Comment by Argorak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Argorak | Hacker News Reader

Irrational created some of my favorite games, because of the amount of thought and attention to detail they poured into them. I loved most of them.

* SWAT 4: How cool is a multiplayer shooter where you actually have to breach a room from multiple sides to pressure the enemy into _not shooting_? And hold your guns until you saw any indication they would? We played that game for nights in one room for better communication.

* System Shock 2: Deeply flawed in some regards, but also the first game that creeped me out in a _perfectly well lit and bright environment_. Shodan, as always, was a great enemy.

* Freedom Force Series: A comic strategy game. It wasn't that hard (it wasn't easy, either), but had "comic" written all over the place. The description if you hovered the cursor over a mere building was "A proud participant of the Patriot City skyline." Someone put an ironic joke on the patriotic theme of the game in the description of a boring apartment block... How fun is that?

BioShock was a culmination of all that. Would you kindly pay them your respect?

> Would you kindly pay them your respect?

No, simply because Bioshock, while being wildly entertaining to many people, was so at the cost of many of the good design choices made in the System Shock games. Just see for example your note about the bright environments and contrast with Bioshock.

(It also irks me a little that your post is missing just enough detail to make it seem as if they made SS2, instead of being co-creators under the lead of Looking Glass.)

"Would you kindly" is a reference to the first Bioshock. You had to be there.

They may have understood the reference, and I think that their point stands regardless. It wasn't just a reference, after all.

Sure, it was a subliminal message to get more upvotes. I am truly sorry for that.

Talking of replacing good design choices with bad ones, how about the antagonists? SHODAN was a compelling character, as full of nuance as of menace; Andrew Ryan and what's-his-face between them just barely managed to add up to cartoonish, and Bioshock's pale attempt to imitate System Shock 2's genuinely astonishing plot twist came off as blatant, forced, and frankly rather pathetic.

Well, the whole Irrational Games/Looking Glass thing is a messy one, so I decided to skip that for the sake of an eulogy. I see Irrational as a successor to Looking Glass, although I would prefer LG to be still existing.

I am split whether Bioshock threw away too much or just enough from System Shock 2. At my first playthrough, I was on the edge about this. The "would you kindly" scene cought me as off-guard as the Shodan reveal in SS2, so I forgive Bioshock a lot in the story department. It was definitely the more polished game in many regards.

SS2 is hard to play nowadays and some things (like the ghosts) just really didn't work in hindsight. Also, the crafting and inventory-tetris didn't really add to the game. There is a lot in it that could be removed for good. On the other hand, SS2 stood at a time where those things hadn't been properly tried yet and is a good example of a game that has to be commended for trying out new things. And damn, was it great to actually explore the story.

I heard a (german) podcast about old games a while ago where one of the podcasters said that he thinks that gamers in the 90s had more tolerance for games trying something and failing, because it was such a rapidly evolving medium.

Perhaps, Bioshock was the System Shock for the 2000s and us old-school gamers wanted it to be something that relentlessly tries out things just as in the old times.

Still, Bioshock is light-years ahead in story-telling and world-building than most games of that era. "Would you kindly" is a great example: It shows that the game was built around a narrative and not around a series of set pieces.

What do you mean the ghosts in SS2 "didn't work"? I thought they were pure genius -- and they scared the crap out of me the first times they appeared.

>>> SWAT 4

Oh man I miss this game so badly. I just loved every piece of it. I tried to buy it now, but unfortunately it's out of stock everywhere. Apparently because the publisher has closed. And there's not much on eBay :(

I'm actually working my way through System Shock 2 for the first time ever. Man, it's dated, but I keep hearing about how great it is, and I'm a big survival-horror fan.

Well, SS2 didn't really stand the test of time at the time it was released. It was released 1 year after Half-Life and looks much older ;).

Still, if you can look behind the graphics and can somehow relate to the time back then, it was also so different from Half-Life in many regards.

The graphics are a bit rough even for 1999, but there are a few user-made mods which help a bit with that, and once you get past the looks, the user interface gives a surprisingly high amount of credit to the player -- especially in comparison with the modern "press X to not die, press Y to win" style.

I recently played through SS2 again, largely for nostalgic reasons, and here's a list of the mods I used, in the order in which I installed them. (Install order matters because, SS2 not being designed for mods, they overwrite core game files; System Shock 2 Mod Manager is highly recommended for keeping everything straight.)

I won't link them because they should all be easily searchable, at most by adding "ss2 mod" to the mod name in your search query; if you can't find one, comment and I'll update with a link.

* Anomalies, Discrepancies, and Outright Bugs (ADaOB) v0.3.0 - bugfixes, &c.

* four hundred v?? - hi-res textures

* SHTUP Beta 6 - more texture improvements

* DeepFriedBeer's sound upgrade v3b - much improved game sound

* PSI-Amp V2 - High-poly/high-res texture replacement for the psionic amplifier weapon.

* Rebirth 02 - High-poly-count model replacements; goes very well with high-res texture packs.

* The following "Tacticool" weapon replacements:

- Assault rifle v1.0

- Grenade launcher v1.0

- Laser pistol v1.1

- Shotgun v1.0

- Wrench v1.0

- Pistol v.11b (ADaOB v0.2.8 compatible)

* Vurt's Hi-Res Space v1.1 - High-resolution skybox texture

I won't pretend that, even with these mods, the result is anything like a modern game in terms of looks. But it's a lot better than stock SS2, and if you're having a lot of trouble getting past the game's looks -- and that's worth doing, if you like your games to make you think and keep you on your toes -- then a setup like this one may help.

Thanks for the list. I'll try those out!

Here, this'll save you some time downloading them individually:

http://aaron-miller.me/misc/Aaron%27s%20SS2%20mod%20collecti...

I'll check that out when I can. Thanks!

It's not ever going to look like a modern game looks because it's not using the graphical engine of a modern game. I find that the most jarring thing is the low-polygon mobs - if you're only going for one mod, grab one that reworks the mobs.

The amazing thing is that the environment looks so good despite the graphical limitations of the time. A stellar job was done folding the starship interiors into the boxy limitations of the day's graphical tech.

There's a rather good Let's Play by Psychedelic Eyeball, here: http://lparchive.org/System-Shock-2-(by-Psychedelic-Eyeball)... As I recall, he does a good job of holding back on spoilers, but you might want to finish the game before watching, just in case there is some side comment or hint that slips out.

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