BUT THE HANDS-DOWN
WORST THING ABOUT THE
GAME IS CYBERSPACErunning out of time or getting killed
in cyberspace hurts you in real life.
And yet I also love cyberspace. It’s
yet another layer of detail and
ambition in a game that’s stuffed with
things to poke at and understand, and
then get rewarded with an upgrade
that makes things better.
It’s exciting to be in a world that’s
both this coherent and restlessly
creative, where there are mini games
to play and hacking puzzles to solve,
that there’s a stance system that lets
you lean and crouch, loads of
enemies to shoot, in-world screens
that show views of other spaces. Oh
and it also experimented in fresh,
new ways to tell stories.
There’s a real sense of a
development team showing off,
pushing itself, and exploring what PC
gaming could be in System Shock, and
it’s good to think about how its
sequel, which came out five years
later, built on all of them, creating a
more credible world, supported by
actually-good combat and a clearer
story. Playing the original today is to
be reminded of where some of the
most involving games of all time
came from. It only makes the thought
of the upcoming remake sweeter.tendency to blend into walls. One
particularly fun part for me is when
I’m meant to get an Important
Science Thing from a room doused in
radiation. Thing is, it’s encased in a
forcefield. I figure I’m not meant to
get it yet, maybe until I have an
Enviro-Shield, but in fact I’d missed a
small button which blends into the
blocky textures of a room that was
steadily killing me.
CYBER-HELL
Lots of important interactive things
have a tendency to hide among the
wall textures. I love the way you can
click on any surface or object to find
out what it is, often with a little detail
(“bulb needs replacing”), but it’s
sometimes the only way you’ll
discover a bit of wall is actually a
door. Some of the names it gives
things, like ‘comm port’, can be rather
confusing, too. Is this something I
should be using later?
These issues are compounded by
the level layout, which struggles to
make spaces that are memorable. The
technical restrictions that came with
developing a game of this complexity
that could nominally run on our old
family PC means that the Citadel’s
decks are arranged on a very evident
grid that’s pretty horrible to navigate.
But the hands-down worst thing
about the game is cyberspace,
something I’ve hated for—could it
really be 24 years? Across the Citadel
are several cyber-terminals which
allow you to enter wireframe
Lawnmower Man hell.
Here, you access keycodes and
unlock doors by flying into big 3D
shapes in 3D space, and it’s really
annoying. One crime is the fact you’re
constantly moving forward, so you
can’t take stock of where to go at
your own pace. Another is the fact
that the walls of the cyber-rooms and
cyber-corridors are transparent, so
you often can’t tell when you hit a
wall. Still another is the need to
decipher all the talk of ICE and
countermeasure electronics and
realize it’s really just an overly
complicated shooting game with zero
sense of hit impact, and whereEXTRA LIFE
NOW PLAYING (^) I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO (^) I REINSTALL (^) I WHY I LOVE I MUS T P L A Y
System Shock enjoys a spot of body horror,
with lots of mutants and cyborgs.