System Shock Remake

[SDG]

Reviews are great. Most of them complain that it's too faithful to the original which is a glowing endorsement for non-retards.

https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/system-shock

I preordered it.

[The_Mask]

Okay, first off: never pre-order.

Second off: never endorse remakes or reboots. Even sequels should be regarded with disdain.

3rd off, and probably the most egregious one: Metacritic is an aggregator. Not a solid 100% reliable opinion. And most reviewers would give a 10/10 to any remake of a classic hit, because it's an easy write-up.

Bottom line would be to have some filter.

[SDG]

Meh. I will never play the original because the controls sound like asshole cancer. This remake is perfect for somebody like me who never got to experience the System Shocks back in the day.

[General Reign]

I really love how eloquent this ignorant prick is. I played the game when I was 8 so SDG is not as smart as any 5th grader.

[SDG]

I really love how eloquent this ignorant prick is. I played the game when I was 8 so SDG is not as smart as any 5th grader.

Meh, probably the same type of asshat that would try to argue that the original Resident Evil is better than the 2002 Remake. As somebody who played the original around 8, it absolutely is not as good as the remake.

[agentorange]

sickeningly bad taste. this shit is garbage. anyone who likes it is a retard

[General Reign]

I really love how eloquent this ignorant prick is. I played the game when I was 8 so SDG is not as smart as any 5th grader.

Meh, probably the same type of asshat that would try to argue that the original Resident Evil is better than the 2002 Remake. As somebody who played the original around 8, it absolutely is not as good as the remake.

The remake is for sure a better game than the original when it comes to Resident Evil 1, but that does not mean the og is not worth playing as your goofy ass implied once before.

[SDG]

I really love how eloquent this ignorant prick is. I played the game when I was 8 so SDG is not as smart as any 5th grader.

Meh, probably the same type of asshat that would try to argue that the original Resident Evil is better than the 2002 Remake. As somebody who played the original around 8, it absolutely is not as good as the remake.

The remake is for sure a better game than the original when it comes to Resident Evil 1, but that does not mean the og is not worth playing as your goofy ass implied once before.

I wasn't implying it wasn't worth playing. I said I, ME, will never play it. My whole point was the System Shock remake is good for people who have no desire to play the original.

[revenant]

Meh. I will never play the original because the controls sound like asshole cancer.

AFAIK the enhanced edition is basically the same game but with freelook controls.

[rusty_shackleford]

sickeningly bad taste. this shit is garbage. anyone who likes it is a retard

wow
is system shock that bad of a game?

[maidenhaver]

Yes, its a mayonnaise-slathered turd.

[KnightoftheWind]

I never liked the aesthetics of the game, both the original and the remake, but then again Sci-Fi/Cyberpunk has never really appealed to me.

[SDG]

Yes, its a mayonnaise-slathered turd.

Mayonnaise is delicious.

[General Reign]

System Shock is fine if you can play games made on PC before 95. The interface is the only crap part and that last remaster they did fixed that shit anyway so it's a non issue.

[rusty_shackleford]

I liked mandalore's video on the original game

[Roguey]

Meh. I will never play the original because the controls sound like asshole cancer.

AFAIK the enhanced edition is basically the same game but with freelook controls.

Also remaps the controls to something a bit more sensible.

System Shock is fine if you can play games made on PC before 95. The interface is the only crap part and that last remaster they did fixed that shit anyway so it's a non issue.

Eh, not quite. There's some things they couldn't change, like how you have to keep toggling in and out of mouselook mode and weird shortcuts (the map is ctrl + a, reloading and changing your ammo types is ctrl + backspace and alt + backspace, arming a grenade is ctrl + " and so on).

[Atlantico]

I am no fan of remakes, but I'll buy this one if those rumors are true and they've made an effort to remake the game faithfully. I've bought the original and enhanced editions already and they're fine, but I was never the target audience for Ultima Underworld or SS1.

[Acrux]

I'm not sure if this should go here or in the game journalist degeneracy thead.

PC Gamer review:

The situation wasn't helped by another bit of painstaking fidelity to the original project: A complete absence of an objective screen or mission markers. Instead, you need to pay attention to the logs you pick up and emails you receive to figure out what to do next.

https://www.pcgamer.com/system-shock-re ... of enemies.

[agentorange]

if you cant adapt to the controls of the original game you probably shouldnt be playing video games, or if you do choose to play them then know that your opinions on them are worth nothing. its like someone who calls themselves a lover of literature being unable to read any book written before 1950 because they cant get used to the differences in language, or a film lover being unable to watch black and white movies, etc etc. you are an enemy of good taste and good games if you like this trash, and the reason why every game UI is now the same and why every game is now nothing more than a palette swap built on the same carbon copy framework with no real variety. night dive is on the same level as beamdog, harbingers of decline and bozos gobble it up.

[Klerik]

They should add an 8-bit color mode that pixelates down to 640x480

[SDG]

if you cant adapt to the controls of the original game you probably shouldnt be playing video games

@rusty_shackleford where is that retard button at?

[General Reign]

if you cant adapt to the controls of the original game you probably shouldnt be playing video games

@rusty_shackleford where is that retard button at?

[The_Mask]

if you cant adapt to the controls of the original game you probably shouldnt be playing video games

@rusty_shackleford where is that retard button at?

You don't want that to happen, cuz you'd find out real quick a lot of people agree with his take.

Flexibility is good in life.

[Segata Sanshiro]

if you cant adapt to the controls of the original game you probably shouldnt be playing video games

@rusty_shackleford where is that retard button at?

Bitch you were crying on the dex about the time limit in this game (which is pretty lenient, and aumented from the original) and thinking about refunding it because of it. The retard button should be the ugly jewess of your avatar.

[SDG]

I don't play games with time limits. That's one rule I'll never break. But the game doesn't force a time limit on you so it's a non issue for me.

[Atlantico]

I can appreciate old game jank as much as anyone. Many RPGs from the mid 80s are excellent and play just fine with their limitations.

System Shock is more like playing a game with a graphing calculator. They tried something, it just did not work as well as it should have, so the "enhanced edition" was absolutely fantastic to get.

This new version is interesting and I want to give it a chance, but I see this more as a "new" game even if it is faithful to the original. Like a shot-for-shot remake of a movie, it's the "same", but it's not the same.

[Cedric]

I don't like the remake at all. The intro is much longer and much worse, they drown you in exposition, the voice logs feel longer (might be imagining this), the fighting and gunplay is subpar (the one thing they could have improved) and the graphics are imo a bit too low res.

Edit: they did get the original VA at least so that's positive. I guess.

[Tweed]

I'm still near the start, in level R.

Media might have bitched about how retro the game is, but really it reeks of modern design philosophy. The agonizingly long and pointless intro is just the start of the trouble. The original intro summed everything up nicely and got you into the game, here you get to sit through a load of product placements and yet another city right out of Blade Runner. The additional scenery is out of place and adds nothing. As several other people have mentioned it's difficult to discern items from the background, there's something to be said for the abstraction of games from the 90s when ultra realistic scenery was impossible. The dark lighting doesn't fit a space station no matter what they say and the one place that was very dark, engineering, is now very bright. It feels like a bad Doom 3 mod and it even has at least one Doom 3 style hazard in it.

The animations feel very stiff, like everyone was an animatronic with their motors wound too tight, or like everyone drank way too much coffee. You can see that right away in the intro when the hacker gives the tri-op security the finger. Item oogling animations waste time that could be better spent actually playing the game. For every log you find you have to stop and do the "scan it in" animation, for every locked door you have to swipe a keycard in front of it to get it open, it's unnecessary. Weapons still feel gutless, poor feedback especially for melee and the new interface makes it harder to keep track of how much ammo you have remaining unless you open up your inventory. The original ammo system emulated the act of reloading by having the player move the cursor down to reload their weapon, a small pip meter let you know how much ammo you had in reverse without being intrusive. Grenades are hard to use since enemies move towards you while the grenades are too busy laying there being worthless, there was a reason why they detonated on impact in the original game it would have been practically nothing to add this feature as the alt-fire mode. EMP grenades no longer destroy robots, they only knock them out, this change has gotten me killed several times.

The worst culprit by far has to be the voice acting. Z-rate voice actors give their very worse for this masterpiece. Overemoting, painfully long dramatic pauses to add tension, lifeless delivery, and just plan badly written dialogue makes every audio log a trial to be faced. Someone at Dumpster Dive obviously wanted more EMOTION in the audio logs, so people could really FEEL how tortured these poor people were before they died. Nevermind that most of them were scientists and as such the more level-headed, analytical deliveries of the original make more sense and they get right to the point instead of dragging it out with horrible emoting. For some reason they decided to make Diego a bigger part of the game instead of a surprise for later on and again, this rewrite feels cheap and pointless. They also cheapen Lansing's character, making it sound like they were autodialing Citadel Station, hoping for someone to pick up rather than a counter terrorist consultant who realizes there's one person on the station SHODAN has no clue about so they start making preparations to contact them when they wake up. Even her lines "First, find a weapon, you're going to need it" reflects on how low we've sunk in game design and trust in the player. I mean, the lead pipe is right there, do you really need to tell the player to grab it? Are modern gamers that stupid?

I've encountered several bugs like not being able to turn on my shields 4 NO RASIN, fatal crashes, getting stuck on things, and the game slowing to a crawl when monsters get gibbed.

Cyberspace would be one of the few improvements, but not without its own foibles. Cyberspace is a bisexual lit descent clone and entirely linear, you start at one end and blast your way to the end to blow up the not-reactor to unlock whatever quest item you needed like a code or a door lock. In the original cyberspace there were branching paths and lots of additional data to find, it also wasn't garishly ugly. SHODAN no longer performs a trace and burn on you even though it would make loads of sense, but I guess that wouldn't line up well with their new cyberspace and it would make zoomies scream. So each cyberjack is now a one and done thing, it doesn't require multiple passes to get everything, I guess that's okay.

Then there's the matter of garbage collection. A busywork mechanic that makes the player clean off entire shelves of useless crap and vaporize it into scrap so they can convert it into goodboy tokens to spend later at vending machines. Resources are more limited off of monster drops than the original, like detox patches don't seem to drop at all anymore, I had to find static ones or buy them. So far all the weapon mods I've found have been in vending machines as well and extra ammo is helpful so you'll probably end up being a space janny unless you want to make things more difficult for yourself. Really though it's just one massive disruption to the gameplay loop and out of place.

So far the game is a trudge, updated in all the wrong places and unrewarding.

[Tweed]

I take back what I said about cyberspace, give me OG System Shock's cyberspace any day of the week over this bad descent clone. If you die everything resets except for reactors so you get to do the whole thing over again if you didn't get to the end.

And the more I play this visually busy mess, the more I find beauty in those old, easy to read games. And to dig deeper on that, Prey is a modern game and an imsim, yet doesn't have anywhere near the same kind of problem Shock does in being unable to discern or find valuable objects in the mess that makes up the visuals. Not even Doom 3 which was one of the first games to reach a level of visual detail that made it hard to detect interactable from props has this much trouble and that game is darker than my asshole at the bottom of a well. What the hell were these people thinking?

[Segata Sanshiro]

And the more I play this visually busy mess, the more I find beauty in those old, easy to read games. And to dig deeper on that, Prey is a modern game and an imsim, yet doesn't have anywhere near the same kind of problem Shock does in being unable to discern or find valuable objects in the mess that makes up the visuals. Not even Doom 3 which was one of the first games to reach a level of visual detail that made it hard to detect interactable from props has this much trouble and that game is darker than my asshole at the bottom of a well. What the hell were these people thinking?

Visual readability will always remain a problem as long as such concept clashes with the masses' conception of "good graphics". It's a lost battle.