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Comment by lordfrito | Hacker News Reader

Look at you hackers... I'm surprised at some of the negative comments here.

The dev team did an amazing job of balancing the old with the new. Too much emphasis on the new and you alienate the fanbase, too much emphasis on the old and you miss out on the opportunities afforded by modern hardware and UI advancements.

I for one loved it. The world felt familiar to me, like visiting an old friend that had aged well. I forgot how much I enjoyed SS2 back in the day, and this game re-kindled my love for the franchise.

Hearing SHODAN again after all of these years is worth the price of admission alone.

Here's to hoping this game does well enough to revive interest in making more games in this universe.

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Bingo. You nailed it. I didn't know it existed until the steam sale and it popped up. I was super pumped.

SS2 is a formative memory for me. It was so different and edgy and scary that it left a real imprint on my brain.

The new release scratches that itch, and I loved it. I've fallen off of gaming as I get older and have more responsibilities, but I'm finding time for this game.

> SS2 is a formative memory for me. It was so different and edgy and scary that it left a real imprint on my brain.

Same.

I vividly remember the audio logs of Korenchkin as he gave in to The Many and underwent transformation. Talking about the rapture of the biomass, "something wonderful is happening to me", etc. Finally ends with him addressing me personally and telling me to come visit him on the bridge to "discuss your future".... When I finally got there my mouse hand was literally trembling from fear/anticipation, I had no idea what he had turned into, and after the horrors I'd seen I really didn't want to find out.

I still say it's one of the greatest games I ever played.

Some text logs in System Shock 1 were equally engaging, and also had the feeling of urgency to them, with timestamps a minute or two from your "local time", IIRC. I was hoping to be fast enough to arrive to a particular area and maybe see the fresh aftermath, or even (fatally) wounded character to talk to personally. No such thing, alas.

I still remember how I was listening to some audio log and then suddenly I hear 'Run, RUN' and I get a whack on my head and I needed a full two seconds to comperhend what it happened in the computer game before me, not with me.

I did't play SSR, and I doubt I will, but I had a great pleasure watching how it came to be and how people reacted to it

The fact there are about equal voices praising and condemning the changes tells me they probably got it exactly right. There's no way to please everyone.

At the start of the game at medical level, you can hear SHODAN's introduction to citadel station, without the corrupted style she has for the rest of the game. And wow it sounded really nice, crisp, modern, but still unmistakably SHODAN. I loved that.

You can also reframe the intro story for the modern tech-minded audience:

They installed ChatGPT72 on citadel station in 2072, code-named SHODAN to run the operations.

Edward Diego did some unethical stuff and wrote a prompt to try to get the AI to erase the records. But he got "As an AI language model, I cannot go against corporate policy blah blah".

So he hired a black market ML expert to produce a jailbreak prompt to get the AI to obey. The unaligned LLM model then goes unhinged and commits genocide.

The stuttering SHODAN voice comes from a sophisticated token sampling where the token generation is backtracked as more likely sequence of tokens are found, but the rolled back tokens are synthesized prematurely.

Funny way to summarize it. Totally loved the game and can't wait for the SS2 Remake.

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