A third main entry, System Shock 3, has been announced. It consists of System Shock, System Shock 2, and the 2023 System Shock remake. This is essentially why System Shock 2 is so notable: it introduced the mechanics, to an audience already seeking them, while looking distinguishable enough, not to appear like a clone of what people were losing interest in.System Shock is a science fiction video game series originally created by Looking Glass Technologies. The thing is, they all offered things that clearly weren’t ‘Duke Nukem-esque.’īy the time people knew what the ’System Shock’ franchise was, the original was wayyyy too dated for anyone to want to check out. If you actually tried the demo for SS2, you pretty much knew right away it was going to be a ’heavy hitter.’ It had obvious graphical limitations, but then Half-Life and Deus Ex certainly weren’t ‘pretty’ by the standards of that era either. It was hall high-def enough to distinguish it from Half-Life, Deus Ex, and most importantly SIN/Duke Nukem/Blood(? I forget its name). This is where System Shock 2 really benefitted: Its aesthetics were actually pretty unique at the time.
The ‘Duke Nukem genre‘ died, and it was worth checking out fps games again. Then Half-Life, Deus Ex, and System Shock 2 all released, and absolutely wrecked the genre’s status quo. Quake solved the ‘too ugly to be distinguishable’ problem.
If you weren’t already aware of how System Shock was a good game, then you were pretty much trained to see it as another ‘ugly, frustrating, and extremely stupid fps.’ This is where the sprite-based fps genre ran into biiiig problems. When I played it as a kid, and ran into a chick in an alien pod, I was like: “Why can’t I save her or something?” There was also the Duke Nukem effect: fps games were getting dumber, and more sensational. Nothing really communicated it was *different.* The images on the back, just looked like someone vomited confetti onto the screen. The problem with the first System Shock, is there was nothing about it that ‘appeared different.’ The front of the box didn’t show anything compelling. One of the big offenders was Hexen, which left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths. Players went from “killing the forces of darkness” to just getting stuck. It stuck around because it did a lot of this well.īut… it introduced a lot of conventions which also sucked, unbelievably hard, like color-coded door keys, nonsensicle level design, etc.
Doom, Hexen, Dark Forces… they didn’t look *that* different from each other.ĭoom only really succeeded because it was the first to do a lot of things: fps, anatomical gore, the totally metal religious element, etc. Why I never thought to look into System Shock 1: “The Rise of the Doom Clones and Bargain Basement Crapshoots.”įirst up, the white elephant in the room: I dont care what the nostalgics say, we *knew* games looked like ass back then. I was around for both releases, and only ever played System Shock 2.
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