![]() ![]() System Shock 2 has an absolute plethora of stats to keep track of, so this initial phase can be quite important. From there, you’re given options as to where you want to spend your ‘years’ of training, which essentially involves walking through different doors and accepting various boosts to your stats. Naturally, being the pro gamer that I am, I decided that the tutorial could go fuck itself, and just ran down the OSA corridor. When you start playing System Shock 2, you can choose to either go through the tutorial or skip it and go straight for the career choices. It is going to be difficult to keep it spoiler-free from this point forward, so consider yourself warned that I may spoil elements of this fourteen year-old title. With that stray thought of achieving greatness as some sort of Psionic God wormed its way into my frontal lobe, this diary was born – because if I can guarantee anything, this will generate plenty of comedy at my expense. Say what you want about the Marines and the Navy, but this was where the real challenge lay. OSA was the third option when selecting a career, focusing your training in the field of Psionics, and it was – for all intents and purposes – a rock hard son of a bitch. This particular brand of evil had sent three innocent letters dancing into my mind: ‘O.S.A’ You know the ones I’m talking about: the sort that whisper dark thoughts and trick you into horrid life choices, like purchasing a BMW or deciding it’s socially acceptable to talk in the cinema. It’s the same story, but your skills and abilities change dramatically, forcing a different style of play. I initially thought that, with a large amount of gaming experience and an increased skillset, I could probably tackle the game on hard (impossible can fuck off) and give the Navy or Marine paths a bash again. ![]() This is a tough title, regardless of career path and difficulty setting, and despite playing it on the standard setting on both occasions, I died countless times and generally got my face smashed in by various forms of opposition. Over the last fifteen years I’d played through, doing both the Marine and then the Navy experience paths, and just – and I really mean only just – surviving through to the end. But what would I do? For the uninformed, System Shock 2 allows you to tailor your experience to a degree which was years ahead of its time, and certainly not something first-person shooters had ever done, until that point. With the re-release of System Shock 2, I dusted off my still-boxed copy and reinstalled it, updating the graphics as I went, ready to give it another playthrough. The thirteen year old me probably had no idea what he’d just done, but he had set into motion a chain of events that would lead to this very article, some fifteen years later. I had no idea what it was, but the box looked cool (they came in giant cardboard boxes back then, kids), and the review scores made it sound pretty good, so I purchased it. There are very few titles that I can remember actually purchasing, but on this particular trip into town with my parents, I found a lonely looking box sitting on top of countless Friends boxsets in my local HMV. As a young gamer, back in 1999, it flew totally under my radar but, thankfully, I picked it up a few weeks after its release. There are plenty of games in the PC Gaming Hall of Fame, but very few are as critically acclaimed as System Shock 2, the player-destroying product of a collaboration between Irrational Games and Looking Glass Studios. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |