I've spent a few days getting to know System Shock 2.

The narrative seems to bridge back to the original System Shock, and I get that feeling that I should have tried to hunt down the old game, but I'd rather not be tied down by that. I think my mission in playing this is to understand why people tend to think of SS2 fondly, and compare it to Bioshock, often saying SS2 was the better of the two.

In that regard so far, I can say:

The game is much more brutal about builds. In true complex RPG fashion I had to restart my game because the build I'd selected was inadequate. I would have liked to have at least a baseline of competence in the fields where the Navy is said to practice, but instead I wound up picking stuff that didn't really help.

That said, the amount of options feel a lot less fluid, in a good way. You decide to go down a path and you get a different experience, though as to how different I'm not quite sure. I can't reach the loot on that ledge, but I get access to a box with loot. I don't get that much damage with a puny pistol, but can research the chilled monkey brains to get a bonus to damage.

The narrative itself is fairly straightforward so far, although I'm not far along really so there could be changes. I've actually stopped listening to tapes, which is probably not a good idea, but I miss the ability from Bioshock to hit "T" when you find a new tape recorder. Here the interface in general is a bit less than optimized, even though there's a lot more to manage here than in Bioshock. Enjoying SHODAN and XERXES voice acting so far.

The Thief engine, an engine I love, I think works better in the dark than it does in well-lit, antiseptic corridors. I find it hard to get past some of the polygonal bodies... I actually think it would be easier for me to have empathy for the sprites of the first System Shock than these guys, but it could be down to how I largely skipped over the early 3D gaming days from the sprites before them. Still, the engine does have its familiar quirks too, where I'm never quite sure where I am with regard to the platform I'm trying to leap to (thankfully the vaulting mechanic saves this from being a rage quit for me).

The game REALLY opens up when you hit engineering, such that it's rather intimidating, and the turrets are often so fast and so deadly that I find it a major stopping point when I hit a room with those. At least with my restart I can use shotguns now, hack more efficiently, and mod weapons a little bit (though being told that I can put 24 bullets in a clip on the pistol makes me laugh, since I rarely have that many. The next mod makes reloading the bullets I don't have faster!). Will probably try to buy a point in maintenance so I don't have to scrounge weaponry all the time.

Despite the wonkiness, I'm glad that the customization goes beyond clicking off stats. You can use the environment to your advantage, hide behind one guy while another guy accidentally shoots him, crush a robot with an elevator, that sort of thing. Emergent situations, I guess, although a lot of the potential for these moments is telegraphed to allow the player to take advantage of them.

In all I see WHY Bioshock is so closely related, even basic mechanical similarities, like alcohol giving a boost to your health but subtracting psi, or the ancestor to the Vita Chamber that many seemed resent in Bioshock, or the chirpy vending machines, all feel like a direct philosophical copy-paste. I'm cool with that, though I'm still wondering if, along the line, my current build will be obsolete and I'll have to start over again; Bioshock at least had momentum in that regard. I do wish that Bioshock had a bit more possibility when it came to customizing, though I'm not sure I would have liked it so much if it had been quite as final with the changes as System Shock 2 is... maybe an experimental grace period?

The games feel different enough that I don't think I can say one is superior to another; SS2 feels more flexible with choices but more rigid when you make them, and it's got the disadvantage of being an older game with a rougher interface, while Bioshock, if you strip away the derivative stuff, is stronger in the interface, but the choices you make, apart from the little sister stuff which I've said I liked, feel largely inconsequential since you're never bound to anything, and pretty much get everything, and more than you can use, by the time you're done. I wonder if Bioshock Infinite's 1999 mode will be a compromise as far as character builds are concerned.

Will report back from the station when I learn more!

I started Bioshock just a little while ago, and completed it today. I already knew every little plot point, and those that I'd forgotten were quickly remembered when I reached their scripted points. I enjoyed the secrets, the audiofiles, the rescuing of innocents, the happy ending. It does say something, either about the craft or the tropes they used, that I was affected emotionally by saving the Little Sisters even though I knew it was coming. Not heavily, but you know, enough to note it.

I liked the modding, though all the options grew unwieldy toward the end. I felt my character had a bell curve of personalization, where there wasn't much to start, and toward the end I pretty much had everything I wanted, with Adam to spare. I don't see myself replaying it any time soon; all the mods I wanted I took, and I don't see the game playing out substantially differently if I pick one mod earlier than another. Maybe a bit, but not much.

Bioshock did manage to provide a successful advertisement for Bioshock Infinite, because it looks like they'll be doing more of this limited complexity and customization that runs fairly smoothly from one signpost to the next, and if they manage to get some of that incidental AI randomness that will sweeten it somewhat. I've been told that B2 is better in some ways, though some of the buzz has worn off, so I may seek it out down the road. I'm also curious about System Shock 1 and 2, they being spiritually connected, though I don't know if I have access to the first one, unless it's through the second's disc?

It was a positive experience overall, and I can see why it made the impact it did, a lot of love went into many of the levels, and that richness was clear early on (though it bled out later, especially when I felt that it ran a tad too long for the arc it was trying to show me). I sorta wish it had a longevity mode that would allow me a bit more to do on a new playthrough-- I guess I could hunt down extra secrets and try to see if I found all the audio logs. Sounds a bit tedious, though. Also, as much as I felt the context was fine as far as shootin' folks was concerned, I'm a bit tapped out on the murder-as-solution mechanic for the time being. Not sure if there's much out there that'll help recharge my batteries. Maybe I should get back to making my own games and see if I can put my effort where my typing fingers are, with regard to alternate kinds of conflict resolution.

Anyone out there still waiting to play Bioshock? Any long-term opinions on this game? It must seem pretty old to many of you.

I loaded up both Savage Empire and Martian Dreams after getting them free from GOG. I actually managed to get pretty far in Savage Empire by just charging into the jungle, killing some of the local wildlife, and figuring out pretty early how to get people to "join" my group, but when I reached a river where a raft and some paddles lay, I never could figure out how to get the damn thing to go. Maybe it needed an extra person, I only had three at the time, but it would be nice if it gave me some feedback on this.

Playing a bit of Martian Dreams solidified a long-ago held impression that it was by far the more refined of the two games, despite the appeal of Savage Empire's subject matter for my pulpy heart, so it's probably going to be the one I'll seriously play. The I-need-a-V8 slanty presentation and the inventory system are a bit clunky to me, but I want to see if I'll be able to get hints of the progress through the game that I'd made when I'd first played it a long time ago, back when I borrowed it from a friend of mine.

It also seems a bit turn-based, which I remember Ultima VII not being, perhaps wrongly. That's a great relief to me, since I remember U7 being a nightmare to play, even on an intended system that happened to be running it a little fast. Of course since it's emulated through Dosbox, old Martian Dreams shouldn't be too bad. And hey, Martian Dreams allows you a bit more customization for your character. Progressive nuff.

It's a bit charming how both narratives try to shoehorn the Avatar into the adventures, but I feel it has better solidity than... I guess other possible contrivances, and Martian Dreams even manages to project a healthy amount of John Carter of Mars without seeming like a low-rent imitation.

I'll admit this, like I have before: old-school RPGs are intimidating to me, even though I'm a fan of them in theory. I guess it's taken me years to realize that some games are a lot nicer to the player than others, that it pays to have a bit of faith in the designer that they're not going to create something cruelly difficult, even if it's an older design.

Lemme know if you have any memories of the Worlds of Ultima games!

Limbo

That One Video Series That One Gal Is Making on Kickstarter

Wii...(said in a high-pitched tone, with voice trailing off)

SWTOR

MISC (NOT MINSC)

In the coming days, I'll tell my friends about how a website announced the release of its new project, and this project is pretty much what colleagues and I have been working on for the past month. Some of my friends will likely tell me that there's nothing new under the sun, that there's no reason to stop working on my own stuff.  It's true, to a point.
 
Still, the project is very close to ours in its design goals, it's robust, and it's got a decent following already. When you dream about making a game, or writing, you know that (unless you're consumed by your own self-importance) you're building on what's come before, but that maybe you'll get that extra bit of recognition for taking that next step. Whether the project continues will have a lot to do with whether we can differentiate ourselves from this thing, or market the idea in such a way to bypass direct comparisons. Unfortunately, it's not the kind of thing you can just tell yourself is going to disappear after release, since it's as much a platform as it is a product.
 
And yet, between writing the paragraph above and this one, I found something that is fundamentally different between our project and theirs, something that broke that looming depression and told me I could at least compete, if not be the only person with a cool sign to wave overhead. This tiny difference meant that the way the player will interact with it gives rise to uncertainty and nebulous pacing, while ours is... something else. Maybe they're on the right track for how to make money on something like this? Maybe I'm setting myself up to be exhausted? I don't know, but I will say that the surge of encouragement I got from this fact makes up for whatever exhaustion there may be.
 
I'd like to say there's a lesson here, and I guess there is, but it's not the point of writing any of this, or even posting the blog after that sudden turn of events killed my original reason for starting. I will take this chance, though, to remind people who, like me, are ready for the sky to fall: keep your eyes open. If the sky's not really falling, you'll realize it eventually. And if it really happens to start falling, you'll at least be able to avoid chunks of sky.

When you see that word "now", stop. Don't click on the ad, don't read the rest of the link text. Stop and remember that the word now is probably the single most abused word in in marketing, and it gets traction exactly because we assume there is some sort of urgency assigned to the word. Most of the time, there fucking isn't.

"Now" is a pet word of marketers precisely because we're trained since we're kids to respond to it. It's a danger word, something that flicks our senses on and makes us ready for fight or flight. But for someone whose job it is to bring in the numbers, "now" gets those numbers. Never mind the exhaustion, never mind the banality of seeing a ton of Facebook updates with the same words over and over. Now gets results, so it continues to be used.

I'm not stopping you from clicking on that link, I'm just asking you to remember, once you do click on that link, to ask yourself what got you there. Did it warrant that immediate click? I'm betting, a good amount of the time, especially for straight up ads, it didn't.

Words like "now" are used to push us around, and they're so commonly used that you are pretty much forced to use that word when you're in marketing, otherwise your boss will tell you it's missing, like it was punctuation or proper spelling. I've become hyper-aware of these things of late, and as such I have an adverse negative reaction to them. That's not necessarily helpful either; I know advertisers are sometimes trying to talk about products that are genuinely worth my time, and are just competing against the noise of a bunch of others doing the same thing, but still... it does feel like an assault.

I'm probably not the only one who, at least on my old, slow computer, used to block ads. Man, was it a relief. And I wound up avoiding on that computer some rather serious threats to security that sneak in through some malicious ads. But even the legitimate ads, all the distractions, are like being hit in the face with the city of Las Vegas every time you try to go to the bathroom. Foreign language websites are a huge relief to me because the words are gibberish to my uneducated mind. I can look at the leering billboard and wonder about what's going through the model's head, rather than figuring out if that's too much yuan to pay for hand lotion.

Not sure if that's ever occurred to you. I know some people who get annoyed when I criticize ads, and I've learned the frustration of trying to sell a game idea to a cynical public, at least indirectly, so I don't think of advertising as a monolithic evil as I used to. But I also know there are some really creepy people who are attracted to that line of work who are convinced of their own superpowers in molding the minds of the hapless public. It doesn't often pay off, but they think it does, even when someone may fully recognize what they're being asked to do, rather than being tricked. There's a bit of magic in all of this, or at least magical thinking, of the 3. ??? 4. Profit! variety. We don't quite know what goes through the heads of millions of people who click on a link, but we have a pretty good idea what goes through our own heads when we do. Just take note of that, before you move on. If we build up some immunity to tricks like "now", maybe they'll have to work harder to relay some actual information, at least until we get lazy again :)

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Star Wars: The Old Republic

For the last week my gaming time has pretty much been devoted to Legend of Grimrock.
 
Combat is straightforward; you click on a character to cast a spell or swing a weapon, and you get two readied options to choose from, one for each hand. Spells require extra button presses to use the right combination of runes (order doesn't matter, just total combination), although you can have a readied spell if you want. Anyone can use any weapon, but in order to be effective in the later part of the game, your character's class needs to support that weapon type. Anyone can wear damage-absorbing armor, too, but without skill in that class of armor (light or heavy), you'll take a heavy hit to your evasion characteristic, which lets you avoid damage altogether. 
 
Unlike Dungeon Master, you MUST click in order to attack, rather than using attack hotkeys. I suppose this simulates the fumbling and coordination needed to attack in real life somewhat, the spells even more so, although it does have the effect of focusing your attention on the corner of the screen where the attack buttons are, rather than at the beautifully rendered enemies. Also unlike Dungeon Master, classes are absolute. In DM, you could have a character with different specializations of priest spells, assassin skills, wizard spells, or warrior abilities. Here, your route is a bit more restricted, although within those roles you may branch out in several ways, having one fighter specialize in armor and swords, with another just in maces or unarmed combat, or a party of wizards each specializing in a single element.
 
That said, the game owes a lot to Dungeon Master and its cousins. Combat is real time, but because the game is set on a grid (and movement and attacks have cooldowns), you're able to maneuver to avoid attackers who would simply swarm you in a fully 2D/3D game, and you can avoid attacks a bit easier because they follow straight lines, although things are fast enough that this is still tough. Maneuvering is done through keyboard commands, and facing is vitally important. Your team is always in a box formation, with two in the front and two in the back. If you're outflanked, the guys/gals/things in the back can get poked. Since you usually put the wimpy ones in back this may result in some messy fights, but that added tactical level is damned charming if you ask me. 
 
Character creation allows preset party members, but I made my own group. There are different races with favored classes and statistics, and you're allowed to pick a few traits that are locked-in once character creation is complete that can give you special resistances, skill points, or other advantages. Classes allow you to focus on certain abilities right from the start, and it's smart to start specializing early, especially with spellcasters because they CANNOT cast spells until at least one of the "spell: ???" slots is unlocked. I focused on spellcraft for my only mage, and after some experimentation in unlocking a few spells I realized that the spells I had unlocked were not really pertinent to combat. Took me a while but eventually I built up a competent ice mage. Each point in a category makes them more effective, and there are tiers in those categories that give your only statistical boosts (other than from your equipment), but some abilities are simply not possible until a minimum tier has been reached.
 
What makes this game fun for me, though, is that it has plenty of puzzles, including tougher ones that are optional, and that they feel perfectly integrated into the environment. I have never, ever felt as much fun as I have with some of these puzzles, and they all stem from the grid-based, trigger-based design of the game. It encourages you to experiment, and you are frequently rewarded for perserverence. There are also times when attacking the problem from a different angle, or even momentarily giving up, can actually yield solutions. The balance in this regard fits my particular tolerance levels quite well. I'm not sure if I'll be able to find every secret in the game, but I feel like I earn every one I find. In a way, too, combat is like an action-based puzzle, which helps you get over the fact that enemy AI is often not as brutal as it could be (although different enemy behavior can lead to some nasty surprises).
 
As with games that are a bit tougher, it pays to save. Resurrection and healing is a lot less painful in this game than in DM, and once you realize the purpose hunger serves you'll be eating less and treating the regeneration that healing gives you as a bonus rather than starving being a penalty. As you become accustomed to the interface you'll get to look up more at your enemies, combat will become a deadly dance rather than a roller coaster of pain, and you'll breeze through dungeon areas that you've previously explored. There's always a chance you'll miss some tiny item, or pass by a clue, but the game is patient, the levels are NOT so expansive that it's too exhausting to backtrack if necessary, and overall I'd say that while the game does bring back some under-utilized elements from older games, it doesn't have that peculiar level of acute cruelty you'd often find in really old games. It takes good ideas and runs with them, current trends be damned.
 
That's probably why it's one of my new favorite games. 
 
If you have any questions about Legend of Grimrock, please ask them in the comments below.

:05
 
*Runs in, panting... gibbers... Tries to catch breath... can't... collapses*
 
:15 
 
And apparently their site did, too. Tee-hee. Downloading now...
 
:24
 
While waiting for the download, (yes, I have a slow connection), I played Fallen London. Reached a very interesting story point where I was asked to either save or destroy someone who had run away with a Clay Man to the depths of the city only to be converted into Clay herself. I chose to allow her to live. Heaven help me if it was the wrong choice! Ah, it's a fun game sometimes. :)
 
Grimrock.net is still down. I should probably stop refreshing and leave them alone. Oh, no, there they are. 10% off, it seems, upon release.
 
Given that the promotional song has been running in my head all day, I think I'm allowed a little fervor. I already paid for it... I hear it's good...  
 
:33
 
Meal and download should be ready simultaneously. Happy! This is the part in the play where the phone rings with tragic news...
 
:41
 
Seems no apocalypse, and the file integrity's good. I will see you on the other side.
 
:43
 
The beast... it extracts...
 
I actually skimmed the license agreement for once. Apparently if I make maps in the game they can take them and modify them. Like put two mushroom dudes in the room when I SPECIFICALLY designed it for one. RIDICULOUS!!!
 
OK, it's ready.  As is food!
 
:48
 
Punished for not using the DirectX setup option. 
 
Working. Music playing. I can't see you anymore. You've faded away...  All I see is... destiny.
 
(many hours):52
 
Hee-hee
 
(although I did figure out an exploit of sorts, thanks to Mento)

Below I'll write about a bunch of random crap rather than talking about one thing. I almost did write an essay a few times, but I think I'll save those ideas for later. They'll probably be better written than this stuff, but they'll probably be a bit more ponderous, too.

Grimrock

That One Service. You Know, That One

GOG.COM's changes...

Stuff I've Been Playing

And now, the rest of the story: