#tales from the...

DEAR DEER

Tales from the System Shock 2 Pt.3

Previously on How to suck at videogames.

So we’re now in the Engineering block something or rather and not actually on the next deck at all. This game is so blinking huge it’s hard to know where you’re going or what you’re doing half the time. This particular area has the wonders of radiation and poor old Stiffy is having a pretty hard time of it getting from place to place. See what I did there? Cocks.

After much faffing about, and a fair amount of savespawning that I’m not too ashamed to admit, I finally figure out where we’re going, making use of the map is starting to become a bit of a priority.

So why didn’t he?

After finding a storage area with some ammo in, I proceed onwards until I find some more capsuled corridors and had a lot of trouble with spawning enemies. As the game is a persistent world, when I turn it off it keeps on going and although there are some scripted enemies and such, most of them are just random. For me, here’s where the game started to show, just how persistent it wanted to be. It threw about 5/6 Manymen with Shotguns and a few more with poles, not to mention the spectacular new addition to the roster of things that prefer my insides outside are the serving robots, strange robots which like to follow you until it reaches you and then explodes although while uttering exclamations of how it wishes to help you. Nice.

As with Half Life, I have grown quite attached to the melee weapon and almost never use it against the baddies, this has made dealing with the robots a little difficult, however it is possible to ensure that you lose no health and bullets whilst expending this not-quite-servile enemy. The trick is to allow it to come close, then just as it stops to blow itself up, you try and get as far away as quickly as possible. I’m not going to lie, it’s a crap idea and it doesn’t work very often.

Continuing down the corridor, I enter a room and then all of a sudden, the screen goes white. Then everything goes all Half Life. A voice starts speaking to me about flesh and I go on a pretty uneventful floaty tour around a pulpy-looking room. The talk about joining the flesh reminded me of Videodrome, but with a good deal less boobs.

Definitely not Half Life.

After the flesh got bored, they zip us back to reality, where Stiffy ventures on unperturbed. There’s a room with robot casings and bots in them. It’s quite obvious that they won’t be staying in them and sure enough they start jumping out like popcorn as soon as I walk past the designated points. It’s these mid-to-late 90′s games like Tomb Raider, Thief and this that I love where, through calculated insidiousness, you can exploit the game’s designs in order to make it past the challenge. In this, I rounded them all up and then jumped on a lift. They walk underneath me and, because their proximity explosions are only programmed in a 2-dimensional plane, they begin to detonate far beneath me out of harm’s way. Joyous.

Yeah, yeah, I know your game.

A good bit of exploration and some keycards later, I’ve found a pretty nifty control room, however I don’t have the hardware thing they want. I return to all the doors which needed numbers and find a small room with a module, Ms. Politics tells us that we need to find a hardware device to bypass the security in order to turn on the power or something. To be honest, I see doors, and I explore until I find ways of opening them and the game is definitely in on this too.

It’s not full of stars.

Apparently I have to go back to the radioactive rooms, great. Some backtracking and finding of the right hardware and I am able to use it in the control room and get to the security module. The radiation’s gone so now I can go back to the very start of this area and get into an area that was blocked off. There are two areas on either side with switches in, neither prove much of a problem. After this I took to exploring one of the doors, which leads to a long room, at the end of which I found this beauty:

My, what a pain. As there was also a shotgun Manyman with her, I decided I would use my rifle-shotgun thing to take them out. Turns out that they’re bloody useless and I melee’d them after all.

With this I was finally able to restore power and quickly ran to the lift. Onto the next deck then.

Tales from the System Shock 2 Pt.2

And things were going so well…

Stiffy wakes up and finds that something has gone wrong with the ship and he’s been ejected from cryo-sleep. For some reason he is now on the Von Braun and not the Rickenbacker. He is also has amnesia. Hmm… I wonder if this will become relevant later on?

Some woman who calls herself (a certain game made by some of the developers of this one have made me a little suspicious of helpful friends that you don’t see) Dr. Janice Polito who tells you that you’re recovering from surgery and that something has gone very wrong with the ship. She doesn’t tell you why you had surgery or what exactly is wrong with the ship. Apparently an evil force has hijacked the ship.

She’s on Deck 4 and we’ve got to find an elevator, but first we have to get out of the cabin before it depressurises. We got a wrench though. Past a pane of glass a woman runs past and is chased and shot at by some sort of man.  It’s a little bit creepy.

Those damn Ice cream trucks always escape me.

I can imagine the ghosts of the future probably will be doing retail therapy in the afterlife.

There’s a bit of a rush before we’re safe and then it’s pretty much exploring after that.

It’s here that I saw my first ghost apparition. Some story segments and background information are told through audiologs while others are through these apparitions of dead people that appear who re-enact moments of their lives.

After finding a code for the door we enter the main area of this deck. This is where the game really starts as instantly Stiffy finds himself attacked by some weird… mutant man. It takes a number of hits from the wrench to bring him down and he dealt a fair amount of damage.

After this we are then told we need to charge a battery to enter the next area, while a nosy camera in the way. We also get here an in-game game which is a small version of Minesweeper, I quickly noticed that they forgot to program in first-click invincibility, so sometimes the first click can lose the game.

Moving on we enter a room with a decidedly creepy man hanging on the ceiling and then a mutantman jumped me! I yelped when this happened, the game is already creepy but it also has some incredible jump scares.

The horror…

We also find the regeneration tubes here, which work when you die, but cost nanites. After this we find a small hub area where there is a cyber-looking face on a panel. Dr. Polito tells us Xerxes is blocking passcodes and doors and so we have to find some kind of Doctor in his lab. But first we must charge that cell.

I presume this face here is the visual representation of Xerxes. It kind of reminds me of Gamesmaster, an old TV show.

Chemicals can be used to make stuff in this, but I am not really sure what, so skipping past the chem-room we find a large-ish room with turrets on the lower floor. It took me ages to take them out in the most conservative fashion as it is here that I discovered how little ammo the game is supposed to give you. Between the two turrets is the charging station for the cell.

Attempting to sneak up on these fellows is a little harder than Thief.

After placing the cell in the required door, Dr Polo or whatever “uploads” some upgrades to me which I can use. How very 90′s. Here is where I spent ages trying to decide what I wanted to upgrade as I was scared I would screw it up.

Moving into the next area we learn the term for the apparitions as “Self hypnotic defects in the R grade unit”. There are lots of monkeys around here, which throw blue balls of magic at you and are really hard to kill as they are so low to the ground. In fact it all starts getting really difficult here! There is a room filled with radiation and then two mutants appear and one even has a shotgun! It’s hardly fair, what are these people even doing with guns on this ship? This isn’t the military ship remember, this is the escorted ship!

Past a turret in another room we find a key card and not much else, going back and following the right-hand route and a bunch of monkeys jump out and scare the hell out of me.  There’s a small area here where it seems that they were experimenting on the monkeys and there is another  card. After a lot of exploring and backtracking I eventually found a corridor I missed, Dr Panda says that Dr. Watts who has the key is badly wounded and has the number I need for the maintenance shaft, rushing along to find him because I really don’t put it past this game to just kill him off and leave me high and dry, I find a large room with a floor below and a member of the Many, the name for the infected survivors of the ship.

Too little, too late.

Well, looks like we were right on time! To get the number that is! Dr Watts is dying and tells us that they were trying to lure Stiffy there to become a host. Whether that means one of what they are or something else I don’t know and certainly don’t wish to find out, I take the two audio logs and then move back to find that there are now two mutant men upstairs where we just were. After a lot of messing around I finally kill them and start listening to the audio log which contains the passcode on my way back to the maintenance shaft when I bump into this fella.

Oh bugger.

It takes a lot of hits to take down and then on the final hit, the sodding thing blows up taking off loads of damage. What an arse-hole. Now I have the passcode to the maintenance shaft we can now enter the next area…

Hydroponics Deck 3 The beginning of this deck is full of windy corridors with lots of radioactive areas, after wandering around I found a room  with a lock on the door, which had some goodies in, Dr Parappa then calls and says that someone is wandering around controlling people. The room just next to this has a camera in, but I didn’t get far as I then I got killed a bunch of times by a robot that kept walking into me and blowing up. Tsk! Another time then!

Tales from the System Shock 2 Pt.1

System Shock is an Action RPG which came out in 1994 for PC, developed solely by Looking Glass Studios, who later went on to create Thief: The Dark Project. It was an interesting game set in the distant future on a space ship, that used two types of screens which you could switch between, one is the normal First-person mode where there are limited pieces of on-screen information around the outer edge and the player can move around normally, the other mode is the HUD mode, where the player can look at the inventory and other information. The game suffered from lack of refinement and is a product of its age, but in 1999, Looking Glass Studios would return and along with Irrational Games, decided to make a sequel.

Set in the 2114, it all looks like Blade Runner meets Half-Life.

Headed by Ken Levine of Thief and Bioshock fame, System Shock 2 built upon the original as a core Action RPG, however this one would have some more First-person shooter and Survival Horror elements. Set on board the Von Braun, a stranded space vessel 42 years after the first game, a man is trapped and tries to escape.

The game appears to be more of a first-person shooter, however there is a hugely customisable upgrade system that is hidden beneath its exterior. Just like with the first game, if you press shift, you enter a management and RPG style mode where the mouse moves over the screen while the player remains still, here you can check your items, logs and other piddly bits of the game. The first-person mode is a lot more fluid, with a more intuitive system for checking out objects.

What a cute robot. Somehow this feels a little ominous…

The game starts with a spanner, but there are also many different guns, like shotgun and pistol as well as a magic type attack called psionic power, which use up some of your psi points and works similar to HP.

The role-playing system is much ore advanced. The player is able to select a set-up for their character by choosing whether they would like to be a marine, who specialise in combat, Navy who are good at hacking and engineering or OSA which are psychics.

The in-game currency, nanites are used in the majority of the role-playing elements. Most upgrades are done at terminals and are bought, getting increasingly more expensive the more you buy of a certain type.

The game didn’t offer me any advice.

Some of the upgrades include the base stats like Strength and endurance, however there are also upgrades for secondary skills like hacking and psionic power. Implants give varying bonuses like 20% more damage when using a melee weapon, combat skills, like Standard guns, Energy weapons and Heavy machineguns, or you can get O/S upgrades which offer nice bonuses like movement speed increase by 15% or 20% more health from hypos.

The game is notorious for being a landmark in interactive storytelling and also for its main villain, evil computer Shodan.

The beginning of the game begins with a rather Starship Troopers-y cutscene about the companies of the future, our main character, who we don’t seem to know the name of, known merely as Soldier G65434-2, but that’s dull so we’ll call him “Stiffy” for short. Stiffy is joining the Armed Forces and after the world’s shortest training segment, we get to choose which path, Marine, Navy or OS.

A skip screen if ever I saw one.

At this point I didn’t really know what was going on, so I chose Navy because I like the uniform and also Stiffy needs to live up to his name, then we get some pretty poorly disguised choices for skill point allocation in the form of story mission choices, as it happens I just ended up choosing all of the hacky type ones, which I probably would have done anyway.