yooooo i gotta get in this
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yeah that was a highlight for me. I mostly enjoyed how understated touches like that were, and how it barely has a tutorial. super bare bones. hope they don’t polish stuff like that away. it’s perfect where it is.
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so I played this for a bit for and I think the characterless and repetitive Creepy Video Game Ambient music is so boring that it made my depression worse and sums up how I feel about it in general.
you know whatever it is people like about mechanical keyboards? that’s what this game does not have
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getting pretty excited about this actually
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Warren Spector’s SSHOCK3 has been put in the bin. I don’t remember if this was ever officially confirmed anywhere. I guess Tencent owns the IP now and will do… something, eventually. This new imsim he’s doing sounds like it might be cool though!!
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Wow that must have been a frustrating experience for everyone involved. Just to cancel it, damn…
Huh, the license must be fragmented, because I know other companies also have the license for derivative and multimedia projects, not Tencent.
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It does look nice!
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Hell yeah good reminder!
The remake is out today!
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Its fuckin good, finally people can play the good System Shock without a million little headaches that come from adjusting to its controls
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I just recently finished the original (the DOS CD version, not even the enhanced edition), and am weighing if I really want to dive back in so soon. I’m tempted! The original is great and this appears to stay true to it. I actually kind of like the original’s funky interface though, so I’ll miss that.
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plugged in
It’s a very straightforward looks & controls remake, like the demos indicated. And the style looks very appealing, runs well, everything needed.
There’s a short quick introduction, necessitated because games can’t ship a paragraph of manual text anymore. The hacker at home, the hacker getting raided, the hacker flipping off the cops… It falls a bit flat. On the surface it lacks confidence - in trying to sketch out the hacker’s home they have to sketch out the hacker as a person and it naturally goes to a few cheap jokes, some retro paraphernalia. It’s not a statement of a strange and claustrophobically dense world of panel gribble like starting on the station.
It uses a handful of signifiers to put the hacker in punk aesthetics and the neo-noir situation of a Gibson protagonist. All accurate to the pastiche the original wanted, yes, but a faithful graphical remake, with its obligatory low-poly game consoles…it’s fundamentally an indulgent experience. It’s nostalgia and it’s comfort. Oh! It’s my old friend Evil Power Ranger Robot, how have you been? Talk sweet to me again, SHODAN.
I’ve been nursing these feelings for a decade as Arkane’s Looking Glass fanproject has really taken off. I crawl over every available topology in these immersive sims, practicing the same heuristics each time and encyclopedically exhausting every level design possibility. It’s essentially mindless for me now, the same facade of thinking people held for SNES JRPGs, some of the easiest games ever made. 0451 is a ritual salve.
I’m getting a lot out of flicking the light switch off and watching the hyper-saturated monitors blink in the dark
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i think this is just what the practice of remakes as a whole are about though. not to say it’s not indulgent. but like - pretty much everything Nintendo since the mid 2000’s is indulgent and about “the feels” in the same way this is. i do also appreciate the effort was put into translating the original visual style and like the ship layout faithfully to like a modern “AAA” type sensibility just because you usually don’t see that, even if the game didn’t need the remake.
i agree that 0451 being a “thinking man’s” thing at this point is a little silly when we have Zachtronics games or Stephen’s Sausage Roll or whatever out there. immersive sims are an oldschool game guy’s AAA fantasy. but i guess i feel similarly nonplussed to the way Souls games are treated as “elevated” that you do to immersive sims here. it’s one fantasy that is still fundamentally a kind of oldschool industry one that is AAA-friendly while still giving winks to a hardcore crowd. it’s fine in itself, but as an end-all-be-all for design it’s painfully limited.
but i dunno! i haven’t played this remake yet - maybe i will. i’m just a lot less bothered by it than i am by a lot of other stuff in this vein. i’d rather see a remake of System Shock 1 than Resident Evil 4 or Silent Hill 2 certainly.
also convinced that like 60% of the reverence for SNES JRPGS is so many of them have top tier music.
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Right, it’s just a noticeable disjunct when the game participates so hard in aesthetics of youth and rebellion, and tries harder to show it.
Nintendo was on a highly-strung model of “same elements, new gimmick to drive gameplay” for maybe fifteen years. In some ways it’s more honest than most companies – they absolutely were creating new interactions each time and straight up don’t add installments if they don’t have anything to do. But I found it pretty redundant.
They’ve really turned it around since the latter half of the Wii U, though. I think a new generation started getting their pitches accepted, even in the hidebound franchises.
I’ve really been thinking about how the new Zeldas, especially Tears of the Kingdom, show Nintendo as one of the only big studios thinking about how to adapt single-player to how kids play games now, and succeeding. It’s a game that deeply engages with Fortnite and Roblox.
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The original game has this intro as well but it’s like 4x as brief lol: you get the pan through Future City except its not painfully long, you see the supremely dweeby main character, cops bust in, we see the establishing shot of citadel station in like a minute. shodan’s narration explains the entire plot - we hacked in and got arrested, Edward Diego gives us access to shodan because he wants her ethical constraints removed, she is clearly evil, we find out why we are in a coma for 6 months, game start. Over in literally 2 minutes. It rocks!
now in this one it is a lot funnier that you are now a buff cool guy hacker who isnt afraid of no cops and diego is now a sinister dracula man instead of an incompetent bureaucrat because i really liked the idea of the main character being this guy
and the whole shodan thing being the result of an incredibly stupid guy trying to climb the corporate ladder instead of being ridiculously malevolent like hes the gman or something
Anyway, this looks like a really good remake of the game besides all that, so i can’t complain too much!
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