Ten years after purchasing this game (1999) - this Xmas - I finally held my nerve and bravery and took on the final hurdle to finish it -
With my boy behind me and urging me on "C'mon dad - get off I want to play.."
I got into the second ship - the Rickenbacker by escape pod - confronted the deadly aliens, leaped across death defying chasms of utter horror - and met the nemesis of the game - and one of PC Gaming most evil bitches - SHODAN - and we know in these circumstances the handsome journo always wins.
The game is quite amazing - I have been a fan of these types of first person sci rpg for ages - the developers all come from the same family as The Thief, Ultima Underworld and apparently the new game Bioshock is the spiritual successor of System Shock 2.
I got Bioshock ready and waiting next by the way.
This game? What is it like? I will give you a link to wiki in a minute - but probably one of the best things about the game is that your character is very very vulnerable - for a lot of the time.
This means you crap yourself when you hear some of the zombie/alien/crew member shout at you "Hurry! Run!" and a lot of the other enemies you encounter also send you the shivers.
You have the psychotic cyber midwives that always seem to hover around the alien eggs, the crazy surgically altered monkeys who use deadly psionic powers on you -
Your bog standard char out of the oven is able to increase a whole lot of skills via cybernetic implants, but their basic HP remains quite low - and this means you start running when the security cameras spot you and for each deck of the ship your first priority is to find a surgical unit to help you heal.
In this game you wish your strength was much higher as you often find lots of items you want to keep - but you cant - possibly forcing you to specialise.
For example - there are a few different armours, a suit to reduce damage in radioactive areas, a armour suit powered by batteries etc - but you cant carry them all.
You have a wide choice of weapons such as a wrench, pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, grenade launcher, laser pistols that have to be recharged but do not use ammo and some exotic alien weapons you can find later on that can be used only after being researched using strange chemicals.
As you progress through the ships guided by a crew member called Polito you encounter fellow crew members - but they have all been turned into Zombie crazy murderers by a strange alien infection and thus begins a risky battle of wits to stay alive and mostly dodge these guys and progress and find out what happened and rectify the situation.
My top five moments?
Fixing the lifts and finally meeting Polito -
Every now and again encoutering ghostly apparitions of the former crew members - usually screaming for mercy -
Not spotting a security camera that then goes on alert and then knowing for the next two minutes every enemy on that level is heading towards my direction -
Finding the rifle and having enough ammo to use it on auto - eat this zombie scum!
And - and the end bit.
System Shock 2 runs perfectly well on my Vista PC, Ihave the original disk and installed the full game and then ran a NO CD Crack = I would recommened it to any person that likes a bit of sci fi first person shooter thingy.
And apparently the latest patches even allows multiplayer - so anyone else want to meet me onboard and face certain death?
Here is the wiki link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock_2
The game is often voted in the top pc games of all time awards - currently in the PC Gamer editors choice at number 16.
