I've been meaning to try Bioshock for a while, but as a prelude decided to detour through a bit of its famous predecessor System Shock beforehand. It's a game I never got around to trying when it was new, seeing as it came out while I was still tootling around on my Sega Genesis, in between my old knock-off non-Sinclair Spectrum and my family buying our first actual PC. By the time its sequel came out I was neck-deep in Mechwarriors and Half-Lives. I have no intention of actually finishing System Shock. I can only stomach so much pixelation these days and I've never been nearly as much a fan of FPS as I am of simulations, strategy or cRPGs.
But, as cynical as my chosen name implies me to be, and as much as I enjoy bitchslapping everyone's nostalgia until it alges, I must admit I'm somewhat impressed with System Shock. (For its time, that is.) Hell, if any genre can be said to have benefited most from technological improvements over the last 25 years, it would have to be... flight simulators... but FPS games nonetheless rank a close second. Yet by the same token, I had to think back to early FPS and realize how many more features System Shock offered over its close predecessors or contemporaries like Wolfenstein and Doom. Some gimmicks like adding actual verticality to the 2.5D visuals were simply a logical feature for such titles to adopt. Others though, like the simulated inertia, the complex maps, the resource management stretching beyond ammunition, the puzzle solving or an actual storyline to follow, the qualitatively and not just quantitatively different baddies, for once support the fanboys' claim to how influential this game must've been not just among FPS but future action-adventure or RPGs. I even managed to find out the hard way that guns have multiple types of ammunition, and that mobs have resistances, by reloading a dart gun and trying to tranquilize cyborgs.
So this, then, is why Half-Life had me pulling so many levers!
That interface even puts most modern games to shame in at least one major way: the info panels on the bottom can be cycled through five types of information at the player's discretion. Speaking for all those of us who've wished we could at least shift the minimap around, let me ask WHY?!? doesn't every game have that 1994 option a quarter of a century later?
Nevertheless it's still a product of its time, and as such SS also serves as a reminder of the lack of artistic quality we took for granted in the old days, the piles of incoherence we swallowed in our excitement to see something, anything, created via computer. And oh, how we thirsted for anything futuristic back in the nineties, increasingly frustrated that the Cold War had ended but the cold world remained as dreary as always, looking forward to Y2K to deliver unto us our flying cars and personal jetpacks.
Look, it's a "force bridge" - !
Yes, a force bridge. Spanning two whole meters. Uuuuse the farce, Luke! Seeing that thing extend set me giggling, wondering at how many gigawatt hours the station wastes by using hard light technology where A Plank would serve perfectly well. Or what the hell purpose those stereotypical old puzzle rooms are supposed to serve in-universe. Judging by the architecture of this station, if humans were actually dumb enough to launch that clusterfuck into space, then SHODAN's perfectly entitled to wipe us out. Too dumb to live. And sure, puzzle rooms, eye-catching but nonsensical architecture, gratuitous flashy magical or futuristic substitutes for mundane objects (mithril toilet paper, anyone?) these are all an inescapable part of gaming... to some extent. Some. Some! extent. But "some" is a very relative term, and unfortunately SS was still decidedly caught up in the Betty Boop stage of creativity seen in any new medium, gleefully flitting past coherence or aesthetics in its rush to harness the godlike power of the cyber.
It's hardly just a matter of logic either. That repeating red snail circuitry pattern on the walls vaults over futurism to merely a gratuitous eyesore, and lack of detail combined with overly busy backgrounds sometimes imposes an unnecessary pixel-hunting element to exploration, a common fault of early graphics. Your exploration also yields audio logs by the station's previous tenants, ranging from flavor-layering details to the story to actual clues you'll need to advance. While they're yet another way to build on the presumed simplicity of FPS, their audio, in an utterly bizarre development choice, re-tells the story of the text in different wording. Neither is the audio a short blurb of the written log, nor is the text merely a transcript, with the result of each acting as white noise for the other. But hey, it was still a point of pride in those days: look, look, we have actual human voices instead of just 8-bit effects! Who cares what they're saying? We. Have. Voices!
No one can "boop-oop a-doop!" like Betty Boop can.
But even as I finish exploring the first level map, what really stands out are the ways in which System Shock tried to break out of the "orc in a 10x10 room" adventuring mold. Yeah, I'll admit it: this thing advanced its medium.
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