The “minigame” in Bioshock is much worse than SS2’s minigame; SS2 played off of the whole “old school RPG based off DnD” aspect, so yeah, there were dice rolls, and honestly, I need to think a lot more to play SS2’s hacking mini game (difficulty based off Cyb&Hack skills, cost never too expensive), than I do for Bioshocks blatant ripoff, dumbing down of, and sleezing up of, the old games like Pipeline. In Bioshock, you really don’t need to think or lose anything valuable when you hack ($500 limit? I had infinite money it felt like, even if the limit were $100…); after a certain point of just getting bored with that easy minigame (maybe it’s just that I grew up with a game that’s *really* challenging, instead of just a ripoff of… that game…), they screwed you over and made it night IMPOSSIBLE to win it at some points. Big straight line of “alarm/failureificness!” squares between the start and end= no player skill required, you fail unless you got X, Y, and Z tonics. SS2s hacking system wasn’t perfect, but it does require more strategy than Bioshock’s hacking. And if you had problems in SS2, it was your own fault for not doing a lower difficulty where everything is much cheaper. And specializations do work, if you realize you’re in an FPS and don’t max out energy in the first level of the game at the first oppertunity. I just played through on hard, and thought I’d run out of nades near the end; wound up with about 40 extra after beating it. In Bioshock, after the first level or so, I realized two things: the Plasmids are nothing but a gimmick, as opposed to the psionic abilities in SS2, which while more niched, were more fun and actually unique, and that I’d never, ever, ever run out of ammo. I tried, too, and I just couldn’t.

One of my biggest gripes with Bioshock: there’s no “moral ambiguity” when, all in all, you gain more stuff by saving the little sisters, than you do by harvesting them. I really feel disappointed with Bioshock, and honestly, I have had a *lot* more fun playing through SS2 for the 5th and 6th time than I had in all of Bioshock. I’m sure it makes a great console FPS, but it’s certainly no spiritual successor to SS2; Bioshock is just another FPS, with different flashy graphics and gimmicks.

It is not the holy grail of gaming, not by a long chalk.

Is System Shock 2 the Bugatti Veyron/Concorde of PC Gaming…?

Something so ‘almost perfect’ that we won’t ever see anything as raw and uncompromisingly good for years too come, if ever, with attempts to improve on the formula just being either refinements (Deus Ex) or watered down improvements (Bioshock).

Now I can’t make my own uninformed decision about killing young girls!

(…UNTIL I LEARNED THAT KILLING THE SMALL CHILDREN WAS WRONG!!!!!)

My happiest memory? running screaming down a corridor looking for a ladder or otherwise higher ground, having only the smallest amounts of health and ammo left, and my last savegame too far back for me to care for. Ahhhh, nostalgia.

The combat wasn’t dice-roll.

The respawning wasn’t excessive unless you tripped a security alarm (a good reason not to).

The hacking was better than BS simply because it wasn’t an overly time consuming and irritating minigame. Just a few clicks and you failed or passed based on your hacking skill.. what with it being somewhat RPG based I don’t see a problem with that. It didn’t bother me half as much as the crappy water game in BS. It wasn’t good though.

Oh you could also carry around repair tools/maintenence tools rather than lots of weapons.

I don’t think the texture comment has much merit tbh, I never had trouble getting lost because of that. (it was much easier to get lost in the original, though I prefer that game to the second).

It had plenty of flaws, the oversized weapons were ugly, the weapons did degrade far too fast (like the armour in Stalker after they patched it..), I never tried psionics so I can’t comment on that but as a Navy (hacker and small arms) player I never had trouble finishing it, unless you thought you could get through it just by having a high hacking skill and nothing else I’m not sure what the problem was there.

I enjoyed BS, but not as much as I enjoyed any of the other games I have played in the last few years on the PC.

(edit)

I do wish someone would take a leaf out of SS1’s difficulty settings book, it was a brilliant idea.

(edit 2)

The main reason to get lost is SS2 was the crappy map not the textures! ¬_¬

“It was a kind of Heart of Darkness story, with a military commander gone crazy and your mission was to go to this crazy space-ship and assassinate him.”

Feels like they went back to System Shock 2’s original premise to start with for BioShock.

The BioShock backlash is very disappointing.

I think SS2 criticisms about breaking weapons and respawning are really overstated. It wasn’t that hard to keep track of the state of your weapons and the decay wasn’t that full on. It was right on the main screen even.
The respawning too wasn’t like a flood or anything, made sense to me in the context of the game.