System Shock

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.…

Tagged with feature, Irrational Games, Night Dive Studios, System Shock, System Shock 2, System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition, System Shock 3, System Shock: Enhanced Edition.

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…

Tagged with feature, Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun, Podcast, The RPS Electronic Wireless show, Wolfenstein, Assassin's Creed, Dark Souls: Remastered, Deus Ex, Doom, Grow Home, No One Lives Forever, Okami HD, Pathologic 2, Prey, Resident Evil 2, System Shock.

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 you…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Deus Ex, NEO Scavenger, System Shock.

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…

Tagged with feature, RPG, speedruns, The Elder Scrolls, The RPG Scrollbars, Two Worlds, Divinity: Original Sin, Mass Effect Andromeda, Planescape: Torment, Quest For Glory, System Shock, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Wasteland 2.

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,…

Tagged with feature, lands of lore iii, RPG, The RPG Scrollbars, tides of numenera, wing commander, Fallout 4, System Shock, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Ultima VII.

"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 TruthIt's hard to argue. They're…

Tagged with feature, RPG, The RPG Scrollbars, BioShock, BioShock 2, BioShock Infinite, South Park: The Stick of Truth, System Shock, System Shock 2, System Shock 3.

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…

Tagged with clouds of xeen, feature, RPG, speech packs, The RPG Scrollbars, Ultima VIII, System Shock, Ultima VII.

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…

Tagged with feature, Night Dive Studios, BioShock, System Shock, System Shock Reboot.

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,…

Tagged with feature, Immersive Sims, immersive-sim, Irrational Games, Ken Levine, Looking Glass Studios, BioShock, BioShock Infinite, System Shock, System Shock 2.

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.

Tagged with cartoons, Disney, Epic Mickey, feature, interview, Junction Point, Ultima Underworld, Warren-Spector, Deus Ex, System Shock.

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…

Tagged with a fairly strong cv all in all, Epic Mickey, feature, interview, ion storm, Looking Glass, Thief™ II: The Metal Age, Ultima Underworld, Warren-Spector, Deus Ex, Dishonored, System Shock, Thief.

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…

Tagged with Blue Manchu, Card Hunter, feature, interview, XCOM, BioShock, System Shock, X-COM: UFO Defense.

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…

Tagged with arma II, feature, Flashback, Frontier: Elite 2, Star Wars: TIE Fighter, the typing of the dead, The Very Important List Of PC Games, Unreal Tournament 2004, Battlefield 2, Battlezone, Counter-Strike, Doom, EVE Online, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Hidden & Dangerous, Hitman: Blood Money, Left 4 Dead 2, Neverwinter Nights, Outcast, Planetside, Quake, Quake III Arena, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, Sacrifice, Syndicate, System Shock, Team Fortress 2, Tribes 2, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.