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FPS spy romp No One Lives Forever turns 20 today but alas Cate Archer is still confined to her room, unable to come out and play. The secret agent shooter has been tied up in legal gridlock for years. You'll not find it for sale online aside from second-hand, but that hasn't stopped RPS singing its praises all this time. A remaster still seems unlikely, but…
Nightdive's remaster of Westwood's great Blade Runner adventure game will not launch this year after all. Turns out, reverse-engineering a game to rebuild it in a whole new engine without access to the original assets is a bit of work. I still don't see why they're putting this much effort into it when a perfectly fine version is available on GOG, running in ScummVM. Especially…
System Shock remake trailer makes being hunted by a murderous AI sound quite chill
I would not describe System Shock as easy-going, laid-back, or a game for elevator music. Yet here comes a new trailer out of notE3 suggesting that being pursued by the hordes of a sexy murderous AI might be quite calming. Presumably for players who get well into being called "insect". I see you.
Typical: you wait decades for a release of Westwood's Blade Runner game then two come along at once. The original 1997 adventure game popped up on GOG in December, powered by ScummVM, and now Nightdive Studios have announced an Enhanced Edition. They say they'll update character models, upscale cutscenes, and improve the technical trimmings.
Feature: A people-chucking bigbot
Mechwarrior? No, thank you. Transformers? No, sir. Heavy Gear? Not my stompy president. That's correct, the super-sized mass-murdering robot of my desires is from Slave Zero. An absolutely mediocre action game, if my memory of blasting buildings into rubble in 1999 is accurate. But it also let you pluck people off the streets and yeet them sky high, like fleshy little pebbles. That was cool.
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.…
20 years after release, System Shock 2 is finally getting an Enhanced Edition
Like a toolbar on my dad’s PC, System Shock 2 won’t die. In fact, it was released 20 years ago this past Sunday and it's still gaining in power. For most of that time, the game has only been developed in fits and starts, relying on community patches, source code leaks, and the determination of Nightdive Studios to get it back in our hands. We…
Feature: Separating the chaff grenades from the wheat... grenades
It’s a bit tricky to knock together a list of the best upcoming stealth games, because it’s a bit tricky to say what a stealth game even is anymore. Stealth is more frequently looking like a playstyle or bulletpoint rather than the crux of an entire game. Even the best stealth games in recent memory - yer Invisible Incs, Ian Hitmans, Alien: Isolations - have all…
Blood: Fresh Supply drags the classic horror FPS out of the DOS era
For the first time ever, there is an official Windows version of Blood, Monolith Software's classic horror-themed FPS. Blood: Fresh Supply is out today, and a subtle update produced by Night Dive and their porting maestro Samuel "Kaiser" Villarreal, brains behind their Turok, Strife and System Shock updates. It's a surprisingly straightforward port to modern systems, retaining the old look while adding widescreen, high-refresh and…
Feature: The show goes on
“It’s not Citadel Station as it was, but as you remember it”. So goes the pitch for Nightdive's System Shock remake, but to me the early demo I played at GDC was neither. I’ve tiptoed my way through the mutant-infested corridors of its sequel, but the original System Shock always lay beyond an impenetrable wall of 90s design sensibilities. I need mouselook, me. I’ve got…
The System Shock remake drips with neon nostalgia in new footage
Two servings of System Shock goodness in just one day? Why yes, I will have cyber-seconds. Following up after OtherSide's System Shock 3 trailer, Night Dive have shared twenty minutes of uncut exploration from their upcoming remake of the first game. It's taken a while to get here, via a detour into a since-cancelled redesign, but I can't grumble about the results. If their aim…
Our audience may skew towards us old fogeys who remember the days of DOS memory management. Some of you are still young, or just late to the party. The Ancestor Bundle over on Fanatical costs as much as a cup of coffee - cheap cafeteria stuff, not Starbucks - and gets you a bunch of immersive sims including both System Shock Games, Strife (the 90s…
The System Shock remake looks magnificently moody in this new footage
It's been almost three years since we all braved one last trip into the crumbling Kickstarter mines to drag System Shock back into the daylight. Night Dive's modernised do-over of the proto-immersive sim has clearly suffered a few trials and tribulations during the protracted Remakening process, but I'm struck by how similar the latest video is to the relatively spanky demo build I played back…
Night Dive’s System Shock remake looks charmingly retro in new alpha footage
It looks like Night Dive's System Shock remake is finally back on track, after a messy engine switch, a cancelled change in art direction and a delay until 2020. Below, we get our first video peek at the 'adventure alpha' version of the immersive sim revival, currently going out to some higher-tier Kickstarter backers. We also get a little peek at the remake's design methodology…
System Shock: Enhanced Edition now looks sharper and controls better than ever
Nightdive's remake of System Shock has been delayed until 2020, but playing the 1994 original is a more tempting option now. Paving the way for immersive sims like Deus Ex and Dishonored, System Shock is an important part of the genre's history, and after a surprise update yesterday it's a far more playable one.System Shock: Enhanced Edition is now a sharper looking game, expanded to…
Retro FPS rework Forsaken Remastered parties like it’s 1998 today
Descent-like hoverbike FPS Forsaken rides again today, remastered by Nightdive. A fascinating relic from an era of over-filtered textures and lurid coloured lighting, Forsaken Remastered takes the '6 degrees of freedom' concept and makes it faster, louder and dumber. Fun, too, especially in its many messy multiplayer modes. While most of Nightdive's remasters have been as authentic to the source material as possible, this one…
Descent-like retro FPS Forsaken gets a Nightdive remaster next week
The next old-school shooter to get some modern spit-and-polish from retro revival crew Nightdive is Forsaken, a Descent-like '6 Degrees of Freedom' FPS from the awkward early days of 3D acceleration. The update is being handled by Samuel 'Kaiser' Villarreal, brains behind Nightdive's Turok 1/2 & Strife remasters, plus a couple more done just for funsies like a PC port of Doom 64. Forsaken will…
Update: The creation of ReWired was made possible via the level editor, Deck, created by System Shock scholar Dertseha. They spent years (much of it without access to source code) reverse-engineering the game as part of their InkyBlackness project to create a comprehensive set of tools for the game.Here's just what the horrifying cyborg doctor ordered to keep System Shock fans busy while we're waiting on the delayed…
The retronauts at Night Dive Studios have shared a look at the latest version of their crowdfunded System Shock, a game which has gone from a straight remake to an expanded reimagining and back down to remake. They had to scale the game down and lay off some staff after some publisher funding fell through, see. Now, yup, it again looks like System Shock but…
Not too long ago, we reported that things were sounding a bit wobbly over on the System Shock remake's Kickstarter page. Plans to divert from a pure remake to redesign the game from the ground up had spiraled out of control, and money was running low.While some less optimistic folks took this as a death knell for the project and declared it done and dusted…
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