System Shock
filfre.net
filfre.net
Shodan is the best sci-fi villain of all time. (See also the inverted gravity scene closer to the end of System Shock II.)
It is like magic.
The game already ran fine at 60fps (and above) on PC at launch, so the engine can handle it fine already.
"FPS Boost" is just marketing speak for "we've decided to prioritize framerate on the next gen consoles rather than improving visuals and keeping things locked at 30fps"
As we detailed in October, with the increased CPU, GPU and memory from our new consoles, all of your existing games look and play better. With certain titles, we can make the experience even better, all with no work required by the developer, and no update needed by the gamer. To that end, the backward compatibility team has developed FPS Boost, which employs a variety of new methods for nearly doubling (and in a few instances, quadrupling) the original framerate on select titles. ... And while not applicable to all games, these new techniques can push game engines to render more quickly for a buttery smooth experience beyond what the original game might have delivered due to the capabilities of the hardware at the time.
It clearly distinguishes "with the increased CPU, GPU and memory from our new consoles, all of your existing games look and play better" from "FPS Boost, which employs a variety of new methods for nearly doubling (and in a few instances, quadrupling) the original framerate on select titles". Further, FPS Boost has to be manually
IANAL but it seems like offering a feature and blatantly lying about it is fraud and that everyone who participated at Microsoft is guilty of both fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud. Do you have evidence of this?
Here's more information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89L-3U2egKw
.. completely common in the industry, especially when it comes to explaining how things work internally.
You might have a case if the 60fps game was actually running at 30fps and just lied to the frame counter.
My theory is that it detects a list of certain compatible games and then "lies" to the game engine through syscalls for clocks or vsync or whatever the game uses to determine frame timings (this would trick a game locked at 30 to run at 60, for example).
If this is indeed how it works, it could well break other things that relied on those timing systems, like the scripted events you're describing.
It's not a bad game, but putting it next to System Shock as a "spiritual successor" only sets people up for wrong expectations which can ultimately lead to a lot of disappointment.
Imho the immersive sim and RPG elements in Bioshock are very minor parts of the game compared to System Shock, Bioshock doesn't even have an inventory.
Personally that really soured my experience with Bioshock, I was expecting something like System Shock, yet ended up getting a FPS game that was rather "of it's time" mechanics wise, which I was a bit tired off at that point.
If, based on that, you're not sure whether or not you'll like it - just click the link and try Chapter 1. It's a fast, fun read and an excellent intro to the novel; at the very worst, you won't have spent too much time in vain. At best, you'll enjoy it as much as I do!
(Or almost as much, maybe; at some point this year I intend to typeset, print, and bind it, so I can add it to my physical library as well as my electronic one. Considering the subject matter, doing that meticulous work to produce a physical copy strikes me as retro-cyberpunk in a way that's both appealing and apropos.)
(Granted I might do that work anyway, because as I think I may have mentioned somewhere here not too long ago, I've been looking for an excuse to turn my old Pagemaker skills into new InDesign skills. But that just means I'll have a professionally made copy to give away, and a handmade one to keep.)
His primary venue is his "Twenty Sided" blog, where he writes long-form critiques and commentary on specific games and the gaming industry as a whole:
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/
His "Mass Effect Retrospective" series is an epic (in both length and detail) deconstruction of the story, setting, and writing of each game in the Mass Effect series:
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?cat=508
He actually recently announced that he's going to be publishing that ME Retrospective in book format as well:
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=52015
and fwiw, he's got a Patreon (which I happily support for a few bucks a month, because I appreciate his writing):
system shock was such a great game. suspenseful, intricate, engrossing and just plain scary to immerse yourself into fully.
in a few years span, we had this, doom, warcraft, xwing/tie fighter, wing commander 3, command and conquer, civilization 1 and 2, myst, alone in the dark (now THAT was a fucking scary game), descent, and so many more that sucked my time away. it was amazing to be present in the golden age of PC gaming, where the confluence of cheap x86 hardware, improving gfx tech, directx and peripheral support all came together so quickly.
i recall fondly the 10base-2 network in my college house, and having friends bring over their computers for LAN parties. descent and warcraft were the best when played to the sounds of your enemies yelling in anguish from downstairs in the living room.
:)
Games like Gothic, Elex, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Two Worlds, Eye: Divine Cybermancy, basically most Deck13 titles...
The late 90s and early 2000s were such a great time for PC games like that.
I really think that Piranha Bytes are the most interesting game studio with regards to RPGs right now. I think they have the best blend of weird mechanics + plot driven gameplay out there, despite their relatively limited resources.
Made by European studios (usually east Europe), with grand ideas, but missing some of the polish you would expect from a AAA game. I be clear I think these games are fantastic, and personally consider the missing polish an asset rather than a detriment to these games, but it certainly impacts game play.
Interesting you could put forward the argument that Cyberpunk 2077 is a Eurojank game as CD Projekt Red is a polish developer, and well, Cyberpunk has more than its fair share of bugs.
It leaves rather little room for art or innovation. This is why I mostly stopped paying attention to such games, and watch for what smaller, bolder studios produce on 5-10% of an AAA budget.
The most successful AAA title of all time is GTAV. Fun for the whole family ^_^
https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/gta-5-now-profitable-ent...
A good example is the game MEAN STREETS (1989), which is both a point-and-click detective adventure game and a full flight simulator as you move between locations.
IIRC Descent II (1997) allowed 800x600 and maybe higher even without a 3D accelerator, but you'd have needed a fairly powerful PC for running that. I'd kind of like to assume Quake would also have supported higher resolutions but I honestly can't remember.
By 1998 or 1999 so, when 3D acceleration was becoming more common, higher resolutions also started gaining more ground in 3D games.
Even after that, many 2D games (including the original StarCraft, I think) were still only 640x480, probably in order to avoid scaling issues with multiple resolutions.
Then there was VESA, which was standard for high-res, but slow.
Then Windows 95 came and with it came drivers and DirectX, and the driver wars moved on to 3D accelerator territory...
However, mid-90's games that did do 640x480 generally did that in 256 colours, so they already had to deal with going above standard VGA one way or another. Very few games that I can think of used the VGA mode of 640x480 in 16 colours, and they certainly weren't first-person shooters.
They definitely seemed to think of that as a failing on their part, but it's IMO a big part of why the game is still engaging nowadays.
Very few games set the imagination on fire the way System Shock did. I'm still not sure why. It was almost a standard-ish horror game.
It was a combination of story, mechanics, and art, I think. The old-style graphics really added to the immersion (though you can't say this without seeming suspect).
There is a playable prealpha
Neato! I've got the GoG version installed on a PC on my network here. I just discovered that the ".CRF" files that contain the game resources are all ZIP files. Now I'm awash in System Shock 2 sounds.
May have been the first and best game to use audio logs to develop the plot & build the world. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf92cXs6fvg
Some other mechanics that helped the atmosphere and kept you on edge were that you could never permanently clear an area of monsters. Some new critters would respawn and prowl through decks you had cleared. You could usually hear them well before you saw them. Resources were also scarce, so wasting ammunition on enemies or subjecting your ranged weapons to unnecessary wear and tear was often a worse choice than avoiding them, or trying to sneak up behind them to bash them to death. The game was built atop the dark engine (Thief) so it had a surprisingly good model of enemy line of sight, sneaking was often viable to close distance or evade.
To progress up the research tree required particular elements as inputs to complete research assignments, and the game would use this to send you on fetch quests to gather a jar full of rare elements from a chemical storage locker deep in a deck of the ship you'd hoped to never visit again.
Late 90s australian game journalism - "after playing system shock 2, somehow the world will never look quite the same again": https://archive.org/details/PCPowerplay-042-1999-11/page/n12...
(after all these years, when i self-checkout groceries at the supermarket, in my head i hear the words "thank you for choosing valuerep")
All these lifes.. a audiobook on its own - and they should have turned it into one.
Warning. Spoilers ahead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIqqQEFOO3s
Tribe's music video for Supercollider[1] was filmed at the Superconducting Super Collider before Congress cut funding. It might be the most expensive music video set ever.
It was the first 3D POV game that I recall with effectively true 3D. Doom had "fake" 3D, you couldn't have two floors on top of each other, but in System Shock you could. It also had different stances and fairly realistic head movement (leaning would tilt the view too).
There's a remake underway, from some of the original devs, also over at GOG[2].
Both are great, had some huge fun playing both. Especially Decent after hours at work. I own both on GoG and should crank them up again.
Edit: ah do you mean the floors can be non-rectangular?
I haven’t played system shock, but the classic doom still holds up as one of my favourite games of all time. I played a ton of it in 2020 using gzdoom: the level design and pacing is still almost unmatched all these years later.
System Shock unfolds on a space station which has a consistent architecture, each level has a plot-defined purpose, a layout consistent with the purpose, and dovetails with levels above and below it. That was a great move, of a different nature.
System Shock should not be lined up with Doom, but rather with Deus Ex and maybe Half-Life.
https://www.playdosgames.com/online/system-shock/ - Play the original game in your browser. The emulator is buggy. Sound doesn't work in Safari. Sound works in Firefox but the game freezes. I suppose it would work better in local DOSBox.
The Thief story is much more structured, less driven by dropped notes - and there are no interactive conversations - but the cutscenes are fairly well done, the sound design amazing - the Brosius's work - and the character you play is very well drawn, a cynical reluctant antihero.
System Shock 1 could have been good - I don't know - its controls were unusable - they were before the time of the mouse being used for looking around.