Branching conversation trees are no substitute for actual talking, and it imposes certain choices onto the player’s character. Games have always been terrible at letting you interact through conversation. Feel free to set me straight in the comments if you think I’ve messed this all up. Here are what I believe to be the key features that made System Shock so special. It had numerous elements that have been often duplicated, but never with the same sublime results. It took the key elements of immersive gameplay and distilled them into a unique and (at the time) frightening experience. The game took advantage of what computers could do welll in 1994, and left out things they couldn’t. They are fine games, but the System Shock series stands alone as the perfect game at the perfect time. More recently, Deus Ex and Deus Ex 2 have come along and been called a spiritual successor to the System Shock series, although I’ve never thought of them as such. In 1999 the sequel System Shock 2 came out and captured the essence of the original, but since then there hasn’t been a game that really appealed to me the way these two have. This means that I will, from time to time, blather on about this game and you will just have to cope with it. The game had such a lasting effect on me that I wrote an entire novel based on the game. I have played a lot of computer games over the years, but none have affected me so strongly as the 1994 classic System Shock.
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