Let's play System Shock: Enhanced Edition [BLIND] #13 - Taking the fight to SHODAN

Channel:

LittleDwarf

Subscribers:

1,140

Published on August 28, 2019 9:00:11 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAdPO_AVfE4

Game:

System Shock (1994)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 1:05:12

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I did play a little of System Shock 2 at some point (though I've never finished it) and I've heard a lot of praise about it. I wanted to try it again and finish it, but it seemed wrong to just play the second installment like that, without knowing the origins. So I decided to try the first one as well. The results were... mixed and I had some trouble adjusting to such an old game, but I did manage to finish it in the end. This is the account of that first time playthrough, with all it's problems and difficulties.

This is an unfiltered, first time experiance of System Shock: Enhanced Edition. It's a blind playthrough, I have no knowledge of the game whatsover. What ensues is quite a bit of clunkyness, struggling with the controls and quite a bit of backtracking.
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System Shock is a 1994 first-person action-adventure video game developed by Looking Glass Technologies and published by Origin Systems. It was directed by Doug Church with Warren Spector serving as producer. The game is set aboard a space station in a cyberpunk vision of the year 2072. Assuming the role of a nameless hacker, the player attempts to hinder the plans of a malevolent artificial intelligence called SHODAN.

System Shock's 3D engine, physics simulation and complex gameplay have been cited as both innovative and influential. The developers sought to build on the emergent gameplay and immersive environments of their previous games, Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss and Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds, by streamlining their mechanics into a more "integrated whole".

Critics praised System Shock and hailed it as a major breakthrough in its genre. It was later placed on multiple hall of fame lists. The game was a moderate commercial success, with sales exceeding 170,000 copies, but Looking Glass ultimately lost money on the project. A sequel, System Shock 2, was released by Looking Glass Studios and offshoot developer Irrational Games in 1999. The 2000 game Deus Ex (also produced by Spector) and the 2007 game BioShock are spiritual successors to the two games. A remade version of the original game by Night Dive Studios is scheduled for release in 2020.

System Shock takes place from a first-person perspective in a three-dimensional (3D) graphical environment. The game is set inside a large, multi-level space station, in which players explore, combat enemies and solve puzzles. Progress is largely non-linear and the game is designed to allow for emergent gameplay. As in Ultima Underworld, the player uses a freely movable mouse cursor to aim weapons, to interact with objects and to manipulate the heads-up display (HUD) interface. View and posture controls on the HUD allow the player to lean left or right, look up or down, crouch, and crawl. Practical uses for these actions include taking cover, retrieving items from beneath the player character and navigating small passages, respectively. The HUD also features three "Multi-Function Displays", which may be configured to display information such as weapon readouts, an automap and an inventory.

Set in the year 2072, the protagonist—a nameless hacker—is caught while attempting to access files concerning Citadel Station, a space station owned by the TriOptimum Corporation. The hacker is taken to Citadel Station and brought before Edward Diego, a TriOptimum executive. Diego offers to drop all charges against the hacker in exchange for a confidential hacking of SHODAN, the artificial intelligence that controls the station. Diego secretly plans to steal an experimental mutagenic virus being tested on Citadel Station, and to sell it on the black market as a biological weapon. To entice cooperation, Diego promises the hacker a valuable military grade neural implant. After hacking SHODAN, removing the AI's ethical constraints, and handing control over to Diego, the protagonist undergoes surgery to implant the promised neural interface. Following the operation, the hacker is put into a six-month healing coma. The game begins as the protagonist awakens from his coma, and finds that SHODAN has commandeered the station. All robots aboard have been reprogrammed for hostility, and the crew have been either mutated, transformed into cyborgs, or killed.