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6 months ago
Feature: The final mystery of System Shock 2 remains unsolved
If you read System Shock 2’s patch notes on Steam you might notice something unusual, as I did. In the list of fixes, additions, and technical talk, there's a note thanking "Le Corbeau" for providing the patch. It's an official patch that the game’s publishers pushed onto Steam, but reading the note it looked to me like they didn’t know who was updating their game.…
2 years ago
Feature: Keep Space Invaders, though
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Feature: Listen or be unmade
Welcome to the freshly relaunched RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show! You might think this is episode 31, but actually it’s episode 1 again. We’re rebooting it, even though we just did that last year. We’ve started by making it more accessible. Instead of three of us chatting about videogames between snippets of jaunty music, there’s just a sad man saying “Sonic the Hedgehog” over…
Feature: Fill your boots
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time. There are lots of things I love about NEO Scavenger [official site]. I love how, despite its lo-fi visuals, it conveys the fickle fortunes and indifferent cruelty of a wilderness better than many technologically superior survival games. I love its ridiculously detailed combat system that lets…
3 years ago
Feature: Faster than a bard shot out of a cannon
It's Summer Games Done Quick time again! You know what that means. The final seal has been broken, the rivers are turning to blood, and High Dread Azagorath is free to destroy the land. But while people wait, they're doing speed-runs. And in celebration of that, I thought I'd take a dig through the archives for a few particularly impressive and interesting ones that take…
Feature: Might need to squish up a bit
For a few horrible minutes during E3, it looked like Bethesda might seriously claim that The Elder Scrolls and Fallout were part of the same universe. Thankfully, not. Despite this being an era where Sony wants a Ghostbusters universe and Universal thinks demeaning the Universal Monsters by linking them with a top-sekrit monstah hunting group led by Dr Jekyll is anything other than schoolboy fan-fiction,…
4 years ago
Feature: "Hello? Is anyone still listening?"
"Day 4. I've looked everywhere, but I can't find anything to eat or a clue to get me off the ship. Just... more audiologs! They're everywhere! For some reason I keep listening to every minute of every one thinking there'll be some useful information but... they're just filler! Filler that's driving me to madness!" - South Park: The Stick Of Truth It's hard to argue.…
Feature: List-listen to this, hacker...
Looking back on System Shock, one part inevitably stands out more than any other. SHODAN. The goddess of Citadel Station. With her words she turned a futuristic maze into a horrific hunter/hunted situation, where survival was about clawing back control and beating the machine at her own game. It’s an impressive achievement… but especially when you consider that really, she was little more than a…
Feature: Comparing and contrast past and future
Remembering Citadel: System Shock versus System Shock Reboot
Suddenly, we have an embarrassment of System Shock riches. First System Shock Enhanced, then a Warren Spector-augmented System Shock 3, and now System Shock Reboot, a total remastering of the first game. It's just poor old System Shock 2 that's left in the cold, as EA jealously guard the rights to the sci-horror series' most acclaimed instalment. That's another day's concern, though: right now, let's…
5 years ago
Feature: Stuck in the middle
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Feature: The Irrational Need For Closure
The contemporary big-budget FPS has a few different strains: blood-n-guts military settings a la Call of Duty, open-world environments like Far Cry, and high-concept dystopias. Outside of open-world most of these styles were first codified in the 1990s, and FPS games then and now share an enormous amount: primarily a core mechanic of shooting many hundreds of enemies in the face over and over again,…
6 years ago
Feature: "We have to get past media envy."
In this second part of my conversation with Warren Spector, we discuss the good and bad of Disney, Spector’s new role as an Academy director, the benefits and drawbacks of growing up as a gamer, and the parallels between Hollywood in the late forties and the games industry now. Also, why indie development is the place to be.
Feature: "I think we became an artform with Pong."
There are a lot of words being written about the new consoles this week but when I spoke to Warren Spector a few days ago, he was clear about where his future lies: “I think all the interesting stuff is happening on PC now… Assuming I make more games, which I intend to do, PC and Mac are going to be my targets.” It’s good…
8 years ago
Feature: Irrational's co-founder on the future of immersive sims
Curse our limited-length titles! For this post should really be called something like 'Irrational co-founder and now Blue Manchu boss Jon Chey talks more about his splendid-sounding new PC boardgame/ CCG/ MMO mash-up Card Hunter, how to make free-to-play non-horrible, what he thinks the future might be for immersive sims in the vein of System Shock and his thoughts on his former studio's controversial XCOM…
9 years ago
Here's some news for you. And not just news. NEWS. Valve Software have just hired a new employee. And not just a new employee. A NEW EMPLOYEE. Doug Church. Doug 'Thief' Church. Doug 'System Shock' Church. Doug 'Ultima Underworld' Church. Doug 'Deus Ex' Church. Doug 'helped (to varying degrees) design a good dozen of the most beloved PC games of all time' Church. And now…
Feature:
Here at Rock, Paper, Shotgun we take the business of PC gaming entirely seriously. There is no smiling, or making rude noises at the back of class, there is only important gaming fact. So when it came to compiling an exhaustive list of the greatest, most important PC games of all time, we realised that the only way we could articulate the importance of the…
10 years ago
This is a big one. No, really. News reached me via Qt3 that Malba Tahan - henceforth known as Saint Malba Tahan - has created a mod for the original System Shock. As well as letting you configure keys and plays with resolution, it adds mouse-look to the game. System Shock is, frankly, one of the most important videogames of all time, and the difficulty…
11 years ago
Gaming archaeology: now there's an idea. It can only be better than Bonekickers, anyway. Upon hearing that EA Mythic had received several crateloads full of Origin Systems (the long-dead studio behind the Wing Commander and Ultima games, plus System Shock, and once home to the power duo of Warren Spector and Richard Garriot) archive materials, a group of fans arranged to catalogue the treasure trove.…
12 years ago
Yep, it's a System Shock retrospective over at PC Gamer UK. Remembering the crazy 'ol FPS scene of '94, I say a few things about the game that somehow completely failed to define the spirit of the time: The interface seems crude now, mostly because it is devoid of mouse-look. The visuals, too, are hard on modern eyes. But the powerful musculature of the beast…
Okay, in a vague warm-up for Bioshock - and I figure that anything's a better use of my time than sitting on every single Bioshock thread on the internet and pressing "refresh" all day - I download System Shock from Underdogs and get it working on DOSBox, with full sound (P-P-PATHETIC CREATURE OF MEAT AND BONE!) and everything. It'll be easier if I still had…
