned fight. Then I read about the star bug on Usenet, patched the game, and beat it pretty handily (because I'd had like 50 practice runs). They'd patched it pretty quickly, it was just harder to get patch news back then unless you dug for it.

I dimly recall I wasn't too fond of the SS2 UI either, that while it had mouselook you were constantly switching to a mouse cursor? It's been quite some time though!

SS1 had a shitty ui but it was pretty advanced letting you pick up anything (no matter how useless) and lean around corners.

God, yes. Tycho of Penny Arcade and I tried over and over and over again to get the multiplayer to work, and managed to make it all the way to the radiation flooded engine core, but the endless crashing and lockups just got to be too much, and we finally gave up. I would love to actually be able to play this in multi and have it work, start to finish.

Yes, that's Matt and Angie with a real live Derek Smart, from the QT3 party they DIDN'T TELL ME ABOUT the year we were all sharing a hotel room at E3, along with Jibble, I believe. Matt was there for an actual respectable site, Angie, Jibble and I were there for Gameshark, and it was, in general, a pretty awesome time.

I'm not sure I ever finished the first one and honestly barely remember a thing about it. I'll probably have to remedy that when I build my DOS rig.

SS2, however, is one of the very few games that ever truly unsettled me.

is a gaming moment that will always stick with me. And somehow Irrational hitting me with a quite similar trope in BioShock didn't have any less of an impact.

If you've never played (or completed) SS2, you owe it to yourself. I'm sure it's aged well in spite of the low-poly models.

It's official like, with a counter and everything.

http://www.gog.com/

There's also an RPS interview with the guy who got the rights and someone from GOG:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/13/many-questions-system-shock-2-comes-to-gog/

L-L-L-Look at you, hacker...

Ditto. I literally thought she had taken over my computer at that moment and had to look around me (in actuality) to doublecheck I was still in the same place. Most memorable gaming moment ever. Even

rates second, and I may have replayed that game even more times than SS2.